Welcome back to our newsletter. We’re warming ourselves up to fall programming in these summer months and coming to you with some stellar film recommendations from under the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive umbrella. Both films hold space for rage. Rage is an underrated motor. Rage isn’t antithetical to graceful movement. Rage is only uncouth to those it implicates. Below you’ll find more on A Place of Rage and The Murder of Fred Hampton, streaming and screening now through BAMPFA.
Do be on the lookout for Black Life presentations very soon including films, prints, music and the like.
Wishing you our very best <3
BAMPFA Recommendation:
film screening
The Murder of Fred Hampton
Wednesday, 9.1.21, at 7:00pm
dir: Howard Alk (United States, 1971)
Restored 35mm Print
Tickets available beginning August 20 for screening at BAMPFA
Face masks covering nose and mouth (without valves) are required at all times.
“It’s the rare film that decades later can seem as timely as it was the day it came out. The searing documentary The Murder of Fred Hampton is such a film.” Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times
Intending to chronicle the newly formed Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party, Michael Gray and Howard Alk documented founder Fred Hampton interacting with the Black community for nearly a year. The dynamic twenty-one-year-old inspired with his rallying cry, “I am a revolutionary,” but his statement “I believe I will be able to die as a revolutionary” proved disturbingly prescient. He was shot dead in his bed during a police raid in which another Panther also died on December 4, 1969. Drawing on footage of the shot-up apartment and interviews with Black Panthers, the filmmakers created an incendiary exposé of the Chicago police force’s role in Hampton’s murder, rebutting the arguments of the Illinois State Attorney and the official police version of events. Fifty years later, The Murder of Fred Hampton remains an urgent and powerful political documentary.
—Kathy Geritz
Details:
Cinematographer: Howard Alk, Michael Gray
88 mins
Color/B&W
35mm
Source: UCLA Film and Television Archive
The Murder of Fred Hampton is provided courtesy of Carol Gray, William Cottle, and The Chicago Film Archives.
free streaming
A Place of Rage
dir. Pratibha Parmar
United Kingdom, 1991
Free Streaming Presentation
Available September 10–October 10
“Parmar’s work . . . is a key component in a history of creative resistance.” Roberta Graham, Girls on Film
Pratibha Parmar’s A Place of Rage is a fierce and loving assessment of the social movements of the 1960s from the vantage point of the 1990s culture wars. The film features interviews with three of the most influential Black feminist intellectuals of our time: Angela Y. Davis, Alice Walker, and June Jordan. The trio asserts the centrality of Black women’s labor and the necessity of intersectional movements for the liberation of all people—past, present, and future. This screening kicks off UC Berkeley’s Department of African American Studies’s yearlong celebration of the life and legacy of writer, activist, and longtime UC Berkeley faculty member June Jordan.
—Leigh Raiford
A fierce and loving assessment of the social movements of the 1960s from the vantage point of the 1990s culture wars, featuring three influential Black feminist intellectuals: Angela Y. Davis, Alice Walker, and June Jordan.
Details:
Screenwriter: Pratibha Parmar
Cinematographer: Pratibha Parmar, Nancy Morita, Tony Hardmon
Featuring Angela Y. Davis, Alice Walker, June Jordan, Trinh T. Minh-ha
52 mins
Color
Digital streaming
Black Life Mixtape # 11: Chop Not Slop!
He Be Like (featuring KenTheMan)
Jombo - Squeeze Me
SmileyWithTheClips - When We Make Love