Film Screenings / Programs / Retrospectives
SKIP NORMAN: HERE AND THERE
January 19 – January 24
January 19-24, 2024
American filmmaker, cinematographer, photographer, visual anthropologist, and educator Skip Norman (aka Wilbert Reuben Norman Jr.) was born in Baltimore. In 1966 – following five years in Germany and Denmark, where he developed an interest in acting and directing alongside his studies dedicated to the German language and literature – he was accepted into the inaugural cohort of students at Berlin’s DFFB Film School. While there he befriended and worked alongside a group of artists and activists interested in the revolutionary potential of film, including Harun Farocki, Holger Meins, Helke Sander, and Gerd Conradt.
In addition to collaborating as cinematographer and assistant director on several of his classmates’ works, Norman authored a remarkable but little-seen body of documentary, experimental, and essay films in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Building upon and contributing to the incendiary work of his peers decrying the US war in Vietnam, he produced a number of equally urgent films about his experience as a Black man in both West Germany and in his home country. Upon his subsequent return to the United States, he continued to collaborate with notable filmmakers like Haile Gerima while further pursuing his interest in photography, both as an artistic practice and as the subject of his doctoral studies, before eventually teaching the craft in Cyprus.
While there have been selected presentations of Norman’s films in Germany in recent years, his work remains less known abroad. Featuring premieres of new restorations and newly produced subtitles, “Skip Norman: Here and There” is the first U.S. retrospective to explore Norman’s multifaceted, international career, bringing his practice as a filmmaker in dialogue with his work as a cinematographer and bridging his time on both sides of the Atlantic.
“Skip Norman: Here and There” has been guest-curated by Jesse Cumming, who wrote the series description above, as well as the individual program descriptions. The series is co-presented with the German Film Office, an initiative of the Goethe-Institut and German Films.
Special thanks to Hanife Aliefendioglu; Mirra Bank; Jesse Cumming; Greg de Cuir Jr.; Ismail Gökçe; Karina Griffith; Anke Hahn & Masha Matzke (Deutsche Kinemathek); Alexis Norman; Volker Pantenburg (Harun Farocki Institut); Joanna Raczynska; Josh Siegel (MoMA); Sara Stevenson (German Film Office); and Alexandra Symons-Sutcliffe.
A selection of the newly restored films will be presented at The Museum of Modern Art on Thursday, January 18, as part of “To Save and Project: The 20th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation”; for more info visit: https://www.moma.org/calendar/film
In addition, on Saturday, January 20, the German Film Office will host a free public program entitled “Skip Norman in Relation” at the Goethe-Institut New York, organized and presented by Greg de Cuir Jr, the co-founder and artistic director of Kinopravda Institute (Belgrade, Serbia). Select screenings of Norman’s films will be complemented by talks from a panel of experts dealing with key themes that connect Norman’s work with a wider aesthetic and cultural context. For more info visit: https://www.germanfilmoffice.us
PROGRAM 1: THE DFFB YEARS
Produced between 1966 and 1969, these early student films range from deconstructed narratives and deceptive agit-prop to experimental essays, revealing not only the protean, multifaceted style of the young Norman, but an incendiary conceptual throughline that would inform later self-authored projects and collaborations, including a commitment to social justice and critiques of hypocritical liberalism. Both CULTURAL NATIONALISM and STRANGE FRUIT take explicit inspiration from the Black Panther Party, the former borrowing a Bobby Seale text that mounts an adroit challenge to counterrevolutionary “Black Capitalism”, the latter expanding upon documentation of a Seale speech in Copenhagen to illustrate and amplify the activist’s message. Wedding nonfiction with noir-tinged narrative, featuring Norman in a small role, the mostly wordless debut RIFFI is an ambitious, cryptic reflection on the act of pursuit whether in the context of romance or violence. Directly inspired by Amiri Baraka’s 1963 analysis of “Negro Music in White America”, the experimental BLUES PEOPLE boldly confronts and challenges the dynamics of fetishization, holding up a mirror not only to anti-Black racism in the United States but Germany in a pointed deconstruction of desire and dominance. As a prelude, the program features a fleeting glimpse of Norman captured on the streets of Berlin by friend Ingrid Opperman.
SKIP NORMAN, WEST-BERLIN, CA. 1969-70 courtesy Ingrid Opperman. All other films courtesy Deutsche Kinemathek.
Ingrid Opperman SKIP NORMAN, WEST-BERLIN, CA. 1969-70 ca. 1969-70, 1 min, 8mm-to-digital, silent
Skip Norman CULTURAL NATIONALISM 1969, 11 min, 16mm-to-digital
Skip Norman STRANGE FRUIT 1969, 29 min, 16mm-to-digital
Skip Norman RIFFI 1966, 16 min, 16mm-to-digital. In English & German with English subtitles.
