In 2014 the program Avant-Noir was first organised on the occasion of the Artist’s Film Biennial at Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. It was conceived to celebrate the work of artists active in this new century who are struggling for a new value and a new perspective placed on the black image in film and video art. These essential films and videos and the artists who created them are in some cases woefully underseen, in other cases known but not celebrated nearly enough.
The idea behind Affinities or The Weight of Cinema derives from Goethe’s classic 1809 novel Elective Affinities. The project, playfully adapting Goethe’s artistic-scientific theory of attractions to the practice of exhibiting experimental cinema, is presented in person by filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson and curator Greg de Cuir Jr, who serve as co-curators. Eight programs of international works of film and video art are arranged along various thematic lines that correspond to their shared interests and concerns.
Much critical attention to women’s avant-garde filmmaking of the 1970s and 1980s focused on East coast and European feminist filmmakers, the critique of visual pleasure and the notion of the male gaze in cinema. In San Francisco, a new generation of feminist avant-garde filmmakers were emerging with a very different approach to questions of gender and pleasure in cinema.
For the second installment of Eye on a Director, MAD highlights the collection of the legendary film distributor and archive Canyon Cinema. In the late 1950s, Canyon Cinema brought together independent film artists whose work reflected a remarkable diversity in style and content. Variously called avant-garde, underground and experimental, these artists shared a vision of filmmaking as a form of personal expression, free from the demands and constraints of commercial conventions.
Avant-Noir surveys contemporary work by moving image artists about African and African diaspora cultures. It is rare that we see Black bodies on screens at film festivals and exhibitions, perhaps even more rare when those images are created by Black artists.
