Framing Media #4 - Hayley O'Malley on Kathleen Collins Beyond Losing Ground

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Today's episode features Hayley O'Malley, a Mellon postdoctoral fellow for the Black Arts Archive Sawyer Seminar at Northwestern University, who researches black women’s art and activism. We discuss her article, "Art on Her Mind: The Making of Kathleen Collins's Cinema of Interiority,” published in Black Camera. O'Malley looks across the broad spectrum of work, much of it unpublished, by the director of Losing Ground to find an artist continually using a subjective voice to define identity beyond the grounds of race and gender. Searching through her archives, she argues for a broader understanding of Collins as a writer in search of authentic experiences and attempting to tell personal stories without necessarily falling simply into autobiography. The research thus demonstrates a better understanding of this recently rediscovered filmmaker not just as a curios side note for film history, but perhaps a defining thinker and writer who influenced a number of writers, directors, and other artists in ways we might not realize.

Framing Media #3 - Eleni Palis on Rethinking Film Quotations Through Race

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Today's episode features Eleni Palis, an assistant professor of English and Cinema Studies at the University of Tennessee, who researches the intersections between classical and post-classical American cinema. We discuss her article, "Race, Authorship and Film Quotation in Post-Classical Cinema” published in Screen. Palis transforms our idea of the film quotation from a practice of canonization used by the directors of New Hollywood by looking at innovative practices by three African American filmmakers: Julie Dash, Cheryl Dunye, and Spike Lee. In her reading of their films, and particularly the use of manufactured and "fake"quotations, Palis demonstrates an alternative use to the practice that interrogates our own relationship to film histories, both real and imagined. Trough a generation of filmmakers who cannot necessarily look to the past for the same kind of inspiration, her article allows us to rethink our own relationship to Hollywood's own history.