Skip Norman BLUES PEOPLE 1969, 18 min, 16mm-to-digital
Total running time: ca. 80 min.
Fri, Jan 19 at 7:30 and Mon, Jan 22 at 7:30. The screening on Fri, Jan 19 will be introduced by Greg de Cuir Jr, co-founder and artistic director of Kinopravda Institute in Belgrade.
PROGRAM 2: 1 BERLIN-HARLEM
One of the final projects Norman contributed to in Germany before his return to the United States was also among the most notable, working as cinematographer alongside Reza Dabui for the underground feature 1 BERLIN-HARLEM. Written and directed by German filmmakers Lothar Lambert and Wolfram Zobus, this subversive, prickly satire features cameos and small roles by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and members of his regular coterie – including Ingrid Caven and Brigitte Mira. The plot begins as Black American GI John (played by actual army man Conrad Jennings) completes his service, whereupon attempts to settle into a professional life in Berlin with his white German partner are shortly frustrated by racist aggressions both subtle and overt. What follows is a drift through the fringes of the city’s outsider and subcultures – including queer cruising spots and Berlin’s “Black Panther Solidarity Committee” – in which fleeting moments of tenderness and sincerity prove less common than crass fetishization and brazen bigotry. Echoing the pointed critique of race relations of Norman’s earlier BLUES PEOPLE, 1 BERLIN-HARLEM offers a complex portrayal of social alienation and abuse, as well as the internalization and eventual response to such violence.
Lothar Lambert & Wolfram Zobus
1 BERLIN-HARLEM
1974, 100 min, 16mm-to-digital. In English and German with English subtitles. Directors of Photography: Skip Norman & Reza Dabui. Courtesy Deutsche Kinemathek.
Sat, Jan 20 at 7:30.
PROGRAM 3: COLLABORATIONS
The students accepted alongside Skip Norman as part of the inaugural DFFB cohort in 1966 include some of West Germany’s most notable post-war political filmmakers, including Harun Farocki, Helke Sander, Hartmut Bitomsky, and later Red Army Faction radical Holger Meins. Deeply collaborative in nature, with a political alignment that extended from the classroom to the streets, the work the cohort produced rallied against the injustices they saw around them, as well as a German citizenry seemingly unconcerned with their status quo. Just as his peers and classmates supported Norman on his own productions (including Meins as cinematographer and Gerd Conradt as assistant cinematographer on RIFFI), in these films Norman contributed his own talent and vision as a cameraman to the work of his colleagues.
The films in this program evidence a shared commitment to both political radicalism and formal experimentation coursing through the work of the cohort. The selections range from the feminist cri de coeur of Helke Sander’s SUBJECTITUDE to the anti-Vietnam war censure of Harun Farocki’s WHITE CHRISTMAS, to the urgent but little-seen BERLIN – 2. JUNI 67 by Thomas Giefer and Hans-Rüdiger Minow, capturing that day’s mass protests against Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi’s visit to West Berlin, which culminated in an epoch-defining shooting of student Benno Ohnesorg.
All films courtesy Deutsche Kinemathek.
Helke Sander SUBJECTITUDE / SUBJEKTITÜDE 1966, 4 min, 16mm-to-digital. In German with English subtitles. Assistant Director of Photography: Skip Norman.
Helke Sander SILVO 1967, 11 min, 16mm-to-digital. In German with English subtitles. Assistant Director of Photography: Skip Norman.
Harun Farocki WHITE CHRISTMAS 1968, 3 min, 16mm-to-digital. In German with English subtitles. Director of Photography: Skip Norman.
Harun Farocki THEIR NEWSPAPERS / IHRE ZEITUNGEN 1968, 17 min, 16mm-to-digital. In German with English subtitles. Director of Photography: Skip Norman.
Thomas Giefer & Hans-Rüdiger MinowBERLIN – 2. JUNI 671967, 45 min, 16mm-to-digital. In German with English subtitles. Director of Photography: Skip Norman.
Total running time: ca. 85 min.
Sun, Jan 21 at 4:00.
