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Description: |
This course will focus on the work of four influential filmmaking collectives from across the global African diaspora: the LA Rebellion (US), the Nest Collective (Kenya), the Black Audio Film Collective (Britain), and Sankofa Film and Video (Britain). What does it mean for black filmmakers to create, in sustained collaboration, a body of politically engaged, experimental work? This will be our guiding question as we study the range of these collectives’ representations, as well as the convergences and divergences among them. Topics will include: the afterlives of slavery and empire; police brutality and black uprisings; migration, memory, and belonging; LGBTQ desire and experience; and Afrofuturism and speculative histories. Our archive will be capacious, spanning narrative films, essay films, anthology films, and web series produced from the 1970s to the 2010s, all of which will be contextualized with interviews, production notes, historical essays, and criticism. We will also devote some time to the foundations of visual analysis to ensure we have a shared vocabulary for discussing the films. |