The Black Filmmakers You May Not Have Heard Of
September 20, 2022 G’day, my Meteor mates, In today’s newsletter, Meteor editor-at-large Rebecca Carroll takes us to the movies. She interviews Rhea Combs, creator of Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898-1971, a new exhibit at the Los Angeles Academy Museum introducing visitors to a rich history of Black filmmakers, photographers, and creatives. Grab your favorite treat for this fantastic conversation. But first, let’s sort through some news, shall we? Watching more movies, Shannon Melero WHAT’S GOING ON“El Apagón”: On Monday, Hurricane Fiona made landfall in Puerto Rico, leaving the entire island without power, destroying roads and bridges, and putting entire towns underwater. As Fiona moves towards the Dominican Republic (where one million residents are without power) and Turks and Caicos, some Puerto Ricans are seeing their power return—but the road to recovery will be long. If you missed the coverage (which you might have, since it was bumped down in favor of the royal funeral), the event was largely described as merely another unavoidable natural disaster. But the reality is, the hurricane’s effects were compounded by the mishandling of government funds, political corruption, and the incompetence of the company controlling the entire island’s power grid, LUMA. To fully understand how unprepared Puerto Rico’s infrastructure was for this storm, I implore you—beg you—to watch the music video collaboration (above) between Bad Bunny and independent Puerto Rican reporter Bianca Graulau. Together, they lay out everything there is to know about what’s really happening in Puerto Rico. (The song is also a banger.) Click here to find out how you can help the island’s recovery. And in Mexico…: Unfortunately, when it rains, it really pours. On Monday afternoon, a magnitude 7.6 earthquake struck the western coast of Mexico, killing two, severely damaging a hospital, and cutting power to several thousand residents. Then, this morning, a second earthquake (magnitude 5.8) struck the region of Michoacán. While the affected areas are expected to recover, these two quakes felt eerie to citizens: They occurred on the anniversaries of two of the most devastating earthquakes the country has ever experienced. AND:
AND THE ACADEMY AWARD GOES TO…Meet the Black Filmmakers That Changed Representation in Movies“The exhibit is a tribute to Black filmmakers who did their work not just in the face of structural racism, but in a burgeoning industry that refused to acknowledge them.” BY REBECCA CARROLL TITLE WALL, REGENERATION: BLACK CINEMA 1898-1971, ACADEMY OF MOTION PICTURES. (PHOTO BY JOSHUA WHITE, JW PICTURES/ © ACADEMY MUSEUM FOUNDATION) “When I was a little girl, all I wanted to see was me in the media. Someone fat like me, Black like me, beautiful like me.” –Lizzo If anyone needed a reminder of how important representation is in visual media, last week’s release of the new Little Mermaid trailer provided it. Dozens of cheerful, genuinely moving videos of little brown and Black girls, rejoicing in seeing a Black Halle Bailey as the new Ariel, hit social media—and were swiftly followed by racist backlash. Representation matters and its absence in visual media is not because Black folks haven’t been creating it; it’s that predominantly white gatekeepers who fund and distribute film and TV have chosen to exclude Black creators. And that’s why REGENERATION: BLACK CINEMA 1898-1971, an exhibit at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles exploring seven decades of the vast canon of work created by Black American filmmakers, is so important. The exhibit is a tribute to Black filmmakers who did their work not just in the face of structural racism, but in a burgeoning industry that refused to acknowledge them. I sat down with Rhea Combs, the co-creator of REGENERATION and director of curatorial affairs at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, to hear about what she learned. RHEA COMBS DURING THE OPENING OF REGENERATION. (PHOTO BY STEFANIE KEENAN VIA GETTY IMAGES FOR ACADEMY MUSEUM OF MOTION PICTURES) Rebecca Carroll: This exhibition features films and visual art from nearly a century of Black filmmaking. Are there pieces that you still think about all the time? Rhea Combs: Yes, short answer. We open it with Something Good – Negro Kiss from 1898, a 29-second work that shows Gertie Brown and Saint Suttle in this kind of playful embrace (the first documented on-screen kiss between two Black folks in film history). It’s the piece that you see when you walk in, and it’s emblematic of everything that Doris Berger and I were really looking to accomplish with this exhibition. And by that, I mean: You see this juxtaposed with a Glenn Ligon Double America 2 work that’s this neon piece that has America written right-side up and then written upside-down—that kind of double consciousness of knowing someone else is looking at you, but then also doing it for yourself and doing it with such pride and such dignity and such beauty. I think Something Good – Negro Kiss embodies all of that. The exhibition notes describe how the groundbreaking Black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux was working in an environment where the bar for what a film should look like was D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation—which, as most people aware of the film know, was wildly racist. What do you think the impact of that film was on Micheaux and other Black filmmakers? When we looked at this show and conceptualized it, we had to predate cinema and look at theater and photography, which then allows you to understand that there were these conversations around Black modernity that were happening. When you situate it within that framework, then you understand better an Oscar Micheaux. Yes, there was D.W. Griffith, [but] there were also people like Booker T. Washington and [W.E.B.] Du Bois, who were creating these really grassroots, organized protests against [Griffith’s] work.… So I think there were these kinds of social and cultural dynamics at play within the African American community that we try to address in the exhibition through showing forward thinkers like Sojourner Truth, who used photography, and Du Bois, Frederick Douglas, and Booker T. Washington. AGENCY, REGENERATION: BLACK CINEMA 1898-1971, ACADEMY OF MOTION PICTURES. (PHOTO BY JOSHUA WHITE, JW PICTURES/ © ACADEMY MUSEUM FOUNDATION) That is sort of a summation of Black culture—so much of the work we create is in response to what we haven’t been able to do, what we haven’t been able to be. Were there moments in the exhibition when it was clear that these filmmakers were creating work that was not [only] in response to the ways in which we were and are oppressed? I think even within the spaces in which these works were shown (pop-up churches or community centers) suggest that while these social realities were happening with structural racism, I believe that filmmakers were doing this in part because they wanted to do the work. They weren’t just doing it in response to. The REGENERATION exhibit will be on view at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles until April of next year. Forward this email to all of your friends that would love to see it! FOLLOW THE METEOR Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? Sign up for your own copy, sent Tuesdays and Thursdays.
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