As a prelude to the Anthology Film Archives retrospective opening on January 19, To Save and Project pays tribute to the writer, director, cinematographer, and visual anthropologist Skip Norman (aka Wilbert Reuben Norman Jr.) (1933–2015) with new restorations of his work spanning two decades, from 1966 to 1986. These programs testify to the singular talents and unique experiences of a Black American artist who lived and worked in the US and West Germany in the late 1960s and 1970s, making still-powerful and provocative films like Blues People (1969) and Strange Fruit (1969), and collaborating with Helke Sander, Lothar Lambert, Harun Farocki, Mirra Bank, and the poet Nikki Giovanni on films that remain politically charged to this day. As Jesse Cumming, the curator of the Skip Norman retrospective, notes, “Norman was a member of the inaugural cohort of students at Berlin’s DFFB Film School, where he befriended and worked alongside a group of artists and activists interested in the revolutionary potential of film. In addition to collaborating as a cinematographer and assistant director on the work of these classmates, Norman authored a remarkable but little-seen body of documentary, experimental, and essay filmmaking in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Building upon and contributing to the incendiary work of his peers decrying the US war in Vietnam and racism back home, Norman produced a number of equally urgent films about his experience as a Black artist inhabiting, and observing, a double life on both sides of the Atlantic."
Strange Fruit. 1969. West Germany. Directed by Skip Norman. 29 min.
Ihre Zeitungen (Their Newspapers). 1968. West Germany. Directed by Harun Farocki. Cinematography by Skip Norman. In German; English subtitles. 17 min.
2K digital restorations courtesy Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek (Berlin). North American premiere.
Spirit to Spirit: Nikki Giovanni. 1986. USA. Directed by Mirra Bank. Cinematography by Skip Norman. Digital restoration by the Academy Film Archive and the Women’s Film Preservation Fund, with support from the Leon Levy Foundation; courtesy Nobody’s Girls, Inc. New York premiere. 29 min.
“Skip Norman’s Strange Fruit combines archival footage of the West Berlin periphery with his recording of a speech by the Black Panther Bobby Seale in Copenhagen. Skillfully weaving performance footage with evocative photo-montage, archival footage, and animation, Mirra Bank’s Spirit to Spirit: Nikki Giovanni offers a compelling interpretation of Giovanni’s concerns. Shot by Skip Norman, the experimental (auto)-portrait is a precious record not only of the poet’s commanding performances but also of her childhood memories, her civil rights activism, and her fight against the war in Vietnam. Both films—with their emphasis on the voices of two charismatic and influential figures of Black American history and letters—are set against Harun Farocki’s Ihre Zeitungen, a film shot by Norman that fiercely interrogates the warmongering of newspaper magnate Axel Springer through his tabloid Bild-Zeitung ” (Jesse Cumming).
Program 75 min.