BLACK LEADER

Home To Harlem: A Night of Hi-De-Ho!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

{image via the Hi De Ho Blog}

Well, all good things must come to an end (for now) so please come thru and join us for the final HOME TO HARLRM program!

Thursday, June 30 at 7:30PM Maysles Documentary Center, 343 Lenox Ave.

Home to Harlem!
⭐️🎶🎶🎶🎶⭐️

You may SMASH YOUR BAGGAGE (1932) when HARLEM BOUND (1935) but once there, you’ll see a SYMPHONY IN BLACK-Duke Ellington’s Rhapsody of Negro Life (1935) and you may get invited to CAB CALLOWAY’S JITTERBUG PARTY (1935) before you return to your dream home in Sugar Hill and tune in to the Nicholas Brothers dancing on the radio in THE BLACK NETWORK (1936)!

🎶Smash Your Baggage

Roy Mack, 1932, 10 min. 16mm

A Vitaphone short-subject featuring the Small's Paradise Entertainers. A group of redcaps in a train station perform musical numbers to raise money for an ailing member of their group.

16mm print preserved by The Library of Congress

 

🎶Harlem Bound

Milton Schwarzwald, 1935, 17 min. Digital

A newly preserved Mentone musical short featuring the Cotton Club Chorines in a setting that replicates the historical actuality of white club patrons watching Black performers.

Featuring Buck and Bubbles; lesser-known, soprano Avis Andrews: “Harlem’s silver-voiced delineator of songs” and MC Norman Astwood, who acted in many Black cast dramas of the era.

Learn more about Avis Andrews and her work with Cab Calloway at the Gorgeous and Comprehensive Hi De Ho Blog!

 

🎶Cab Calloway’s Jitterbug Party

Fred Waller 1935 8 min

Broadcasting from Harlem’s Cotton Club “A Musical Description of Darkest Harlem” and a late night club crawl through Harlem hotspots with Cab and his pals.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

🎶Symphony in Black — A Rhapsody of Negro Life

Fred Waller, 1935, 10 min. 16mm

Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday in a musical short. Numbers include: "The Laborers," " A Triangle" (Dance–Jealousy–Big city blues), "A Hymn of sorrow," and "Harlem Rhythm." Featuring famed, undulating, Harlem nightclub dancer Earl “Snakehips” Tucker.

16mm print courtesy of The NYPL Performing Arts Library Reserve Film & Video Collection

 

🎶The Black Network

Roy Mack 1936 20 min. Digital

A talent packed Vitaphone Variety broadcasting to Harlem. Will romantic partners and stars of the Black Network, Nina Mae (Nina Mae McKinney) and the Harlem Gondolier (Babe Wallace) find their dream home in Harlem’s Sugar Hill neighborhood? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

See you there!

⭐️🎶🎶🎶🎶⭐️

MADE IN HARLEM

"Home to Harlem" presents Harlem through an archival lens as both an actual home for Black citizens and families and as a location in the popular imagination of African Americans, by exploring the multiple intersections of documentary, amateur films, home movies, musical shorts, nontheatrical materials, family archives and the preservation of cultural artifacts of the community.

 

Made In Harlem: Home To Harlem

Come thru! click text below for the link to the schedule

Made In Harlem: Home To Harlem
Screening FREE June 9-June 30 2022

In Collaboration with: the Documentary Forum at City College, Third World Newsreel, Centro Civico Cultural Dominicano, Children’s Art Carnival, and XFR Collective

"Home to Harlem" presents Harlem through an archival lens as both an actual home for Black citizens and families… and as a location in the popular imagination of African Americans, by exploring the various intersections of documentary, amateur films, home movies, musical shorts, nontheatrical materials, family archives and the preservation of cultural artifacts in Harlem. The series will also spotlight film exhibition in Harlem, innovated by Jessie Maple and LeRoy Patton’s 20 West: Home of Black Cinema.

CURATORIAL NOTE

Oscar Micheaux’s 1932 talkie, The Girl From Chicago has a sweet scene that evokes my parents’ marriage origin story; standing in front of a flowery hydrangea bush, urbanite Alonzo proposes to whisk away southern ingenue, Norma, from Mississippi to New York City, “Home to Harlem and all that goes with it!”  She declaims: 

Home to Harlem. But I’ve never been to Harlem or New York, dear, though I have always wanted to go. They say you’ll love it, Harlem, after you’ve been there a while. No end to theaters…And nightclubs with good singing and dancing until the wee hours of the morning.

"Home to Harlem" presents Harlem through an archival lens as both an actual home for Black citizens and families (like my Harlemite father,“Buddy”and Maconite mother, “Junior”) and as a location in the popular imagination of African Americans, by exploring the multiple intersections of documentary, amateur films, home movies, musical shorts, nontheatrical materials, family archives and the preservation of cultural artifacts of the community. The series will also spotlight film exhibition in Harlem as  innovated by Jessie Maple and LeRoy Patton’s 20 West: Home of Black Cinema.

Community archiving, preservation, restoration and archival materials enlivened by access, moves our understanding of Harlem beyond memory and nostalgia. These activities can rebuild the substrata or “carriers” of images on a seemingly lost, discolored or faded film. Retrieved and renewed, the images become more complexly resonant. The films in this series suggest a network of associations between the audio-visual documents of the extant place and of the cinematic imaginary.  I have never lived in Harlem but it is deeply my (movie) home. 

-Ina Diane Archer, daughter of Lee and Ina

Curated by Ina Archer and Emily Apter

Generously funded by West Harlem Development Corporation and Harlem Community Development Corporation.

 

SEE YOU THERE!