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!

A slap heard...

 

This was the moment in 1967 that pushed Hollywood forward. It was constructed, rehearsed, directed, enacted, and filmed and edited with added foley effects. I reedited the scene for my installation Osmundine(Orchid Slap). 

This is the moment and behavior that sets Hollywood back 50 plus years, upending the joy of Questlove’s documentary feature win for revealing to a new generation, elided archival documentation of historic, live Black performances, filmed 3 years after the release of In The Heat of The Night.

One slap is acting, no matter how “realistic” we may want it to be, because it challenges decades of (mis)representation. The other slap is acting-out with actual violence, documented on a live telecast. Ironically--a minstrel show comedy-giant-razor-sized irony- is that this happened as we mourn the loss of awardee, Sidney Poitier (who delivered that blow to racism), significantly, during the first Oscar broadcast to be directed by a Black man, Will Packer.

(Plus, there’s Danny Glover winning a Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, and--you can’t script this, Samuel L. Jackson receiving an honorary Oscar.)

Conflating a joke made by a comedian about a performer of equal stature into an attack on people with alopecia is misdirection.  Chris Rock, in my experience of his comedy, doesn’t punch down, but up and across. Jada Pinkett-Smith is a public figure and an actor who can defend herself. She’s at a show where comics make jokes about people who are in the same, rare, realm of fame that she occupies. Rock’s (ridiculously outdated-1997!) jibe doesn’t cast Pinkett-Smith as less beautiful, less rich, influential or chic, nor does he defame her as a Black woman. Despite the accolades, the Pinkett-Smith family are Hollywood royalty, not actual royalty and we cats may look at and make fun of the King (Richard) and Queen.

The Smith family are not sovereigns and the fact that Smith had the temerity to walk up on stage during a live, international broadcast and assault his Black colleague in front of Yes The Children!, the theater audience, TV and internet watchers, fans, fellow Academy members, actors and industry professionals and hopefuls is shocking and shameful.

I’m disappointed that the show went on.

Are the Oscars important? No. Are the Oscars important? Yes. Do they have meaning? Yes. Do they have meaning? No.

Maybe now, the show will go the way of the Golden Globes to be ensconced in memories and at the Academy Museum. We don’t need the show anymore, which originated as a roomful of self-congratulating studio moguls slapping each other on the back and giving each other awards in order to protect/promote their industry. The challenges of achieving equity in this arena of the representational, performing arts that acknowledges people of color as skilled artists and professionals, in front of and behind the scenes, was upstaged by Smith’s ugly, self-righteous and all too real need to bitch slap.

 

 

Last Day For The 2021 Frieze NYC Viewing Room!

Last day to see my solo booth with Microscope Gallery @ the 2021 Frieze NYC Viewing Room!

Virtually Come thru!

Ina Archer is an artist expanding the possibilities of moving image, installation, sculpture, and collage. Archer’s works draw attention to stereotypical and degrading representations of African Americans and the “other” in commercial cinema, literature, art, and product branding from the 1900s to the present. Often through the use of humor, Archer re-makes and re-contextualizes images of blackness to address themes of race, race relations, and cultural appropriation.

Follow the link to see more!

Microscope Gallery received some wonderful press!

New York Times

FADMAGAZINE

More FADMAGAZINE

Frame Prize Honorable Mention

Collector Daily

Isn’t It Romantic! Medicine for Melancholy

I Am the City...Ina Archer on Medicine for Melancholy 
My debut (essay) for @reverse_shot
I’ve always wanted to write about Barry Jenkin’s Medicine For Melancholy and I was pleased to be given this opportunity. 

"Medicine for Melancholy, which received a 2008 Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best First Feature, stands out as both a “first” of its kind and as a disciple of earlier duet films like Before Sunrise (1995) or even Something Good Negro Kiss (1898), the newly uncovered film fragment of a Black couple (vaudevillians Saint Suttle and Gertie Brown) playfully canoodling. It is a quiet but influential work in its depiction of blackness, of Black romance and alterity in a shifting urban landscape. The film is both elegiac and symbolic, yet precisely located in San Francisco and true to the early 2000s—the beginning of the diversifying representation of Black lifeworlds that was ignited—underlined—by the Obama candidacy. A 2009 article by Dennis Lim quotes Jenkins, who said he wrote the film two years “before Obamania took off.” Obama opened up the representational arts to the notion that American identity is complex and situated and that it could be read through the experiences of the (Black) people right next door."

