In brief
Guest - Dr Susan Lord (Queen's University, Kingston)
Host - Dr Pasquale Iannone (University of Edinburgh)
Title - Appearances and Apparitions: The Black Subject in Sara Gómez’s documentaries
Series - Edinburgh Film Seminars
Abstract
by Susan Lord
Afro-Cuban filmmaker Sara Gómez passed away in 1974, leaving a legacy of cinematic inventions that centre women and the Black subject of Cuba in the 1960s.
A revolutionary, feminist, Black activist, Gómez’s documentaries are contributions to the discursive and visual repertoire of the Revolution.
In our book, The Cinema of Sara Gómez: Reframing Revolution (co-edited with María Caridad Cumaná) we attend to these themes, and at the Vulnerable Media Lab, we are restoring these documentaries.
In the process, we are having conversations about the forms of appearance, the emergence of a Black gaze, the shaping of the image by mould and neglect, and the relationships between competing histories of economy and ecology of the image.
This talk will take some of these ideas forward in an effort to think about a Black public sphere in the 1960s and for today.
About the speaker
Dr Susan Lord holds a PhD from York University. She is Professor in the Department of Film and Media at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada, and is the Director of the Vulnerable Media Lab.
Her research interests have landed in the areas of cinema and media arts, archives, gendered spaces and the city, and Cuban cinema and visual culture. She has undertaken curatorial projects of media arts and worked with artists’ groups and artist-run centres for over 30 years. The Vulnerable Media Lab is dedicated to the social ecology of media arts collectivesand collections, and to the preservation, migration and remediation of media arts archives by women, Indigenous peoples, LGBTQ2 and regional producers.
At present, the Vulnerable Media Lab is restoring all of Sara Gómez’s documentaries.
With Maria Caridad Cumaná, Susan is co-editor of a collection of essays, interviews and documents about the Afro-Cuban filmmaker Sara Gómez, The Cinema of Sara Gómez: Reframing Revolution, recently published with University of Indiana Press.
Other books include Killing Women: Gender, Violence and Representation (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006) on the visual culture of gender and violence, Fluid Screens: Expanded Cinema and Digital Cultures (University of Toronto Press, 2007) with Janine Marchessault, and New World Coming: The 1960s and the Shaping of Global Consciousness (Between The Lines, 2009).
Take me to the Vulnerable Media Lab website
About the series
Edinburgh Film Seminars is hosted by Film Studies at the University of Edinburgh and brings together world-leading academics within the field to discuss their research.
This event is hosted in collaboration with Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies (SPLAS) at the University of Edinburgh, Africa in Motion (AiM) and Havana Glasgow Film Festival (HGFF)
Africa in Motion Film Festival
How to join
Events are free and everyone is welcome. It will be held online using Zoom.
Registration on Eventbrite is required so that you can be sent joining instructions and links in advance.
If you have any queries, please email Dr Pasquale Iannone.
Are you interested in studying film at Edinburgh?
Exploring crucial concepts in the development of film theory and film-philosophy, one one-year taught Masters programme (MSc) centres on the criticism, analysis and interpretation of auteur cinema, with a focus on European and American film.
We also supervise PhD research in film theory, film-philosophy, various national cinemas, the work of individual filmmakers, and cinema in relation to other art forms.
