Difficult Dialogues: Race in Our Global World

Friday, April 11, 7pm
Shadows
(John Cassavetes, 1959, U.S., 81 minutes, 35mm)
Cassavetes’s debut American film, shot on a handheld camera, follows a family of black Manhattan hipsters, jazz musician brothers Benny (Ben Carruthers) and Hugh (Hugh Hurd), and their light-skinned sister, Lelia (Lelia Goldani). Lelia is in a relationship with a white man, Tony (Anthony Ray), which ends when he discovers she’s black. The improvised dialogue and ellipses of the film are evocative not only of jazz music (Charles Mingus composed part of the soundtrack), but of the fluidity of Lelia’s racial identity. Cassavetes originally finished Shadows two years earlier, but reshot half of the film after a negative response. The first version was unseen for 45 years until it was discovered, long forgotten, in a junk dealer’s attic in 2003. We're showing the more widely circulated second version, but in any iteration, Shadows is a landmark of American independent film—it has even been called the birth of it.

Friday, April 11, 9pm
The Wedding Banquet
(Ang Lee, 1993, Taiwan/U.S., 106 minutes, 35mm)
This smart social comedy was Ang Lee’s second collaboration with writer/producer James Schamus, co-founder of the independent production company Good Machine. A young, gay Taiwanese immigrant living in New York agrees to marry a Chinese woman so that she can obtain a green card, but lands himself in trouble when his parents—unaware of their son’s sexuality—decide to fly in from Taiwan for the wedding. The Wedding Banquet offers an insightful look at the interplay between race, culture, and gender, while staying light on its feet.

Friday, April 18, 8pm
Lone Star
(John Sayles, 1996, U.S., 135 minutes, 35mm)
Rio County, Texas—a border town with a military base and a deep Latino history—is suffering from more than its share of racial tensions and skeletons. Director John Sayles presents the town through the eyes of sheriff Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper), a fair-minded man with a firm belief in progress. When the bones of former sheriff Charlie Wade (Kris Kristofferson) are discovered in the desert, the old rumor that Sam’s father had killed the famously corrupt and violent Wade begins to tug at Sam and slowly unravels his perception of Rio County’s past and his own present. A rich, multilayered film, Lone Star is one of Sayles’s best. Professor Sharon Holland will introduce the film and lead a discussion afterwards.

Wednesday, April 23, 8pm
The Birth of a Nation
(D.W. Griffith, 1915, U.S., 189 minutes, 35mm)
Unsettling and profoundly racist, The Birth of a Nation is nevertheless a pivotal part of American history. D.W. Griffith’s epic spans from the Antebellum South to the Reconstruction, in which the film’s glorified Klan rises to reestablish the South. As Roger Ebert pointed out, the film has been called racist since before people started calling films racist. The Birth of a Nation was an important rallying point for the just-founded NAACP, which organized an education campaign to combat the film’s portrayal of African-Americans. Interestingly, the commercial success of the movie helped establish feature-length narratives as a Hollywood genre. To watch The Birth of a Nation is to, in part, grapple with the disturbing historical beginnings of the Hollywood narrative. Professor Jacqueline Stewart will introduce the film and lead a discussion afterwards.   

Friday, April 25, 8 pm
The Searchers
(John Ford, 1956, U.S., 119 minutes, 35mm)
There is an interpretation of this American classic that suggests John Ford bent the western to address more than just race relations between white settlers and American Indians. The civil rights movement was beginning in earnest in America—Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954 and the Montgomery Bus Boycott began in 1955. Amid this tumult, Ford made a movie about a Confederate Civil War veteran, Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), who returns to his brother’s Texas ranch in search of the America he’d fought for. A Comanche raid shatters those hopes and launches him on a five-year quest for revenge and for his kidnapped niece (Natalie Wood), who may have become, in Ethan’s eyes, too Comanche to live. Among the most influential American films, The Searchers is as giant as its landscapes and as forceful as its obsessive protagonist.

Wednesday, April 30, 8 pm
Rabbit-Proof Fence
(Phillip Noyce, 2002, Australia, 94 minutes, 35mm)
In the early 1900s, white Australia panicked over what it called an “unwanted third race” of half-Aborigine children. These “half-caste” children were forcibly removed from their families and placed in special detention centers across the continent. Rabbit-Proof Fence tells the story of three girls—Molly, Daisy, and Gracie—who have been torn from their families by the government. Part of the so-called “stolen generation,” the girls escape from their state compound and begin a 1,500 mile walk back to their mothers. The unforgiving terrain of the Australian Outback becomes the backdrop for a movie about this national shame and the simple, steely determination of children who just want to go home.

