Christopher Harris is an experimental filmmaker whose work both utilizes and subverts the grammars of documentary and narrative cinema, in pointed explorations of African American historiography and black aesthetics.

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.

Whether you call it collage, compilation, found footage, détournement, or recycled cinema, the incorporation of already existing media into new artworks is a practice that generates novel juxtapositions and new meanings and ideas, often in ways entirely unrelated to the intentions of the original makers.