Darnell Martin, the director of
I Like It Like That (1994), the first Hollywood studio vehicle piloted by a Black woman, recently said this of the withering of the previous Black film heyday of
Do the Right Thing (1989) and
Daughters of the Dust (1991): “It’s like they set us up to fail.” If the 21st-century FOIA film has its way, being set up to fail by shadowy forces will become a productive artistic subject perhaps the primary inspiration, in fact, for backward-glancing Black cinema as our post-civil rights era topples and rebuilds the monuments of 20th-century Black culture.
What is a FOIA film, anyway? It’s a film that could only be made after (1) the liberating provisions of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) were extended to once-secret FBI documents; and after (2) those documents, exposed to public view, have been redefined as master keys to the interaction of modern Black life and the American racial state. It’s a film, then, like Sam Pollard’s
With her spare line and sly, deadpan humor, Christine Sun Kim investigates sound as a physical and social phenomenon while also interrogating the cultural hierarchies in which sound operates. In her new mural for Washington University’s Kemper Art Museum, the artist and Deaf activist highlights how the weight of history and everyday experiences intertwine to affect the lives of Deaf people.
February 4, 2021