Documentary Filmmaker, William Miles, Dies at 82

William Miles, also known as Bill, lived a life devoted to exploring and documenting the history, culture, and achievements of African Americans. On May 12, at the age of 82, Miles died in Queens, reported the New York Times. Although stricken with a number of health problems, the cause of his death is unknown. Born on April 18^th 1931 and raised in Harlem on West 126^th street, Miles lived behind and worked at the famous Apollo Theatre.  Among his many awards was his induction into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame in 1986. He leaves behind his wife of 61 years, Gloria Miles, daughters Brenda Moore and Deborah Jones, and three grandchildren.

William Miles (photo: Don Purdue)

The New York Times recently reported:

“Mr. Miles was part historical sleuth, part preservationist, part bard. His films, which combined archival footage, still photographs and fresh interviews, were triumphs of curiosity and persistence in unearthing lost material about forgotten subjects.”

Many of Miles’s films concentrated on documenting African Americans’ contributions to the military. Miles’s film Men of Bronze (1977), also known as the Harlem Hellfighters and the Black Rattlers, has been noted as one of his most important films. The film had its debut at the New York Film Festival and later aired on national public television. Men of Bronze, which is a combination of photos, footage, memoirs, and anecdotes, captures the emotional journey of the all-black 369^th Infantry Regiment and the story of how they fought under the French flag due to segregationist policies during the First World War. Authors Phyllis R. Klotman and Janet K. Cutler stated in their book Struggles For Representation: African American Documentary Film and Video, “Men of Bronze (1997) became a model for documentaries that put African Americans back into military history.”

The Black Film Center/Archive holds copies of several of Miles’s films, including 16mm prints of his series, I Remember Harlem.  Other Miles material at BFC/A includes an interview conducted by BFC/A founder Phyllis Klotman and a collection of Miles’s research materials, donated in August 1997, relating to the 1992 documentary film Liberators: Fighting on Two Fronts in World War II.  Co-produced and directed by Nina Rosenblum, this ninety-minute film documented the stories of black army units fighting against racism in the military and at home. The film was nominated in the 1993 Academy Awards for Best Documentary Feature.  A finding aid is available online here.

In 2006, William Miles placed a major collection of his work with the Washington University Film and Media Archive in St. Louis. 

Miles was a recipient of many awards throughout his career and was a member of several distinguished organizations. Some of his awards and affiliations include: the Black Harlem Award, the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame, Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers, the International Documentary Association, and the Black National Programming Consortium.

William Miles’s work will continued to be treasured for years to come, as his documentaries provide insight on the history of many aspects of African American life across an array of professions and communities.

~Katrina Overby

BFC/A’s Jordache Ellapen Receives SSRC Fellowship

The Black Film Center/Archive congratulates our Research Assistant Jordache Ellapen, a Ph.D. student in the Department of American Studies at Indiana University, on his receipt of a Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship (DPDF) through the Social Science Research Council (SSRC).

The Social Science Research Council is an independent non-profit international organization that works with practitioners, policymakers, scholars, and researchers in the fields of conflict and peace building, development and social change, the public sphere, knowledge and learning, and strengthening global social science. To foster innovative and original research, each year the SSRC offers 12 DPDF Fellowships to doctoral students constructing compelling research proposals in five fields.  As Jordache explained: “The description of the particular field, Postcolonial identities and Decolonial Struggles: Creolization and Colored Cosmopolitanism, is what appealed to me. Although my research is more broadly cultural studies-based, the questions I seek to explore through this research fit within this field description.”

Research Assistant Jordache Ellapen at the Black Film Center/Archive, April 2013.

Postcolonial identities and Decolonial Struggles: Creolization and Colored Cosmopolitanism seeks to investigate the development of cross-racial identities and cross-cultural national linkages between twentieth century struggles against domination. Drawing on a range of disciplines from Sociology and Geography to Ethnomusicology and Philosophy, the field hopes to examine how the movements and settlement of people, concepts, and ideas reveal the persistent reconfiguration of socio-cultural identities and borders.  Jordache hopes in particular to “push the boundaries of identity politics in the post-apartheid context, by provocatively troubling the category black, asking us to rethink blackness within the South African context, and thinking what implications this may have for blackness on a more global level.”  His research focuses on “race and critical race theory in the postcolony beyond the black/white binary” and will include the creation of “an archive that promises to be rich with material, and exciting to audiences across disciplines,” comprised of “visual cultural objects that range from short and feature-length films, photography, election campaign posters and fine art exhibitions.”

