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 begin a collaborative and creative engagement with issues of film materiality, loss, fragmentation, opacity, erasure, silencing, and survival within African American film and media history.
As part of their Gray Center Fellowship, Allyson Nadia Field and Christopher Harris organized a film series through the University of Chicago's Film Studies Center titled The Speculative Archive. The series deepens the work of Field and Harris in relation to the foundational themes of their fellowship:
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 screenings and conversations with invited filmmakers, The Speculative Archive investigates these questions through-and against-African American media history’s precarious archival condition.
Upcoming events in the series can be found here.
An archive of the events in this series can be found here.
The series is made possible by the generous co-sponsorship of the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts & Inquiry, the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, Chicago Studies, the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture, the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, Department of Cinema and Media Studies, Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity, and the Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality.