Shorts Program 1

This collection of shorts journeys through Black memory, spirituality, and self-discovery. Drawing from folklore, Pan-African thought, blues traditions, and experimental cinema, these works explore how the Black identity was shaped through ancestral knowledge and collective remembrance.

From Zora Neale Hurston's early documentation of Southern Black life to Ben Caldwell's meditations on African consciousness, Oliver Franklin's search for Marcus Garvey, and Mike Henderson's blues cosmology, each film offers a pathway toward understanding the self in relation to history, community, and liberation.

I & I: An African Allegory (1979)
Dir. Ben Caldwell
32min; Digital

Directed, written, and produced by Caldwell, this experimental reflection on Ayi Kwei Armah’s novel Two Thousand Seasons revolves around divisions between people, posing a unifying concept of “I and I.”

In Search of Marcus Garvey (1981)
Dir. Oliver Franklin
29min; Digital

After a young psychologist finds critical materials concerning Marcus Garvey in a Philadelphia trash can, he embarks on a journey that unearths the lengthy history of one of Pan-Africanism’s most prominent voices.

Pitchfork and the Devil (1979)
Dir. Mike Henderson
16min; Digital

Perhaps best known for his rich, gestural paintings, Mike Henderson also delved into experimental filmmaking throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s, producing a series of musically-inclined short films. Pitchfork and the Devil, deemed “blues cinema” by Henderson (himself an accomplished blues guitarist), follows its titular character embroiled in trouble with the law.

Fieldwork Footage (1928)
Dir. Zora Neale Hurston
3min; Digital

The acclaimed author of Their Eyes Were Watching God spent nearly two years, under the tutelage of anthropologist Franz Boas, documenting the folkloric customs of southern African American communities in this early work of documentary film.