Black Film Center/Archive receives two grants for programming
The IU Black Film Center/Archive is the recipient of two grants that will support an ongoing preservation project and fund a two-day symposium on an early filmmaker.
The National Endowment for the Humanities grant of $150,000 will fund the Richard E. Norman and Race Filmmaking: Reprocessing and Digitization project, which will preserve more than 20,000 items from the archives of Richard E. Norman, a pioneer in development of films for African-American audiences.
This is the second year that the BFC/A won an NEH grant. Other IU projects to receive NEH grants in this round of awards include the development of a course on the meaning of play, a study course on contemporary religious traditions, preservation of sound recordings in the Archives of Traditional Music, and an individual project on Asian Americans and affirmative action.
The second of BFC/A’s grants is from IU’s Frontiers/New Currents program. The $20,000 grant will support a two-day symposium during fall semester called “From Cinematic Past to Fast Forward Present: D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation Centennial.” This marks the 100th anniversary of the release of the film, which was controversial for its depiction of African Americans and notable at that time for its use of camera techniques and narrative.