PROGRAM 4: PERFORMANCES
This program offers two performance-oriented projects shot by Norman in his years working as an independent cameraman. Filmed in West Berlin, WARM-UPS, by the American conceptual artist Allan Kaprow, is a recreation of a performance originally enacted in Boston, in which individuals assess the flow of body heat from hands, torsos, and feet to adjacent surfaces. As the film’s voiceover itself notes, “Using words and pictures it condenses the times and spaces of the real event into a graphic illustration of what happened.” A decade later, Norman acted as the cinematographer on New York film director Mirra Bank’s SPIRIT TO SPIRIT, an experimental (auto-)portrait of and collaboration with the legendary American poet and musician Nikki Giovanni. Structured around footage of the performer alone on a soundstage, the film finds Giovanni commanding the Norman-helmed camera while detailing moments from her childhood, her experience of the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and more, including her thoughts on the art of poetry. Interwoven throughout, alongside expertly deployed archival material, she recites some of her most acclaimed compositions, including “Nikki-Rosa” and “Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day”, each revealing the artist’s superlative command of language and protean approach to form, one that moves effortlessly from the coy, to the incensed, to the sorrowful – at times within the same work. The skill she displays in her craft is here mirrored in Norman’s subtle approach to light and color, which elevates Giovanni’s one-of-a-kind wit and charisma to the level of a silver screen icon.
Allan Kaprow
WARM-UPS
1975, 14 min, 16mm-to-digital. Director of Photography: Skip Norman. Produced by Deutscher Akadamemischer, Austauschdienst (DAAD). © Allan Kaprow Estate. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.
Mirra Bank
SPIRIT TO SPIRIT: NIKKI GIOVANNI
1986, 29 min, 16mm-to-DCP. Director of Photography: Skip Norman; Producers: Mirra Bank & Perrin Ireland. Restoration of this film was made possible by The Academy Film Archive and the Women’s Film Preservation Fund, with support from the Leon Levy Foundation. Screening courtesy of Mirra Bank.
Total running time: ca. 50 min.
Sun, Jan 21 at 6:15.
PROGRAM 5: THE INDEPENDENT YEARS
Upon completion of his degree with the DFFB, Norman undertook a series of projects that extended the concerns of his student work into even more rigorous and intellectual terrain, with a series of essay films that brought a Marxist, structuralist critique to issues of Black disenfranchisement in both the United States and Africa.
ON AFRICA emerged out of a trip Norman took to West Africa in the late 1960s. Contrasting footage of Berlin – notably the site of the 1884 conference that divided the African continent among European powers – with archival colonial photography and details of its brutality, it later incorporates striking still photographs Norman captured in his travels. His grounds-eye view is paired with a voice-over detailing the operation of neocolonial banking structures, mining, and other means of continued exploitation. Initially produced as one film before it was separated for distribution, WASHINGTON D.C. NOVEMBER 1970 and BLACK MAN’S VOLUNTEER ARMY OF LIBERATION take stock of the nation’s capital early in a new decade. The former contrasts a compendium of notable Black and abolitionist figures and American wars with speakers outside a Black Panther Party registration center, while the latter examines a mutual aid network established in D.C. to support drug users, while deconstructing the issue’s root cause.
All films courtesy Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst e.V.
Skip Norman
ON AFRICA
1970, 35 min, 16mm-to-digital. In German with English subtitles. Co-written by Joey Gibbs.
Skip Norman
WASHINGTON D.C. NOVEMBER 1970
1970, 18 min, 16mm-to-digital
Skip Norman
BLACK MAN’S VOLUNTEER ARMY OF LIBERATION
1970, 43 min, 16mm-to-digital
Total running time: ca. 100 min.
Sun, Jan 21 at 8:00 and Wed, Jan 24 at 7:30.
PROGRAM 6: WILMINGTON 10 — U.S.A. 10,000
While living in Washington, D.C., Norman made the acquaintance of legendary Ethiopian filmmaker Haile Gerima, eventually leading to his role as cinematographer on Gerima’s feature documentary WILMINGTON 10 — U.S.A. 10,000. Centered on the wrongful 1972 imprisonment of nine men and one woman from the North Carolina city – then still incarcerated on trumped up charges of arson and conspiracy – the film traces both the background of the accusations and the groundswell of national and international support calling for their release. Boldly nonlinear in its assemblage and expansive in scope, the film connects the prisoners’ plight with the 1898 Wilmington Massacre, an unfinished civil rights movement, and contemporary liberation movements stretching from Chile to South Africa, interweaving interviews with members of the jailed group and fellow political prisoner Assata Shakur with an intergenerational symphony of voices from Wilmington locals – giving notable space to reflections of the community’s Black women. As with several of Norman’s own projects, the result is cumulative, chorus-like, and vivid, effortlessly locating intimate details within a macro understanding and critique of racist systems and structures.
Haile Gerima
WILMINGTON 10 — U.S.A. 10,000
1979, 120 min, 16mm-to-DCP. Director of Photography: Skip Norman. Restored by the Academy Film Archive. Screening courtesy of Haile Gerima and Merawi Gerima.
Tues, Jan 23 at 7:30.