The funding provided by the DPDF Fellowship will allow Jordache to more fully explore these critical and thought-provoking research questions by attending two SSRC workshops and conducting individual exploratory research.  Over the summer, Jordache will travel to South Africa where he will be engaged in various research activities. “There are two archives that I will visit; The Cullen Library at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and the Gandhi-Luthuli Documentation Center at the University of Kwa Zulu Natal in Durban. I will also interview some South African artists of Indian origin [and] conduct some ethnographic research by observing and taking note of certain predominantly Indian areas in Johannesburg and Tongaat.” The Spring and Fall workshops (May 28-June 2 in Coventry, England/September 18-22 in Cambridge, Massachusetts) will be led by Gurminder Bhambra, Professor of Sociology at University of Warwick and Nico Slate, Assistant History Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. While both workshops will help Jordache refine his research questions and expose his own work to a larger body of research literature, the Fall workshop will also draw on Jordache’s forthcoming summer experiences to enhance his research proposal.

~Ardea Smith

BFC/A Awarded 2013 NEH Grant

The Black Film Center/Archive has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities 2013 Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant to support the program, “Representing Early Black Film Artifacts as Material Evidence in Digital Contexts.”

In November 2013, project director Brian Graney and lead scholar Michael T. Martin will convene an interdisciplinary group of scholars, moving image archivists, and library professionals for a two-day conference and workshop to discuss the new methodologies and questions emerging through recent scholarship in early black-audience film studies and their broader application to other marginalized media cultures with rich histories of material practice. 

Of the hundreds of black-audience films produced since 1905—most notably by Oscar Micheaux—only a small percentage of original film prints are known to exist.  Those that survive are found in fragmentary form or in markedly different versions.  In a 2011 article in Film History, Jacqueline Stewart proposed a challenging new avenue for this area of study by identifying unmined evidentiary value in what “we can learn from the singularity of each print…and what any existing print might teach us about the circulation, exhibition, and content of movies in this under-documented film culture.  Indeed, when we think of each print as a unique artifact, we are encouraged to reconsider what we think of as a film’s ‘content.’”

This letter from a distributor in the field indicates some of the modifications a print might endure over the course of a run. From the Richard E. Norman Collection, Black Film Center/Archive, Indiana University.

Reconsidering how we define the content of a film print to encompass all of its physical characteristics, markings, and structures as a material artifact introduces important questions bearing on how film is represented as a digital object: How can we amend current best practices for digitization of motion picture film which by design omit or obscure physical attributes of the original artifact? What tools might be turned to unconventional uses in representing film artifacts digitally for close examination and study? And how might this representation of film as object offer a conceptual bridge for integrating audiovisual media within a wider network of related visual and textual documentation?

PARTICIPANTS:

Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, is scheduled to present the keynote address. Other invited conference participants include:

·         Matthew Bernstein (Emory University)

·         Allyson Field (UCLA)

·         Terri Francis (Yale University)

·         Jan-Christopher Horak (UCLA Film & Television Archive)

·         Leah Kerr (Independent archivist)

·         Barbara Tepa Lupack (Independent scholar)

·         Mike Mashon (Library of Congress, Moving Image Section)

·         Charlene Regester (UNC – Chapel Hill)

·         Jacqueline Stewart (Northwestern University)

·         Dana White (Emory University)

 Indiana University faculty and staff contributing to the conference and workshop program include:

 ·        Cara Caddoo (American Studies)

·         William Cowan (IU Libraries Software Development)

·         Barbara Klinger (Communication & Culture)

·         Rachael Stoeltje (IU Libraries Film Archive)

·         Gregory Waller (Communication & Culture)

·         John A. Walsh (Library and Information Science)

 The conference and keynote presentation will be held on Friday, November 15, at the Indiana University Cinema; the workshop will be held on Saturday, November 16, at the Black Film Center/Archive.  For more information, contact Brian Graney at bpgraney@indiana.edu or 812-855-6041.

