Still from Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich's film Spit on the Broom (2019). Image courtesy the artist
Dancers on Film: Two by Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich
ONLINE ONLY
This is a past event
HOSTED VIA ZOOM
Register in advance for this webinar and to access the film pre-screening.
The second program for our Director's Film Series, Dancers on Film, presents filmmaker and artist Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich in conversation with research specialist Kristin Juarez. The discussion will center on how experimental filmmaking reimagines the fragments of African American narratives found in archival material and cinema histories. The program will include a screening of the artist's short films, including her surrealist documentary Spit on the Broom (2019), which explores the history of the United Order of Tents—a clandestine organization of Black women organized in the 1840s during the height of the Underground Railroad.
The program will be accompanied by a pre-screening of George Stevens' film Swing Time (1936), the classic Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musical that speaks to Hunt-Ehrlich's use of dance to create new understandings of the cinematic genre. Swing Time will be available for viewing from June 9 through June 11 through webinar registration.
Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich is a filmmaker and artist whose work has screened internationally. She appeared on Filmmaker Magazine's 2020 list of "25 New Faces of Independent Cinema." Her first feature film, Madame Négritude (forthcoming), received screenwriting support from the San Francisco Film Society's Rainin Grant, and was a 2020 finalist at Biennale College Cinema, the Venice Film Festival's prestigious film lab and fund.
Kristin Juarez is the research specialist for the African American Art History Initiative at the Getty Research Institute. She studies the work of modern and contemporary multidisciplinary artists who utilize the moving image, dance, and visual art. She is co-curator of the forthcoming exhibition Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures, which will open at Art + Practice in September 2021.
This program is the second in an ongoing series that considers how the moving image archives dance and what dance can archive. This program is associated with the Getty Research Institute's African American Art History Initiative.
The conversation will be recorded and available on Getty Research Institute's YouTube channel.