A 98-year-old female Communist black rights activist, the Philadelphia anarchist community and a local leftist activist organization seemingly have very little in common.
But the group proved otherwise to the eclectic audience present Tuesday night at the first in a screening and discussion series, "Issues in Black Independent Cinema" hosted by the Africana Studies Center and the Scribe Video Center.
A minister from a baptist church, an independent film actress, a poet, a representative from humanitarian group Books Through Bars, Penn students, local activists and a handful of self-proclaimed "film-lovers" were among those present at the event, which aimed to reach students and the greater Philadelphia community.
Louis Massiah, director and founder of the Scribe Video Center, screened two of his own documentaries, "In Her Own Words" and "A is for Anarchist, B is for Brown."
The first profiled Louise Thompson Patterson (1901-1999), a relatively unknown but key figure in the struggle for equality for blacks in the 20th century.
The second film focused on both the local anarchist community and similar organizations in Philadelphia, as well as a relatively young Philadelphia leftist action group, the Brown Collective.
Massiah, who currently teaches a course at Penn on Black independent cinema, led what he called "a conversation, not a lecture." As demonstrated by the varied themes of the evening's documentaries, Massiah was careful not to narrowly define black film or its purpose.
Instead, Massiah asked a series of open-ended questions intended to acknowledge the varied forms and functions of black cinema, such as "Why is it important that there be black film?" and "How does this work push the culture further -- push the community forward?"
Massiah did, however, explicitly emphasize the need to preserve and perpetuate oral histories, not only of the black community, but of the community at large.
Tufuku Zuberi, director of the Africana Studies Center was also present, and identified the series as evidence of the success of a 30-year struggle to demand that "Penn acknowledge the center of Africana Studies as a serious thing."
The screenings and discussions, held Tuesday nights in the David Rittenhouse Laboratory, will run through Nov. 19 and are free and open to the public. The series is intended as a discourse on independent black cinema, particularly the documentary, and its role and impact within the context of the African diaspora.
