Frequent Small Meals presents
Civil Rights on Film
Four nights of rare films on African-American life, 1941-1967
Curated by Andy Ditzler
February 20 - 28, 2009

"Black history at 24 frames per second...richer and more complex glimpses of the civil rights era than we get from history books" - Creative Loafing

Ed Pincus filming Black Natchez (1965) courtesy Ed Pincus

co-sponsored by the following Emory University departments: the Studies in Sexualities Initiative, the James Weldon Johnson Institute, the Department of Film Studies, and the Office of LGBT Life

Government training films, cinéma vérité documentaries, experimental forms, itinerant and ephemeral films, network news reports, activist film, and the avant-garde: the explosion of moving image forms in the mid-twentieth century was a prism through which the complexity of African-American life was shown. New ways of documentary filmmaking coincided with the spectacular growth of the Civil Rights movement, documenting the movement with unprecedented intimacy. And by the late 1960s, image-conscious subcultures and political identities were foreshadowed in the way documentary began to merge autobiography with narrative – and to challenge notions of cinematic truth. Civil Rights on Film captures this movement with a series of rare and important moving image works, all made between 1941 and 1967.

Program 1: Life, Work, and Segregation in the South

Program 2: Inside the Movement: "Direct Cinema" and Civil Rights

Program 3: The Fierce Urgency of Now

Program 4: "My name is Jason Holliday…"

Download the series brochure (PDF, 300 KB)

Curator's program notes on the films


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