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.
I am honored to be included in this lovely, thoughtful volume. I'm humbled by the company! Think of this as a way to engage with NMAAHC, aka "The Mack", our own "Blacksonian" as we move through this complicated moment and we are able to meet again on the National Mall. Please see editors Jason Fox and Mia Mask's letter below and explore my contribution:
We didn't imagine publishing this issue in a moment of crisis for so many people. We are doing so, not to ignore the enormity of what we are all facing right now and the uneven effects it will have across so many communities, but because affirming community and culture, interpreting and validating experiences, and recognizing collective efforts is so critical in moments like this.
"When you do something ... in a community where you’re involved in attempting to share the history, you become something … you become a key or kernel from which people can be challenged, from which they can build other things, or from which they can see possibilities."
When legendary scholar, maker, and archivist Pearl Bowser said this, she was referring to a small screening club she used to run. But today major sites of national historical memory, like the new Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture, house Black visions for remaking the future outside of Western racialized infrastructures and outside of didactic modes of address. This development, we argue across this volume, invites a timely way of thinking about documentary’s relationship to Blackness, and it provides a space filled with case studies and questions through which to do it.
What links the many scholars, critics, curators, and makers whose contributions constitute this issue is their fundamental challenge to the managerial vision of historical documents as indexes of existing worlds, defining reality in advance of the people who inherit it. The future isn't made yet, but potential futures have already taken root in the cracks between the past and the present.
Two events at one of my favorite places in the world!
Editing Exercises by Hortense "Tee" Beveridge
1st/ MORE ORPHANS OF NEW YORK
Sunday, May 19, 5:10
Tuesday, May 21, 2:30
A sequel to last October’s twice-sold-out “Orphans” show. This all-new program includes home movies shot by a WPIX (Channel 11) kids’ show host in 1948; Meet Me Down at Coney Isle (1931), part of the “the Magic Carpet of Movietone” travelogue series; an NYU surveillance film of a Washington Square demonstration against Dow Chemical (1968); early 30s amateur films by Wallace Kelly; Eduardo Darino’s Poison on the Walls (1975), made for the NYC Department of Health; The Dog Lover (1962), a recently rediscovered film by legendary photographer/filmmaker Morris Engel (co-director of The Little Fugitive), starring Jack Gilford and vividly photographed in 35mm black and white on the Upper West Side; and much more.
Presented by NYU cinema studies professor Dan Streible, founder of the Orphan Film Symposium, with contributions from archivists Mike Mashon, Ina Archer, Mary Engel, Annie Schweikert, and Shane Fleming. 35mm, 16mm, and digital. Approx. 120 min.
I'll be introducing the unforgettable Morris, Time To Make It and Editing Exercises from NMAAHC's Pearl Bowser Collection.
2nd/
AN ALL-COLORED VITAPHONE SHOW presented by Ina Archer
6:20
Monday, May 20
$9.00 Member$15.00 Regular
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.)
I've created a black film-centric blog linked with continuumfb called BLACK LEADER which I hope that you will visit and I am making another try at restarting my HORROR blog which I've really missed working on. And we are living in such SCARY times!!
And speaking of frights, as I've been revisiting posts on this blog I am horrified at the destruction wrecked upon my content by Youtube. The whole raison d'être of the project was to comment about the movies and cinema culture always with the addition of film clips. So maybe one day when I'm feeling blue I'll go through and prune all the dead links from the blog. And strive to find another way. Anyway, to be added soon are notes from some recent screenings and symposiums where I've presented, a couple of podcasts and new articles for Film Comment.
I'm thinking back to my old minstrelsy and passing days --not when I used to pass as a minstrel--but when those issues were the explicit focus of my work going all the way back to RISD.
And thinking about the world of movies of course. Let's see; Actor Herb Jeffries lived his life as a black man and acted in black cast movies...Al Jolson had an autobiographical belief that he actually had a black mammy down home somewhere. And then there's Quentin Tarentino...Zelig and Chameleon Man, Black Like Me, Soul Man and Gentleman's Agreement all come to mind.
So, for a limited time (about a week) and for your viewing pleasure I am posting my video 1/16th of 100%?!
Let me know what you think!
1/16th of 100%!?, video (23 minutes) Writer, director, editor 1993/96
Montage that examines themes of appropriation, miscegenation and minstrelsy through manipulating footage found in Hollywood movies from the 1920s through the 1950s-- including Imitation of Life, Showboat and The Jazz Singer.
Here's what I'll read tonight in case you can't make it! (And I will post my complete program notes later.)
Goin’ Home:
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 16” wax records during filming and synchronized mechanically with the projected footage. 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.
A uniquely arty or ART-FULL Vitaphone musical short, Yamecraw: A Negro Rhapsody is based on a symphonic jazz composition by African-American composer, and pioneer of stride piano, James P. Johnson (famous for writing “The Charleston” and other popular tunes of the era) and is reminiscent of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.
