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"In his expansive new book The World of Black Film, author, programmer, and Criterion Collection Curatorial Director Ashley Clark embarks on a journey through cinematic Blackness, spanning more than one hundred years and 30 countries across 100 films. From groundbreaking silent cinema, such as Lime Kiln Club Field Day and the “race films” of Oscar Micheaux, to contemporary works by Mati Diop and Steve McQueen, with a revelatory outpouring of brilliant and frequently underappreciated films in between from all over the globe, The World of Black Film is an entertaining, thorough, and thought-provoking analytical survey of a cinematic universe too often, as Clark writes, “underfunded, overlooked, and marginalized in mainstream film discourse.”
We’re pleased to welcome Clark to the Museum to present two films in surprising and unusual concert with one another: the American studio production The Wiz and the Mauritanian-French-Algerian coproduction West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty. Both are musicals made in the late 1970s, and though they couldn’t be more different in historical meaning, concept, craft, and setting, each was, in its own industry, a mega-budgeted film told through song, and both have stood the test of time as a singular representation of Black expression and individuality. We are also presenting the Sun Ra cult Afrofuturist classic Space Is the Place, another unorthodox seventies music experience."–Musem of the Moving Image