The Clark Honors College’s Equity, Justice and Inclusion visiting fellow Dr. Artel Great will deliver a lecture on African Americans and the film industry. Great, an Independent Spirit Award-nominated filmmaker and a scholar of Black cinema and media culture, is the George and Judy Marcus endowed chair in African-American Cinema Studies and assistant professor of Critical Studies at San Francisco State University.  His appearance is co-sponsored by CHC and the Division of Equity and Inclusion.

As an Honors College fellow, Great is teaching a course this term that actively explores the hidden histories of Black cinema in the United States. Since the very beginning of motion pictures, the film industry has generated a catalog of tropes, caricatures, and grotesque depictions that have relegated Black bodies to the margins of the film frame. Despite these constraints, Black filmmakers have managed to forge major innovations in the cinematic arts for nearly 127 years. His course analyzes a range of feature films, both documentary and narrative, that highlight the intellectual history, aesthetic practices, and cultural politics of Black-American cinema, examining how these films have managed to forecast, initiate, and visualize social change in a wide variety of contexts.