Courses

 

Master Class with Sonia Sanchez and Nadine Patterson:     Spring into Being - Making Haiku into Short Films

5 Saturdays (2016)- May 7, 14, 21, 28, and June 4

TIME: May 7th- 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM; May 14th, 21st, 28th, and June 4 - 12:00 PM - 3:00 PM

Location(s): 

Scribe Video Center
4212 Chestnut Street, 3rd Fl
Philadelphia, PA 19104

Event Type: Master Classes

Instructors: Sonia Sanchez and Nadine Patterson

Learn the art of writing Haiku and then translate your poetry into a short film. Writer Sonia Sanchez will teach participants how to write a Haiku and filmmaker Nadine Patterson will teach camera and editing techniques to facilitate the creation of their films. Participants will work in teams to shoot/edit the videos and the last session will be a screening of the works.  Previous production experience is preferred.

Sonia Sanchez, poet, playwright, teacher, activist and spoken word artist, has raised her voice for Black culture, civil rights, women’s liberation and peace since emerging as a seminal figure of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s. Nadine Patterson is an award winning independent writer/producer/director.  Her films include Tango Macbeth was selected as part of the Africa Diaspora International Film Festival 2012 to 2013.  

BLACK FILM REVOLUTION: Then & Now          

“The whole idea of ART and the framework in which we judge art, has been hijacked in the service of profit. In the service of a system which will eat whatever creative, imaginative impulse that we have, it will eat it alive and spit it out, and discount it and everything else. That’s …the world we live in. And yet at the same time we have to filter through that as ARTISTS and find our own truth and our own sense of ourselves as human beings. ----Danny Glover

Course Aims: 

By analyzing the Black Film Movement as it relates to cinema in the United States and the United Kingdom, we can see how artists of the African Diaspora have been able to create a new cinema that centers the image of black and brown peoples and our stories. The critical and cultural success of these films puts the lie to the myth that Black Films are not something that domestic or international audiences want to see. Rather these are films that question the status quo, and shed light upon issues that cross race, gender, sexuality, class and ability. We will also look at how Afro-Latino cinema in the US and Indian cinema in the UK expands the idea and historiography of “Blackness”.

This one day workshop-lecture was originally conceived as a course to introduce participants to the breadth of Black Cinema over a period of one hundred plus years, 1913-2014.

The format is an open two-way conversation to allow for maximum participation. I projected the entire course outline on a large video screen. Class participants also follow on their laptops or mobile devices as I played various film clips and statistics.

We began by discussing the discovery of the reels from the earliest Black American feature film produced by Bert Williams (a successful actor/performer/producer of the era). The seven reels were not known of until now. The 1913 footage reveals an all black cast and is a strong counter to the narrative of D.W. Griffiths Birth of a Nation.

Each block in the Projqet format was a talking point that instructor and participants can view, select media from and comment on in any order they choose. The idea is to cover the various concepts presented in more of a conversational manner as opposed to a strait ahead lecture. [2018: Please note the Projeqt site is no longer active. I will create a Power Point version for future use.]

The workshop was sponsored by Griotworks and held November 8^th, 2014 at CultureWorks in Philadelphia.