Contact information
Name:
Katherine Groo
Phone:
610-330-3219
Email:
grook@lafayette.edu
Categories:
When:
Thursday, September 13, 2018 - 4:15pm - 6:15pm
Where:
Landis Cinema, Buck Hall - 219 N. 3rd St.
Presenter:
Professor Samantha Sheppard, Performing and Media Arts, Cornell University
Price:
Free
Please join us for the first event in the Film and Media Studies speaker series this fall:
Professor Samantha Sheppard, Performing and Media Arts, Cornell University
“The Revolt of the Cinematic Black Athlete”
To understand the revolt of the cinematic Black athlete, it is critical to set the scene for and unpack the staging of one of the most popular and pivotal spectacles of Black resistance in sports history: US sprinters and medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos’ Black Power salute at the 1968 Summer Olympic Games in Mexico City. Smith and Carlos’ protest provides a historical grounding and critical entryway into how Haile Gerima’s 1971 experimental film Hour Glass (made at UCLA during the “L.A. Rebellion”) pictorializes a revolt of the Black athlete. Drawing on Trinh T. Minh-ha’s notion of “bold omissions and minute depictions,” Sheppard argues that Gerima culls the history of Smith and Carlos’ protest, (re)locating the revolutionary imagery and sounds of 1968 into Hour Glass.
Prof. Sheppard received her bachelor’s degree in Film & Television Studies and Women and Gender Studies from Dartmouth College and her master’s degree and doctorate in Cinema and Media Studies from University of California, Los Angeles. She also holds a graduate certificate in Women’s Studies from UCLA’s Department of Gender Studies. Prof. Sheppard is the co-editor of From Madea to Media Mogul: Theorizing Tyler Perry (University Press of Mississippi, 2016). Her published and forthcoming essays appear in several journals and anthologies, including: Cinema Journal, Film Quarterly, Journal of Sports History,Journal of Sport and Social Issues, L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema, TV Memories: Love Letters to Our Television Past, Race and the Revolutionary Impulse in The Spook WhoSat by the Door, and Black Camera. Dr. Sheppard writes extensively on Black cultural production and production cultures. She is currently working on a manuscript titled Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen.
Sponsored by:
Film and Media Studies