Allyson Nadia Field and Marsha Gordon, speakers
This program showcases a selection of 16 mm shorts produced between the 1940s and 1970s that engage with ideas about race, identity, and community outside mainstream theatrical cinema. Selections include educational films, home movies, industry and government films, student films, and anthropological films. From one of the earliest known film representations of a Japanese American cultural movement in the post-World War II era, to a Charles and Ray Eames film about the Day of the Dead, to a portrait of a young African American high schooler living in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles on the cusp of the 1965 rebellion, these films portray the lives of those who were mostly excluded from the commercial Hollywood movies of the same period. Allyson Nadia Field and Marsha Gordon, coeditors of Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film (Duke University Press, 2019), present the works. (Approximately 130 minutes)