The Lost Films of Kathleen Collins: U.S. Theatrical Premiere at the IU Cinema

To mark the recent restoration of Kathleen Collins’s rarely seen feature films, the Black Film Center/Archive is co-sponsoring a special screening of Losing Ground and The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy; this is the U.S. theatrical premiere of both restorations.  The double header will show tonight, Thursday, March 21 at 7:00 pm at the IU Cinema.  Prof. LaMonda Horton-Stallings, who wrote a critical essay on Losing Ground for Black Camera in 2011, will lead a Q+A session at the conclusion of the screening.

Sara (played by Seret Scott) in Losing Ground (1982)

Collins was a truly multi-talented woman.  In addition to independently producing, writing and directing films, she also had extensive experience as a film editor.   Moreover, Collins wrote plays, helped to create the film studies program at City College of New York, studied literature, film and philosophy in Paris at the Sorbonne, and translated for Cahiers du Cinéma.  Sadly, in 1988 she passed away from cancer at the relatively young age of 46.

BFC/A founder Phyllis Klotman invited Collins to IU a few times in the early 1980s.  Collins presented Losing Ground in 1983, and later returned to campus to teach a seminar on film production and film aesthetics.  In a fascinating interview conducted by Klotman, Collins revealed her fiercely independent spirit, seen here in her reasoning for turning down a lucrative job as a producer at a major TV network:

…I did consciously turn that job down.  I did say that I don’t really feel that whatever creative work that is going to come out of me will come out successfully if I have to work off other people’s formulas…[E]ven if I made that decision [to accept the TV network job], I might presumably be producing…television drama, [but] I don’t think I would have ever gotten the chance to direct at all; I would have never gotten the chance to write my own scripts.  I don’t think that other avenues would have been open to do any of the films I’ve done at all.  I don’t think anyone would have bought those ideas and said, “This is terrific!”  And so to that degree I consider it a necessity that I do it independently.  And I can’t imagine ever veering from that.*

In addition to the aforementioned interview, the BFC/A holds a number of significant research and archival materials related to Collins, including a 16mm print of Losing Ground and a video-recording of Collins interviewed by a local Indiana PBS show.  Of particular note is the John Williams collection.  Williams, film scholar and former publicist for the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame, recently donated copies of Collins’s written work (essays, scripts and translations), reviews and film festival program notes–amongst other research materials.

“The Lost Films of Kathleen Collins” is part of the “New Restorations from Milestone Films” series at the IU Cinema.  Friday evening will feature the newly-restored print of Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason at 6:30 pm.  Dennis Doros, president of Milestone Films, will give the Jorgensen Lecture earlier on Friday afternoon at 3:00 pm.

The entire series is sponsored by the BFC/A, the Department of Communication and Culture, UNDERGROUND Film Series, IU Libraries Film Archives and IU Cinema.

More about Kathleen Collins:

Black Film Review’s special tribute to Collins

John Williams’s Cineaste essay on Collins and Julie Dash

New York Times obituary

* This quote is taken from a transcribed interview between Kathleen Collins and Phyllis Klotman that is part of the BFC/A’s research materials on Collins.

~ Nzingha Kendall

Peter Davis Profile in IU International

The BFC/A’s Peter Davis Collection, consisting of films, videos, and related materials documenting Davis’s work in apartheid-era South Africa and beyond, was recently featured in IU International, the news magazine of the Office of the Vice President for International Affairs at Indiana University. The story is also available through the online publication, Inside IU Bloomington.

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Davis took this image in Lesotho in the 1970s. Photo courtesy of BFC/A.

As the article states, Davis viewed his films through a political lens:

A 1974 project for the humanitarian agency CARE took Davis to 14 countries in Africa in 28 days. He didn’t set out to observe the difference in the lives of the oppressed and their oppressors in Africa, but seeing it defined his career for the next three decades. Davis produced 12 full-length documentary films of his own and worked on many for other producers, all especially rich in the history of apartheid.

