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Image from VIEWFINDER by Crystal Campbell

Questioning Archives: Short Films

Che Applewhaite and Crystal Z. Campbell in person

Among Black Atlantic Cinemas

  • Saturday, June 4, 2022
  • 2:00 p.m.
  • West Building Lecture Hall
  • In-person
  • Registration Required

Registration is required.

Short films by four contemporary filmmakers explore the documentary trope of the “ethnographic,” underscoring the unreliability of objectivity in formulations of race, class, and gender. Films include Halimuhfack (Christopher Harris, US, 2016, 16mm to digital, 4 minutes), with the voice of famed author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston; A New England Document (Che Applewhaite, USA/UK/Trinidad & Tobago, 2020, digital, 16 minutes), which reconstructs the genocidal impulses of two ethnographers’ photographic encounters in the Kalahari Desert, Namibia, from the perspective of its suppressed stories; and Go-Rilla Means War (Crystal Z. Campbell, US, 2017, 35mm to digital, 20 minutes), among others. Total running time approximately 75 minutes.

Halimuhfack, courtesy of Christopher Harris

A New England Document courtesy of Che Applewhaite