Skip Norman: Three Short Films | Duke Experimental Film Society

-- Presented by Duke Experimental Film Society and Screen/Society

“[Skip] Norman was a member of the inaugural cohort of students [including Helke Sander, Lothar Lambert, and Harun Farocki] at Berlin’s DFFB Film School, where he befriended and worked alongside a group of artists and activists interested in the revolutionary potential of film ... Norman authored a remarkable but little-seen body of documentary, experimental, and essay filmmaking in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Building upon and contributing to the incendiary work of his peers decrying the US war in Vietnam and racism back home, Norman produced a number of equally urgent films about his experience as a Black artist inhabiting, and observing, a double life on both sides of the Atlantic.” – Jesse Cumming

On Africa
(Skip Norman and Joey Gibbs, 1970, 35 min, Digital)

"On Africa, codirected with Joey Gibbs, emerged out of a trip Norman took to West Africa in the late 1960s. Contrasting footage of Berlin—notably the site of the 1884 conference that divided the African continent among European powers—with archival colonial photography and details of its brutality, it later incorporates striking still photographs Norman captured in his travels. His ground-eye view is paired with a voiceover detailing the operation of neocolonial banking structures, mining, and other means of continued exploitation. " – Jesse Cumming
 

"Initially produced as one film before separated for distribution, Washington D.C. November 1970 and Black Man’s Volunteer Army of Liberation take stock of the nation’s capital early in a new decade. The former contrasts a compendium of notable Black and abolitionist figures and American wars with speakers outside a Black Panther Party registration center, and the latter examines a mutual aid network established in Washington, DC, to support drug users, while deconstructing the issue’s root cause." – Jesse Cumming

Screen/Society screenings are free and open to the public.

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