News Story

The center/archive was founded in 1981 by Phyllis R. Klotman, an IU archivist, film theorist, professor and dean for women’s affairs, who realized that historically essential and valuable film materials by and about Black Americans were being lost to a lack of preservation and resources. The center’s purpose was to give such material proper archival and preservatory treatment, and to serve as a repository for films and related media by Black filmmakers.

Klotman had a clear and elemental mission, Francis said: to collect, preserve and share Black film history. And thus the BFC/A got its dual name, an archive of important materials in Black film history and a center for them to be accessible.

“Phyllis turned Black film from something you would read about in books into a place that you could go,” Francis said.

And she was fond of giving things with multiple purposes multiple names. Klotman hosted workshop/festivals at the center/archive that invited West and East Coast filmmakers, including the likes of Bill Gunn and Kathleen Collins, to Southern Indiana to talk about their work.

As part of her vision for the BFC/A going forward, Francis said there’s more work to be done amplifying the scholarship of academics at IU whose work involves or is adjacent to the center. Francis said she’s also interested in looking at Klotman’s work to find material that can be reissued through IU Press.

“A lot of what we can do is be imaginative and creative in generating new relationships to the materials that we have, while at the same time we have good infrastructure for funding people to come visit and upkeeping the website,” she said.

Filipi also asked about the diversity of the center’s collections. Among them is the Richard E. Norman collection, which includes correspondence, publicity materials, posters, fiscal statements, photographs and more. Norman was a white southerner who initially made small-scale films with white casts and crews, but switched to making race films (a term applied at the time to movies shot with an all-Black cast and intended for all-Black audiences) because of the untapped market of Black film audiences and performers who were unable to act in mainstream films at the time.

The center also has special collections with materials relating to Bridgett Davis, director of “Naked Acts”; William Moore, the first Black composer credited on an animated film; Jessie Maple, the first Black woman admitted to the cinematographers’ union; and more.

The first feature-length drama directed by a Black woman since the 1920s, “Losing Ground” follows a philosophy professor researching so-called ecstatic experiences and her struggles navigating that research, and the fact that everyone arounds her seems to be in the midst of their own ecstatic experiences as her life remains stagnant and confusing.

For her short film, “An Ecstatic Experience,” Gary wanted to extrapolate that core idea of the film and make it into a personal reflection. The film, like much of Gary’s work, mixes repurposed archival footage (here painstakingly hand-scratched) with documentary practice and digital abstractions.

Part of her inspiration came from a summer of protests after one of countless killings of unarmed Black Americans by police.

“I can’t even tell you who it was,” she said. “But we were in the streets.”

It was important to Gary to render that experience on film: “to me that felt like ecstasy,” she said.

“Losing Ground,” beyond the purely wonderful merits of its involving narrative and aesthetic stylings, was an incredibly important film for Francis, too.

“It’s probably that film that started to clue me in to how movies are found, lost and found again,” she said.

“Losing Ground” was never released theatrically. It played only in the film festival circuit during the lifetime of its director, who died in 1988 at the age of 46; she never saw it attain its current status as a widely loved and celebrated work.

In 2015, it was restored by Collins’ daughter Nina and reissued. The restoration screened at Film Society of Lincoln Center, bringing it new critical and popular interest. In 2020, “Losing Ground” was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress on the grounds of historical, cultural or aesthetic significance.

“Losing Ground” offers its own unique avenue to think about film presentation, Francis said. There’s work that has to be done to preserve a film physically, but there’s also imaginative work in presentation, in considering where and how to best appreciate a work.

For Gary, having her own film shown in conversation with Collins’ is always a humbling experience.

“I wanted to contend with the idea of chasing ecstasy as well, but in my own context,” she said. “In a way, my essay film is in itself a kind of dissertation.”

In addition to “An Ecstatic Experience,” Gary is also director of “Giverny Document: Single Channel,” a meditative and formally diverse documentary that blends documentary and borrowed footage with digital abstraction on a larger scale. It features on-the-street interviews conducted by Gary in which Black women meditate on the idea of safety, interspersed with footage of Nina Simone, a Black woman wandering around Monet’s garden and the aftermath of the police killing of Philando Castile.