Film
The Pursuit of Vulnerability
- 7PM
Programmer: Ayanna Dozier
“The pursuit of vulnerability—the effort to remain open to at-risk bodies while possessing an at-risk body—is always marked by the certainty of death from exposure. And yet, it is a line of pursuit that we, as Black women, must maintain. What my interest in Ms. Morrison and Ms. Lorde’s words aims to examine is their very determined pursuits towards emotional and spiritual vulnerability as Black women in a world that reaps profit from the neglect, harm, and death of their at-risk bodies.”—Ayanna Dozier
Intro by Ayanna Dozier
Dirs. Ada Gay Griffin & Michelle Parkerson
1995, 80min
Audre Lorde—a self-described “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet”—speaks about her extraordinary life and career, from her fearless work advancing womanist and civil rights to her poetry, which gave voice to society’s most marginalized. As one of the first figures to argue for the importance of intersectional feminism, Lorde was an ahead-of-her-time thinker whose ideas resonate today as strongly as ever.
Dir. Michele Pearson Clarke
2014, 4min
With Audre Lorde acting as both subject and surrogate, All That is Left Unsaid is a daughter’s elegy for her mother. Both women lived with cancer for 14 years, and the absence of their wisdom, guidance, and love is experienced as an ongoing loss. This short experimental documentary reflects on all other Black women gone too soon, in contemplating this aspect of grief.
Ayanna Dozier is a filmmaker and performance artist. She is the author of a forthcoming volume in the 33 1/3 series on Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope and has written about Black feminist theory, cinema, and performance art for Cléo, Another Gaze, Feminist Media Studies, and Liquid Blackness Journal. Dozier is a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art and a Ph.D. candidate at McGill University, examining formal and narrative aesthetics in contemporary Black feminist experimental short films in her dissertation.
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