If January didn’t bring the spirit of renewal to you, Spring is here to offer another chance at new beginnings, new blooms and verdant fantasies. Here at Black Life, we’re feeling spring’s energetic pull. The sun lingers a little longer, the flowers are scented brightly and we’re tilling the soil, preparing some special programs for summer. Please stay tuned for an announcement about the artists and filmmakers we’re collaborating with this year. For now, we leave you with some recommendations and a new mixtape of things that have turned our heads and our hearts <3
~ RECOMMENDATIONS ~*
Black Film Archive
Maya Cade’s Black Film Archive is a living register of Black films. Launched last summer, the archive currently showcases Black films made from 1915 to 1979 streaming now. You can keep up with its founder and subscribe below to the newsletter ~
As we mentioned last month, there are four films by Malian filmmaker Souleymane Cissé which will screen at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. We’ll see you in the theater ~
We’re very pleased to recommend fours films by the great Souleymane Cissé which screen at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive beginning March 31 until April 17, 2022.
In March 2020, BAMPFA was honored to host one of the giants of African cinema, Malian filmmaker Souleymane Cissé, with his film Brightness, at our last screening before the COVID-19 lockdown. We are pleased to once again present this landmark of cinema, as well as a new restoration of Cissé’s The Young Girl, The Wind, and Baara.
Born in Bamako in 1940, Cissé began his career as a film projectionist, later studying at the VGIK film school in Moscow before returning to Mali to work on newsreels for the country’s Ministry of Information. His searing 1975 feature debut, The Young Girl, was the first full-length film shot in his native language of Bambara; a fearless depiction of rape and powerlessness, it was banned by the authorities, and Cissé was jailed. His later works Baara and The Wind offer similarly heady social and political critique, delivered with visual panache and in narratives that weave Marxist thought with more ancient, traditional themes.
Cissé noted that his most acclaimed work, Brightness, was “in part made in opposition to European ethnographic films.” He believes that “every nation has the right to be represented by the cinema.” Proudly African, Cissé aims his films toward Malians first, so that they can understand the grace of their countrymen in the face of the reality—and the corruption—they encounter daily. “Damu is the Bambara term for the positive impression that is left by the sight of a person or a thing,” he wrote. “Damu is perhaps what grace is. When you see man living, you observe all that he is, all that surrounds him . . . you have to depict him with damu.”
—Jason Sanders, Film Notes Writer
This series is organized by Film Curator Kathy Geritz. Cosponsored by the Center for African Studies.
BLACK LIFE MIXTAPE #14 - The Complexity of It Matters
1. KeiyaA - “I! Gits! Weary!”
2. Ruth Wilson Gilmore - Geographies of Racial Capitalism
3. Celestine Ukwu - Na Nchekwube Mma Anyi Egbuna Anyi