Previous Mellon Collaborative Fellowship
Experimental Cinema and Speculative Approaches to the Archive and Media Histories
In Fall 2022, filmmaker Christopher Harris and University of Chicago scholar Allyson Nadia Field began a collaborative and creative engagement with issues of film materiality, loss, fragmentation, opacity, erasure, silencing, and survival within African American film and media history.
Recent years have seen the flourishing of work by experimental filmmakers that imaginatively engages with absences in the historical record, especially around the visual history of African Americans. How might scholarship adapt methodologies from these creative practices? How can scholarly methods, in turn, inform art making (as the formation of another kind of history)? Through their Fellowship, Christopher Harris and Allyson Nadia Field investigated these questions through—and against—African American media history’s precarious archival condition.
Both Harris and Field, in different forms, have long been engaged with the archive—both present and overwhelmingly absent—of African American film and media history. Field’s Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity (Duke University Press, 2015) concerns entirely nonextant film and includes a “manifesto” for finding presence in absence. She is currently working on a project on the “speculative archive,” an extension of the manifesto that aims to explore experimental methodologies for approaching archival absence in Black film history. Harris’s filmmaking practice has been invested with the medium’s materiality, zones of display and opacity, and racialized regimes of the gaze. His work engages an expansive conception of the archive, where objects, artifacts and images are placed into new temporal and spatial relations to one another. Currently, he’s investigating the dialectical relationship between the cinematic apparatus and the carceral apparatus in a project on carcerality and archival audio and moving images.
Course
Cinema and the Speculative Archive: Theory & Practice Seminar
Spring 2024
CMST 39000
Recent years have seen the flourishing of work by experimental filmmakers that imaginatively engages with absences in the historical record, especially around the visual history of African Americans. How might scholarship adapt methodologies from these creative practices? How can scholarly methods, in turn, inform art making (as the formation of another kind of history)? Engaging theory and practice, this course investigates these questions through—and against—African American media history’s precarious archival condition.
Fellows
Christopher Harris
Christopher Harris makes films and video installations that read African American historiography through the poetics and aesthetics of experimental cinema. Often drawing on archival sounds and images, his work features staged re-enactments, hand-cranked cameras, rear-projection, close-focus cinematography, re-photography, photochemical manipulations, and screen captured video, among other strategies. Like his production techniques, his influences—among them Black literature, various strains of North American avant-garde film, and most significantly, all forms of Black music—are eclectic. Working through incongruity and slippages, between sound and image, between past, present and future, and between absence and presence, his films, like the music from which they take inspiration, embody the existential complexities and paradoxes of racialized identity in the U.S.
His current project is a series of optically printed 16mm experimental films in conversation with canonical works of African American literature. His films have appeared widely at festivals, museums and cinematheques, including solo screenings at the 2024 Whitney Biennial, Tate Modern, TIFF Lightbox, the Museum of Modern Art, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, the Locarno Film Festival, and Arsenal Berlin, a two-person screening with Su Friedrich at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, and group screenings at the New York Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and the BlackStar Film Festival, among many others.
Harris is the recipient of a 2025 United States Artists Fellowship, a 2023-24 Andrew Mellon Collaborative Fellowship for Arts Practice and Scholarship from the University of Chicago’s Gray Center for the Arts, the 2023 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts in Film/Video, a 2020–2021 fellowship at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and a 2015 Creative Capital Award. Christopher Harris is Professor of Visual Arts at Princeton University. Prior to Princeton, Harris taught at the University of Iowa, where he was the F. Wendell Miller Associate Professor in film and video production, and at the University of Central Florida.
ALLYSON NADIA FIELD
Allyson Nadia Field , Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies and the College, University of Chicago.
Allyson Nadia Field’s scholarship contributes to evolving areas of study that investigate the functioning of race and representation in interdisciplinary contexts surrounding cinema. Her primary research interest is in African American film, both silent era cinema and more contemporary filmmaking practices, and is unified by two broad theoretical inquiries: how film and visual media shape perceptions of race and ethnicity, and how these media have been and can be mobilized to perpetuate or challenge social inequities. Her work is grounded in sustained archival research, integrating that material with concerns of film form, media theory, and broader cultural questions of representation. She is the author of Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film & The Possibility of Black Modernity (Duke University Press, 2015) and, with Jan-Christopher Horak and Jacqueline Stewart, co-editor of L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema (University of California Press, 2015).