The Screen at Contemporary: Sonic Textures, Shattered Scenes

About

Selected dates | 2024 | 6.30pm 
Nottingham Contemporary
£6 (£30 season ticket)

The Screen at Contemporary presents Sonic Textures, Shattered Scenes: a selection of landmark films by Black artists working in independent cinema in the 1970s-90s.

This season showcases truly groundbreaking cinema by artists and thinkers that expanded the ways the Black American experience could be represented, examined, and cherished. These are experimental, personal, and radical films by academics, musicians, poets, writers, actors, photographers, and visual artists who changed cinema forever. In turns thrilling, cerebral, and sensuous, this diverse programme of films spanning various genres are united by invoking the richness of the lives we live. In recent years many of these previously-overlooked films have been restored, and even re-cut, enabling new generations to see these films as they were originally intended.

Please note that many of the films in this season reflect historical attitudes that audiences may find outdated and offensive.

The season title is taken from the article Cosmic Freeze Frames: A Poetics of Bill Gunn by Carlos Valladares on gagosian.com (Spring 2021)

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Ganja & Hess | Wednesday 6th November

An anthropologist, Hess, is stabbed with an ancient ceremonial dagger by his assistant, rendering him immortal and into a vampire. The assistant's wife, Ganja, comes searching for her missing husband, and she and Hess form an unexpected and intense bond. This avant-garde take on the vampire genre is a potent mix of African spirituality and mysticism that explores sexuality, desire, and death. Ganja & Hess was underrated and misunderstood on its release but is now considered a masterpiece.

For years Gunn's version was unavailable and this edition represents the original release, restored by The Museum of Modern Art with support from Martin Scorsese's The Film Foundation, and mastered in HD from a 35mm negative.

Bill Gunn was a playwright, poet, actor, and novelist who directed three feature films. He sought to make films about the kinds of people and experiences he knew on his own terms, rather than seek to please the white critic or produce palatable images of what the Black man should be.

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Losing Ground | Wednesday 13th November

A thoughtful philosophy professor and her charismatic artist husband decide to rent a house for the summer. Whilst he is enamoured with the local inhabitants and takes a muse, she researches ecstatic worship and is convinced by one of her students to be in his short experimental film. In her delicious, funny, smart and vibrant film, Collins explores the nature of artistic practice, creative and intellectual ambition, desire and being desired, and how all this bleeds into how we live our lives. Losing Ground truly deserves to be revered as one of the best American independent films.

After its premiere, Losing Ground did not secure general distribution and was not widely seen beyond the festival circuit. In 2015 the Lincoln Center restored the film, and it was released by Kino Lorber.

Kathleen Collins was a poet, playwright, writer, filmmaker, director, civil rights activist, and educator. Her book Notes from a Black Woman's Diary shows her as a free thinker who explored the human condition masterfully, with playfulness and depth. Losing Ground was the first US feature film made by a Black woman and she paved the way for others in this season.

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My Brother's Wedding | Wednesday 20th November

A young man, Pierce, works at his family dry cleaners in LA. Amidst the malaise of the day-to-day running of the business, his brother asks him to be his best man. Pierce resents his brother, a lawyer, for his bourgeois ambitions, and his wife-to-be for her upper-middle-class background. Set in a South Central Black neighborhood with southern roots, Burnett's semi-autobiographical film explores tensions and resentments within family and community. Accompanied by a bluesy soul soundtrack by Johnny Ace, My Brother's Wedding is a wise and searingly funny depiction of humanity with poetry, rage, and humour coursing through its veins.

Burnett is one of the most important filmmakers working in American cinema. His practice has spanned directing, producing, writing, editing, acting, photography, cinematography, and activism. Along with other filmmakers like Julie Dash he was part of the LA Rebellion, a group of Black creatives who sought new ways to articulate the Black experience onscreen.

Burnett had not finished editing My Brother's Wedding when its producers rushed through its premiere in 1983. The film received mixed reviews and was not widely distributed. Decades later, the Pacific Film Archive restored the film and Milestone Films released a new version, re-edited by the director.

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Drylongso | Wednesday 27th November

Pica, alarmed by the rate at which the young Black men around her are dying, attempts to preserve their existence in Polaroids for an art project as she believes they are "endangered species". On the way she meets Tobi, a woman in an abusive relationship who dresses in men's clothes to hide herself in plain sight. Smith renders themes of love, heartbreak, art, and violence in sumptuous, saturated Californian hues, crafting both a rare cinematic celebration of Black female creativity and a moving elegy for a generation of lost African American men.

Cauleen Smith is a filmmaker and multimedia visual artist. Her experimental work addresses African-American identity and, more specifically, the issues facing contemporary Black women. She has been associated with the Afrofuturist movement and her work has been inspired by the likes of Alice Coltrane and spiritual practices. Smith is currently a professor in the Department of Art at the University of California.
The film was restored in 4K by the Criterion Collection, Janus Films, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences®, supervised by director Cauleen Smith. Screening Courtesy of T A P E Collective.

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Eve's Bayou | Wednesday 4th December

Set in 1960s Louisiana, an affluent African American family unravels following the infidelities of its charming patriarch. A coming-of-age tale told from the perspective of ten-year-old Eve, Lemmons' stunning debut explores complex family dynamics, trauma, and spiritualism whilst steeped in rich southern gothic atmosphere. Inspired by her own upbringing, the film feels at once naturalistic and in the realms of folktale. A vivid, hypnotic, and atmospheric piece of cinema.

Kasi Lemons is a director, writer, producer, actor, and librettist. She is also an Associate Arts Professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Lemmons initially developed Eve's Bayou as a novel before deciding the best medium for the story was film.
In 2006 Eve's Bayou was selected by the National Film Registry (US) for being "culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress USA.

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Mo' Better Blues | Wednesday 11th December

Bleek, played by a young Denzel Washington, is an intense, self-centred jazz trumpeter whose ambition alienates everyone around him. He navigates love and art in this kinetic, stylish, and claustrophobic film with an infectious soundtrack from Branford Marsalis Quartet and Terence Blanchard. A mix of smokey jazz clubs, argumentative promoters, animated musicians, and trysts with lovers, this has the irresistibly delicious flavour of independent American cinema of the early '90s from an enormously influential filmmaker. Wrongly overlooked in Lee's jam-packed ouevre, Mo' Better Blues is a vivid ode to the art of jazz and its roots in the African American experience.

Spike Lee is one of the most prominent and prolific American filmmakers working today. He launched the careers of some of the most notable actors working today and has made thirty-five feature films under his production company 45 Acres and a Mule. He is a director, producer, screenwriter, actor, activist and author, as well as a tenured professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in the Graduate Film Programme.

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Access
This event is inclusive for wheelchair users; our building is wheelchair accessible with lift access to all floors. If you require a wheelchair space, please email info@nottinghamcontemporary.org or phone 0115 948 9750 so we can ensure a space is set up for you.

If you require a free ticket for a carer, please contact us using the details above to arrange this.

This event will take place in The Space. 

If you have any questions around access or have specific access requirements we can accommodate, please get in touch with us by emailing info@nottinghamcontemporary.org or phoning 0115 948 9750.