Black Cinema 1: Image and Mirage, Meaning and Identity

Co-presented with Black Creative Collective: Brown Hall

Apr. 8 - 7:30 pm

$8 suggested

Terrell Hall Auditorium
Room 122
PCC Cascade Campus
705 N Killingsworth

Black Bullets by Jeannette Ehlers

Chronicles of a Lying Spirit by Cauleen Smith

Reckless Eyeballing by Christopher Harris

Work Stills:

About This Screening

Attempting to engage with both the experimental films of black artists addressing race and the African-American community here in Portland, we are partnering with the BCC: Brown Hall to create programming that looks to contribute to larger movements towards equality and an end to state-supported brutality. Black Bullets pays tribute to the act of revolt. Inspired by the Haitian revolution, it was filmed on The Citadel, a mountaintop fortress that has become a sign of freedom and an icon of Haiti. Reckless Eyeballing is a hypnotic inspection of sexual desire, racial identity, and film history. In Cauleen Smith’s experimental biography, marginal representations of black female identity are transposed on images and locations spanning vast spaces, places, and time. American Hunger functions as an audio-visual meditation on the constructs surrounding African-American cultural identity while simultaneously examining an identity that spans hundreds of years, and thousands of miles. And Medea is a collage film that explores the information that permeates into a yet unborn child. Sounds provided by Jonny Cool Stargazer.

This series is supported in part by the Multnomah County Cultural Coalition and the Arts Equity Grant with the Regional Arts & Culture Council.

Program Details

April 8th

*Medea print courtesy of the UCLA Film and Televion Archive

Black Bullets
by Jeannette Ehlers
Denmark, 2012, video, B&W, sound, 4.33 min.
Forged Ways
by Ephraim Asili
US/Ethiopia, 2011, 16mm to digital, color, sound, 16 min.
Reckless Eyeballing
by Christopher Harris
US, 2004, 16mm, B&W, sound, 13 min.
Chronicles of a Lying Spirit
by Cauleen Smith
US, 1992, 16mm, color, sound, 13 min.
American Hunger
by Ephraim Asili
US/Ghana, 2013, 16mm to digital, color, sound, 19 min.
Medea*
by Ben Caldwell
US, 1973, 16mm to video, color, sound, 7 min.