“I never believed that apartheid would be beaten on the battlefield,” Davis wrote in a 2008 article for African Activist Archive Project. “I concluded early on that the critical struggle over apartheid would be above all else a propaganda battle.”

South Africa limited what Davis could film. To get into the country, Davis chose a subject that would appeal to the apartheid censors — the history of the Afrikaners. He called the film White Laager, a reference to the circling of covered wagons that the Boers used to protect themselves as they moved into hostile territory. But the image became a metaphor for a ruling minority constantly trying to keep the conquered at bay, the formerly oppressed becoming oppressors.

The full article, which describes Davis’s relationship with the BFC/A, can be read here. And for more information on Peter Davis, visit him online at Villon Films.

~Stacey Doyle

Monday, March 18: Audre Lorde documentary and guests at IU Cinema

On Monday, March 18, the Black Film Center/Archive welcomes guests Drs. Marion Kraft and Dagmar Schultz to present and discuss the 2012 documentary, AUDRE LORDE: THE BERLIN YEARS 1984 to 1992.

At 3:00 PM, Afro-German scholar and Lorde translator Dr. Marion Kraft will present a Jorgensen Lecture at IU Cinema to discuss her role in the film and Lorde’s influence on the German Black and Feminist movements.

At 7:00 PM, Director Dr. Dagmar Schultz will present her 2012 documentary and will be joined by Dr. Kraft for a Q&A following the film.

The trailer is available online here.

Schultz wrote recently:

A year has passed since AUDRE LORDE – THE BERLIN YEARS 1984 to 1992 had its world premier at the Berlinale. The film has been screened at over 40 festivals worldwide and has been shown at numerous other venues and at conferences in Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. Interest in the film is expanding more and more: e.g. in Germany AIDS projects are screening it. We hope that it will reach more and more colleges and universities and also schools – for that purpose Marion Kraft designed the Study Guide on the website!

Ika Hügel-Marshall and I travelled 2012 with the Audre Lorde Legacy Cultural Festival in England and in the United States. Now in March 2013 Marion Kraft, protagonist in the film and translator of Audre Lorde’s poetry, and I have embarked on a tour in Canada and the US (for detailed information see calendar on the website):

We are 

- on March 15 at the University of Toronto with the Women and Gender Studies and Caribbean Studies

- on March 16 in Waterloo, Ontario for the Rainbow Reels Queer Film Festival

- on March 18 at Indiana University with the Black Film Center/Archive

- on March 20 in New York City with the Goethe Institute

The film will follow this run with a March 23 appearance at the Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles as part of the 2013 Outfest Fusion Film Festival.

Cuban Women Filmmakers US Showcase & a Conversation with Gloria Rolando

A significant showcase of Cuban women filmmakers began a tour of the United States on March 6^th, 2013, in Los Angeles. The Cuban Women Filmmakers US Showcase, brought about by the Women in Film International Committee, Cuban Women Filmmakers Mediatheque, the Cuban Institute of Art and Cinematography (ICAIC), brings acclaimed directors Gloria Rolando, Marina Ochoa, Milena Almira, and actress Claudia Rojas.

The showcase features film screenings, panel discussions, and events to promote cultural exchange in Los Angeles, Miami, and New York.  A full schedule is available here, while here is a list of all of the films – mostly shorts by a long list of Cuban women – including Blanco Es Mi Pelo, Negro Mi Piel (White Is My Hair, Black My Skin) by Marina Ocho (1997), De Cierta Manera (One Way or Another) by Sara Gomez (1975), and Derecho de Ser (Right to Be) by Claudia Rojas (2013).

Derecho de Ser

One of the directors who will participate in the showcase, Gloria Rolando, is famous for her documentaries on Afro-Cuban topics. Rolando studied Art History in Cuba, and through this line of inquiry, came to work with many famous filmmakers – documentarians in particular – from Cuba, including Santiago Alvarez and Rogelio Paris.  She is also quite active in the group Imagenes del Caribe (Caribbean Images)

Rolando visited Indiana University in 2010, when she sat down with BFC/A director Michael Martin to discuss her influences, the state of Cuban filmmaking, and what the future holds.  In anticipation of the Cuban Women Filmmakers US Showcase, and to elucidate some of the themes that Gloria Rolando deals with, we’re releasing here some interesting selections from Martin’s unpublished interview with Rolando.

