Happy Birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. (aka MLK Day in the USA).
On Sunday, January 23, 2022 (1:30pm) the mostly-annual “Orphans at MoMA” screening returns to the Museum of Modern Art’s To Save and Project, International Festival of Film Preservation. More on that in the next post. For now we can note that among the 14 short films on display will be outtakes from a 1973 Turkish documentary about James Baldwin and three recently preserved very early silent films (1898, 1902) documenting African American performers and communities.
The 2022 TSP festival opened with the Academy Film Archives restoration of Haile Gerima’s documentary Wilmington 10 – USA 10,000 (1979) and a live discussion with Gerima and Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis Jr., the lead figure in the case of the so-called Wilmington 10. As a young man, Chavis was an assistant to Dr. King. While leading civil rights protests in North Carolina in 1971, he and nine others were wrongfully convicted of setting fire to a white business. They were still in prison at the time of Gerima’s film, but Chavis v. North Carolina (1980) overturned the conviction and in 2012 the governor issued a “pardon of innocence” to the ten Black protestors.
Other new preservation work on Black cinema being highlighted at MoMA’s festival includes The Killing Floor (Bill Duke, US, 1984) and Suzanne Suzanne (James V. Hatch and Camille Billops, 1982). Recently restored films with Black directors and casts from Africa — Den Muso, aka The Young Girl (Souleymane Cissé, Mali, 1975) and Badou Boy (Djibril Diop Mambéty, Senegal, 1970) — are also part of the two-week festival.
MLK Day 2019 was also the day of the previous Orphans at MoMA TSP screening. Given the date, we shaped the variety program of shorts into one entitled “Beloved Community: Rarities of African American and LGBTQ Cinema—and More, highlights from the 2018 Orphan Film Symposium on Love. We added two pieces directly related to the holiday.
NYU student Brianna Jones introduced Martin Luther King on Voting (WIS-TV, 1966) from the University of South Carolina Moving Image Research Collections. “On May 9, 1966, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke in Kingstree, South Carolina” said the program notes, “urging residents to ‘march on ballot boxes’ in the upcoming election. Newsfilm from a Columbia television station, the 16mm original was preserved in 35mm by Monaco Film lab with audio restoration by Chace Audio for the Orphan Film Symposium. (The Monaco work was done by generous soul John Carlson. On King Day this week, Canyon Cinema posted the news of his very recent death.)
The other MLK piece was documentary material I read about in Simona Monizza’s report for Eye Netherland Filmmuseum about the discovery of footage in the Netherlands. Martin Luther King at Santa Rita [Peace Pickets, Original, fragment] (Leonard Henny, 1968). I then matched this short piece of film with audio from Pacifica Radio Archives, Martin Luther King at Santa Rita (KPFA-FM, 1968). The 23-minute program is here.
“For this screening only, a 16mm silent fragment from EYE is accompanied by non-synchronized audio recorded at the same place and time by KPFA radio,” I wrote at the time. “On January 14, 1968, Dr. King visited Joan Baez and others arrested for anti-war protests. He spoke to those keeping vigil outside. The film ends with David Harris (Baez’s husband) meeting King for the first time; KPFA captured their informal conversation at the same moment.” The Pacifica radio station broadcast the recording the next day — January 15th.
It struck me that his words were spoken the day before the last birthday he would live to see.