 

AN ALL-COLORED VITAPHONE SHOW @ THE FILM FORUM

May 20th @ 6:20 SHARP! FILM FORUM

HERE WE COME!!

SMASH YOUR BAGGAGE!

HAROLD & FAYARD!!

THE FABULOUS CORA LaREDD!!

NINA MAE & BABE!

 

Artist and archivist, Ina Archer, presents early sound shorts starring Black artists, mostly filmed at Brooklyn’s Vitaphone studios, including Yamercraw: A Negro Rhapsody (1929); An All-Colored Vaudeville Show (1935), with the Nicholas Brothers; Gjon Mili’s jazz film masterpiece Jammin’ the Blues (1944); and Duke Ellington, Noble Sissle & Eubie Blake, Nina Mae McKinney, Ethel Waters, Cab Calloway, and many more. Dedicated to Ron Hutchinson (see A TRIBUTE TO RON HUTCHINSON on May 28.)

Ina Diane Archer is a Media Conservation and Digitization Assistant at The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture. She is a filmmaker, visual artist, programmer and writer whose multimedia works and films have been shown nationally. She is the former co-chair of New York Women in Film and Television’s Women’s Film Preservation Fund. Prior to joining NMAAHC, Ina was on faculty at Parsons The New School for Design. Ina earned a BFA in Film/Video from RISD and a Master’s in Cinema Studies at NYU focusing on race, preservation, technology, and early sound film. But her real cinema education happened in the Film Forum theaters where she spent her formative years eating popcorn and drinking mint tea.

 

Excerpt: White folks call it madness but we call it Hi De Ho: “All Colored” Vitaphone

The Vitaphone Studios, a division of Warner Bros, located in Brooklyn, NY was a prolific producer of short films during the transition to sound starting as early as 1926. Vitaphone technology was a sound-on-disk process where audio was recorded separately onto wax records during filming and synchronized mechanically with the projected footage. The 16” disks rotated at 331/3 rpms and played for approximately 7 to 9 minutes running in sync with a 35mm image marked “picture start”. The disk was synchronized by cueing the stylus marker on the central groove of the disks. Initially, the records could not be edited resulting in the stagey, one take style of the early films. However, the Vitaphone synchronization of sound and picture and the short format made it a technology ideally suited to show off live acts.

Between 1929 and 1936, The Vitaphone studio, using talent from nearby Broadway and the vaudeville circuits, made scores of “Varieties” and “Brevities” films. Over this time the shorts developed from 9 minute one reelers recording musical and novelty acts with simple proscenium staging, to two reels, that were twenty minute semi-integrated musicals with narrative scenarios framing the numbers. The films, many of which were preserved by UCLA, are a record of popular entertainment of the period and they include many ethnic and black themed acts (including, famously, Al Jolson’s pre-Jazz Singer short A Plantation Act), blackface and black-voiced minstrel shows, as well as all black- cast shorts subjects.

In this program we will enjoy Vitaphone films featuring African-American performers drawn from the stage, revues and clubs like the dance corps from Smalls Paradise, bandleaders such as Eubie Blake; lesser known figures like drummer Freddie Crump and The Norman Thomas Quintette, and recognizable faces like the supernaturally talented child, Sammy Davis, Jr., and later, Cab Calloway. Ina Archer 2014

FREDDIE

CRUMP!

*SEE YOU THERE*

 

Us directed by Jordan Peele

Doppelgängstas!

Please follow the tether here to read my review of Us on Film Comments blog.

And while you are there check out my reviews of Get Out and Keanu!

Like many of the most enduring horror films, Peele taps into the return of the repressed. Us dares us to contemplate what lies beneath the “Find Yourself” hall of mirrors (literally represented by a beachside carnival attraction), both psychologically and spatially leading down a rabbit hole of possible interpretations. In the depths below the earth, Peele reveals a prison-like laboratory/dormitory, rendering a space that might be a national “sunken place”—the hypnotized state that the protagonist of Get Out fears being sent into, in which the black body is paralyzed, expropriated, and stripped of agency while retaining a frightening consciousness of imprisonment.

