On Thursday, December 12 at 7:00 PM, Scribe Video Center, located at 3908 Lancaster Avenue, will present the Producers’ Forum screening of the “South Side Home Movie Project” — an initiative to collect, preserve, digitize, exhibit, and research home movies made by residents of Chicago’s South Side curated by Jacqueline Stewart.
Stewart is a professor in the department of cinema and media studies at the University of Chicago and the first African American host of Turner Classic Movies Channel’s 25-year-old “Silent Sunday Nights” programming block.
Candace Ming, project manager and archivist at University of Chicago, writes about the project in The Indiana University Press explaining that “these primary historical documents of family life and events in Chicago from the mid- to late twentieth century serve to illuminate and often correct the canonical historical record for both the way we think of amateur cinema and African American cinema practices.”
A Chicago native, Stewart is a three-term appointee to the National Film Preservation Board (NFPB), which advises the librarian of Congress on policy, and is the chair of the NFPB Diversity Task Force.
“The South Side Home Movie Project” grew from the notable absence of home movies in film scholarship and seeks to provide context and history for the historic neighborhood. The videos not only serve as art pieces but as historical documents that can play a role in understanding racial, cultural, and socioeconomic divides that have persisted for centuries. In this manner, the project is both a film preservation project and a visual history of Chicago’s South Side neighborhoods.
To date, they have collected about 200 films and are continuing to grow. The archive includes home movies shot on 8mm, Super8mm, and 16mm film.
“The South Side Home Movie Project is an effort to build an alternative visual archive of the South Side… It’s a project that’s really inspired by the belief that people have always documented their own lives in really intimate and powerful ways,” Stewart said.
Tickets are $10 for general admission, $8 for students and seniors, and $5 for Scribe members. They should be purchased in advance due to limited seating. For more information, please contact [email protected].
Film listings and screening schedules are available at www.scribe.org .
For more information about the project itself, visit: https://sshmp.uchicago.edu/.
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