Going their own way
black cinema at the Filmfest
By establishing the American Independents section at the Filmfest, Ulla Rapp created a framework that included works by African American filmmakers. In 1987, for example, Robert Townsend came to Munich with his comedy HOLLYWOOD SHUFFLE, with himself in the lead role. Time and again, Rapp gave works of Black cinema a focus within her “Indies” section, such as at Filmfest 1990, which saw a selection of “Young Black Cinema”.
Three years later, she again curated a special, this time on “Early Black Cinema”. “I had read that two crates of film reels had been discovered in a small town in southern Texas: films by Black directors, made with Black actors, for Black audiences. With these wonderful pioneering works, we continued our involvement with Black cinema,” says Rapp. In the years that followed, works of Black cinema were sporadically included in the program, even after Ulla Rapp was no longer curating films for the Filmfest. In 2007, Susana Borges Gomes took over her position, followed by Sofia Glasl in 2016.
„A Selection of Black Cinema” with Arthur Jafa
In 2019, FILMFEST MÜNCHEN collaborated with Museum Brandhorst to present a program called “A Peculiar Vantage: A Selection of Black Cinema”. This showcased films selected by African American artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa, whose own works were featured in an exhibition celebrating the 10th anniversary of Museum Brandhorst. The films included blaxploitation classics such as Melvin van Peebles’ SWEET SWEETBACK’S BAADASSSSS SONG (1971) and PASSING THROUGH (1977) by Larry Clark. The latter is a quintessential example of the “L.A. Rebellion”, a late 1960s movement among Black student directors at the UCLA Film School; from then until the late 1980s, they established an overtly Black cinema as an alternative to classical Hollywood cinema. Another important figure in the “L.A. Rebellion” was and is director Haile Gerima, who was born in Ethiopia in 1946. His feature films BUSH MAMA (1975) and ASHES AND EMBERS (1982) were included in Arthur Jafa’s selection.
Robert Townsend with Ulla Rapp
Dennis Dortch, Arthur Jafa and Larry Clark
the legacy of the „L.A. Rebellion“
The “L.A. Rebellion” lives on today in the form of a new young movement in Black cinema. Merawi Gerima, the son of Haile Gerima, had a remarkable debut in 2020 with the semi-autobiographical feature film RESIDUE, in which an African American director returns to the Washington, DC, neighborhood where he grew up, to observe the impact of gentrification and structural racism on the Black community. Julia Weigl, the curator of Scandinavian and English-language films at the Filmfest since 2019, invited RESIDUE, along with director Merawi Gerami, to Munich for the 2021 edition of the festival. (Watch Julia Weigl interview Merawi Gerima: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nJsXX9Nz_Y).
In the following year as well, Julia Weigl curated an increasing number of films that fulfill the Filmfest’s aspiration of screening diverse films made for diverse audiences. The highlights of Filmfest 2022, for example, included EAR FOR EYE by British playwright, screenwriter, and director debbie tucker green: an expressively filmed stage adaptation of her own play, which deals with various experiences that traumatize British and American Black people.
A new wave of independent Black filmmaking has emerged, says Julia Weigl, although the boundary between it and the mainstream is now all too fluid. “Even at the Sundance Film Festival, which has always been considered the home of independent cinema, it can be observed that most of the films have been produced by major studios. Or the films are sold to a streaming service for 20 million. There’s a lot of temptation to make the films with the market in mind from the outset and to soft-pedal the stories along with their aesthetics. However, some representatives of Black cinema are not interested in conforming to the conventional narrative patterns and the traditional, mainly white, approaches. They want to go their own way, a new way, in terms of both aesthetics and content, and in so doing create a genuinely Black, contemporary cinema.”
Residue
ear for eye
BAADASSSSS CINEMA:
An Evening with Sir Isaac Julien
An absolute highlight came this spring, when Museum Brandhorst and FILMFEST MÜNCHEN welcomed a star of the international art scene, British director and video artist Sir Isaac Julien, to Munich on May 9. This year, Tate Britain is honoring his work, which spans four decades, in a major solo exhibition titled “Isaac Julien: What Freedom Is to Me”. As part of Museum Brandhorst’s long-standing collaboration with the Filmfest, Isaac Julien personally presented his acclaimed documentary BAADASSSSS CINEMA (2002) about the blaxploitation films of the 1970s in the foyer of Museum Brandhorst, followed by a talk on the history of Black cinema then and now.