(You can listen to a recording posted above. There's a link to the film but the copy is terrible)
A brief “African-American tone poem”, the scenario is similar to that of King Vidor’s Hallelujah. A young man seeking fortune in the city is distracted by urban excitements and tempted by a city woman, only to be crushed by it all. Chastised, he returns, welcomed back home by his devoted wife, to his family’s rural shack. Yamecraw, despite the racist signifiers of this period of cinema -- like watermelons, cotton-picking, and mammies -- is an imaginative and concise presentation of a black migration narrative aided by the restrained performances of the actors that mixes operatic, modernist and folk expression.
Native Son (1951), the first of two movie versions of Richard Wrights’acclaimed 1940 novel, is an odd but compelling international hybrid. It was helmed by a French director, Pierre Chenal, shot in Buenos Aires and, fascinatingly, cast with the middle-aged, African-American author, Richard Wright, playing his 25 year old protagonist, Bigger Thomas. (For a treat look up Wright’s screen tests on youtube)
A NoirCity Magazine interview with scholar Edgardo Krebs, notes that Chenal first wanted to cast Canada Lee, who turned down the role, after which he considered Wright:
“…Chenal posed the question: would you consider playing Bigger Thomas? Wright laughed and responded “But man, I am no actor!” Chenal insisted. “You do not need to pretend to be one,” he said, “just live Bigger’s nightmare.”
Bigger’s nightmare --violently portrayed in both the novel and the adapted film--was that of many post-migration African-Americans and each begins with Bigger and his family already trapped by brutal poverty in a racially segregated city.
Towards the finale of Native Son in true noir fashion, Bigger recounts his dream of escaping imprisonment and his ensuing execution by fleeing the impoverished Chicago streets back to his southern home, a rickety cabin shown floating in a surrealistically designed cotton field. This fantasy, which quickly transfigures into a grim hallucination, initially resembles the strange, pastoral landscape seen in Yamekraw and might suggest that Bigger's unconscious has been influenced by the imagery he has absorbed as a black movie-goer.
By showing two films by white directors adapting works by black artists, in tandem, I hope to demonstrate the duality of black migration narratives and of “home” pictured through generic (and sometimes problematic) film images; first a musical short with a heavenly, happy ending followed by a racially charged thriller, where “return” can only be attained through death.
As Bigger intuits describing his dream:
“All around me everything was white. I was back in the farm where I used to live when I was a boy. I felt free. I wasn’t scared no more… I was back home again.”
program notes written by ina archer
YAMECRAW (1930) Warner Bros. (as The Vitaphone Corporation). DISTRIBUTED BY: Warner Bros. (1930) (USA). DIRECTED BY: Murray Roth. STORY: Stanley Rauh. MUSIC BY James P. Johnson (initially uncredited) and Hugo Mariani (musical score). PHOTOGRAPHY: E.B. DuPar. ART DIRECTION: Manuel Osman.
NATIVE SON (1951) Argentina Sono Film S.A.C.I. DISTRIBUTED BY: Argentina Sono Film S.A.C.I. (1951) (Argentina), Classic Pictures (1951) (USA). PRODUCED BY: Walter Gould, Jaime Prades. DIRECTED BY: Pierre Chenal. SCREENPLAY: Pierre Chenal, Richard Wright (novel). PHOTOGRAPHY: Antonio Merayo. FILM EDITOR: Jorge Gárate. MUSIC: Juan Ehlert (as John Ehlert). SET DECORATION BY: Gori Muñoz. COSTUME DESIGN BY: Eduardo Lerchundi. CAST: Richard Wright (Bigger Thomas), Gloria Madison (Bessie Mears), Willa Pearl Curtis (Mrs. Hannah Thomas), Jean Wallace (Mary Dalton), Charles Cane (Det. Britten). FORMAT: 35mm. RUNNING TIME: 90 minutes. ORIGINAL RELEASE: Italy 1951 (Venice Film Festival). Argentina, March 2, 1951. USA, June 16, 1951 (New York City, New York)
Thursday, March 6, 2014 from 12:00 PM to 9:00 PM NYC
FUƧION NYC is an engaged, curator-driven platform for exhibitions and public art around the City. Our show will explore what it takes to live and express oneself as a full human being. Technology has not only changed our lives forever but also the relevancy of human endeavor. All facets of our life have been affected and how we relate to one another. So, we will look at ways where we can re-integrate our humanity creatively that includes our desires, individual tastes and environment through the lens of curators and artists of color.
Lead Curators: Savona Bailey-McClain and Yves Marie Vilain
Participating Curators: Ina Archer,Badder Israel
Artists:Ina Archer, Brian Convery, Diane Dwyer, Scherezade Garcia, Christopher Harris, Yasmin Hernandez, Ariel Jackson, Shani Peters, Joshua Reynolds, Adrienne Reynolds, Madeline Schwartzman, Dianne Smith, Toccarra Thomas,Yves Marie Vilain.
The FUƧION NYC digital artists selected by Ina Archer,incorporate the challenges and opportunities presented by technology into their time-based art. Yet, they remain fully human through the integration of the handmade and handheld.Using old and new media, these nine artists explore low-tech and artisanal methods to create works in single channel and installation video, film, digital animation, performance and drawing.