Wednesday, May 14, 8 pm FREE!
Jump the Gun
(Les Blair, 1997, South Africa/United Kingdom, 124 minutes, 35mm)
Set in mid-90’s South Africa, Jump the Gun follows an ensemble of characters navigating the politics of an unstable post-apartheid Johannesburg. After leaving her husband, Gugu moves in with her aunt in a downtrodden black township. She is soon seduced by an accountant who promises she can sing with a band he manages. Meanwhile, a white oil rigger, Clint, returns to town and has trouble to adjusting to a South Africa that’s “getting pretty African.” Writer/director Les Blair has collaborated with Mike Leigh and Ken Loach and shares their forthright, clear-headed, compassionate approach to social issues.

Wednesday, May 21, 8pm FREE!
Black Girl
(Ousmane Sembene, 1966, Senegal/France, 65 minutes, 35mm)
Made six years after Senegal’s independence from France, Black Girl was one of the first films about the meaning of the colonial past in a globalizing world. Senegalese intellectual and novelist Ousmane Sembene’s first motion picture, the film is told from the perspective of Diouana, a Senegalese woman who travels to France to work as a nanny for a French couple who’d employed her in Dakar prior to Senegalese independence. The hope she places in the idea of France is shattered by the couple, who are nostalgic for the elevated status they held in Dakar as members of the colonial elite. A stark, powerful film. Professor Richard Iton will introduce the film and lead a discussion afterwards.   

Wednesday, May 28, 8pm FREE!
Fear Eats the Soul
(Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974, Germany, 93 minutes, 35mm)
Fear Eats the Soul is Fassbinder at his best. A short, tough tale and a reworking of Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, the film reveals melodrama in the cheap loneliness and banality of everyday life. Fear Eats the Soul turns on an elegantly constructed plot. Mira, a dowdy German housekeeper in her sixties, falls in love with Salem, a Berber guest worker about twenty years her junior. To quote critic Scott Tobias: “Just when the two seem cast off as victims, Fassbinder flips the entire premise on its head, showing how their bond relies on (and feeds off of) the same cruel machinations used to pry them apart. No one can be extricated from the world around them; even Salem and Mira wind up perpetuating the conditions that exploit them.” Professor Alexander Weheliye will introduce the film and lead a discussion afterwards.

Thursday, May 29, 8 pm FREE!
Imitation of Life
(Douglas Sirk, 1959, U.S., 125 minutes, 35mm)
Douglas Sirk’s final film with Universal producer Ross Hunter, Imitation of Life is one of Hollywood’s most studied depictions of race. The film initially follows the rise of actress Lora Meredith (Lana Turner), supported by her loyal maid, Annie (Juanita Moore). As Meredith’s fortunes change, the focus shifts to Annie’s light-skinned daughter Sara Jane (Susan Kohner), who hungers to be white. To paraphrase critic James Harvey: Lora and Sara Jane both live superficially, aiming for shallowness. The film suggests that neither Lora nor Annie, black nor white, can entirely comprehend how they reinforce a system of prejudice and inequality. Professor Jennifer Brody will introduce the film and lead a discussion afterwards.

Wednesday, June 4, 8pm FREE!
La Haine
(Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995, France, 96 minutes, 35mm)
Made in 1995, La Haine received renewed attention a decade later when the Parisian suburbs smoldered after the summer 2005 riots. In that light La Haine was remarkably prescient, but it isn’t insightful as much as strong and bold, telling the story of a disenfranchised people on their terms. La Haine takes place the day after a riot. Severely beaten by the police, Abdel has been hospitalized. His friend Vinz (Vincent Cassel) has found a policeman’s gun and vowed to kill a cop if Abdel dies. The heart of the film is the banter among Vinz and his two friends as they roam the streets, spitting dialogue at one another and searching for a safe haven.

Thursday, June 5, 8pm FREE!
Falling Down
(Joel Schumacher, 1993, U.S., 113 minutes, 35mm)
Named for his vanity license plate and forced by the summer heat and traffic to walk home through Los Angeles, William ‘D-Fens’ Foster is portrayed with remarkable empathy by Michael Douglas. On his walk home, D-Fens, an unemployed defense worker, violently and almost psychotically takes out his frustrations and insecurities on nearly everyone he comes in contact with. Directed by Joel Schumacher, the fascinating, flawed Falling Down can be interpreted as a problematic expression of white male insecurity. Needless to say, it was a flashpoint on its release. Professor E. Patrick Johnson will introduce the film and lead a discussion afterwards.

The series is part of the Center for Global Culture and Communication's Difficult Dialogue programming, which is sponsored by a generous grant from The Ford Foundation.