*         *         *         *

BLACK FILM CENTER/ARCHIVE: That distinctiveness concerns your sustained interrogation and recovery of the black experience largely in Cuba.  My question to you is why have you chosen to devote your life’s work to the study of the African diaspora?

GLORIA ROLANDO: I grew up in a very, very humble black family.  My father was a shoemaker, my mother made clothes, and my grandmother, whose hands I never will forget, used to work as a domestic in the houses of other people.  She was a character; she’d never talk about age, she’d talk about life.  She told me how in Santa Clara in the 30s and 40s black people would walk around the park while white people would walk inside the park; it was the custom of that time.

She told me about the Union Fraternal, the society for black people in Havana, and another black society for those who were doctors or lawyers or teachers.  I remember that she used to say, “Maybe you will attend Club Athena because you have your title, you graduated, you are a professional.”   In school, though, I never heard about this kind of history.  After some time, I held on to all this information, and when I started to make films I wanted to see these kind of very humble people, but very proud and with a lot of dignity.

Filmmaker Gloria Rolando

BFC/A: In your work, you’ve largely made documentaries.  Why this genre and form of storytelling?  Why documentary?

GR: Well, I was a part of the documentary school mostly because of who I worked with at the ICAIC.  The first project that I worked on in the ICAIC was with Santiago Villafuerte. It was a story about the migration of people from Haiti after the Haitian revolution.  It’s the documentary that is called Tumba Francesa.  So I did all the research and it was my first work and also my first script, Tumba Francesa with Santiago Villafuerte. I discovered that through hours of historical research for the documentary that I got in touch with the main characters of the story.  I discovered something that would help me to discover Cuban culture to know more about my country.  So I said, “Ah! The cinema will help me.  And a documentary about war will help me to know more about Cuban culture,” because I had never learned about Tumba Francesa and all these black people that are going to white clubs and speaking another language.

BFC/A: Gloria, let’s talk a little bit about Images of the Caribbean.  What is Images of the Caribbean?

GR: It’s a family relationship, friends—it’s not a company.  People think that it’s a company.  No!  First, it’s not possible to do this in Cuba (laughs). No, we’re separate from a company.

People ask me how it is possible to have so many projects going at once.  Well, it’s because I am a member of the National Video Movement and each project has a different story.  My Footsteps in Baraguá was the first one that I loved so much; it was with the help of so many people.

In a general sense, though, we would like to be part or to re-create or to catch the images of the people who don’t have voices for themselves.  They are part of the history, they made the history, and they appear as general topics in books. In Spanish we have a phrase about la historia de la gente sin historia –and we want to give voices to these people.  You know, of course they made the history, of course they are part of the history, but they don’t have their own voice.

BFC/A: Let’s talk about your work-in-progress.  What can you tell me about 1912: Breaking the Silence and its three part structure?

GR: Well, the first chapter is like an introduction.  So I talk a little bit at the beginning and try to create some kind of expectation by talking about the injustice.  We jump right in in the credits – with a young lad named Josenia.  As a student in her psychology classes, students of all races would ask: “What did black people contribute to Cuban history?”

I didn’t include her answer in the film. Her answer is the documentary. She said, “I didn’t know either; I was worried because I didn’t have too much information, only about the Independent Party of Color.”  She wasn’t clear about the rest of the Cuban history before the Independent Party of Color.

For this project, I listened to the voices of the young people.  It’s the voice of the young generation in Cuba, and I am very concerned about how they teach the Cuban history.  Of course it’s not only for young people; it’s for many other people that never take care of the Cuban history in this way.  So for that reason I said, “Okay, I cannot get in touch directly to the Independent Party of Color.  I need to do more.”

So I dedicated this first chapter to get in touch with different circles of different members of Cuban history, and now I have finished with the foundation of the party.