And remember, when you point at someone, three fingers are pointing back at you...

 

 

Sorry To Bother You d. Boots Riley

 

Have you seen Sorry To Bother You yet? Excellent! Now you can read my featured essay in the July/August copy of Film Comment Magazine. (BTW--NO SPOILERS here)

 

"That first screening of Sorry to Bother You I attended was framed by the release of Childish Gambino/Donald Glover’s “This Is America” music video, directed by Hiro Murai, which at the time was being celebrated and widely parsed on social media and podcasts. There are relevant parallels between the sardonic music video and Riley’s satirical film: both are entertaining and disturbing at the same time—highly designed, layered, and musically structured works with fluid transitions but odd shifts in mood. They are consistently surprising and even shockingly dark. Stanfield is another common denominator between the film and Glover’s video, linked via his role as laconic and vaguely magical Darius in another project by Glover, the Emmy Award–winning TV series Atlanta, for which Murai often directs episodes. In Sorry to Bother You, the actor has the opportunity to create a full, sympathetic leading character (as much as a satirical film can withstand), and his deep relationship with Detroit, the love story at the core of the film, prevents its polemics and lampoons from pushing any sense of alienation into extremes. Furthermore, his presence evokes the work of Jordan Peele, who featured Stanfield as the expropriated, youthful black body of an elderly white man in his Oscar-winning “social thriller” Get Out."

 

But wait, there's more! Here's a link to a STBY podcast, a conversation between "white voice" me and Film Comment's Editor in Chief, Nic Rapold. We vainly attempt to wrangle additional details about the film that couldn't be included in the article using words and without spoiling! like the below:

 

"As the film grows increasingly bizarre there is scene that provokes queasy laughs leave a bitter aftertaste. At a debauched house party straight outta of Eyes Wide Shut, Steve Lift (a quasi Jobs/Zuckerberg figure as played by Armie Hammer) cajoles Cassius into attempting to "free-style" for his guests. Initially, the all white crowd is bewildered by his awkward rhymes, only accepting (and joining in) Cassius rhythmically shouting a racist epithet, in a desperate and reductive parody of hardcore rap, as his authentic “black” voice."

 

Keep Print Alive! 

 To read the full article, please buy a print copy of the magazine.



 

 

Directed by Denzel Washington

{image via Deadline Hollywood from an informative interview with Washington about his directorial work.}

I think Denzel was had at the Oscar's in the best actor category and he was sorely unacknowledged as a director.

Here's my review of his work on Fences in the January/February issue of Film Comment

Excerpt:

    The minimal use of cinematic space and time exemplifies the layered metaphors of Fences, the gradual building of which organizes the action of the play, keeping the family members in and others out. But at key moments, especially in a bit of magic realism near the end, the POV soars beyond the home. The camera elegantly frames the actors as they declaim, becoming an unseen third player in their scenes, assisted by the exceptional sound recording and editing. The extras (local residents in period costumes) that populate the street scenes could have stepped out of the home movies and pictures of Charles "Teenie" Harris, the African American Hill District photographer whose work comprises a rare archive of images of the social world of Pittsburgh’s black communities. The art direction overall features layered surfaces, hues and textures of peeling paint, brick walls, leaves and brush and crisscrossed lines of hanging laundry that evokes the artwork of another Pittsburger, the painter and collagist Romare Bearden, who was a seminal influence on Wilson.

Read more here:  Download FENCES

 

 

 

Oscar Time!

image via Hollywood Reporter-read their thorough article on McDaniel and the Academy Awards here:

Well, it's actually after the Awards Show that will live in infamy. I missed the moment having gone to bed in disgust after L2 Land was mistaken for the "Best Picture".  The only reason I have that pile of plastic, glass and electrons is to see a live moment like that and I didn't see it. "Oh well, you know..." But I have been remiss in posting my Hattie video this year and so #black_leader presents it now:

 

Hattie McDaniel: Or A Credit To The Motion Picture Industry from Ina Archer on Vimeo.