16mm film

It can be a tricky business putting one’s own life on the screen, but for over 40 years, the filmmaking duo of Camille Billops and James V. Hatch have used personal documentaries to explore what it means to be an artist, a woman, and an African-American in this complex land called the United States. The lens of these films have focused primarily on Billops’ life and family. Although these films explore difficult and painful social and political issues, they are marked by humor, enormous inventiveness and a deep and genuine love.

Drawing from Billops’ training as a sculptor, printmaker and book illustrator and Hatch’s experience as a theater historian/director, together they have made multilayered “documentary” films that deploy dramatizations and a touch of surrealism. In this Master Class, Billops and Hatch will talk about their filmmaking process - “building” a film using diverse media and narrative devices -- family pictures, home movies, drawings, staged theatrical sequences and singing performances. They will also talk about how to keep a critical perspective when the artist is author, subject and object.

Presented in partnership with Film @ International House, The Film & Media Arts Department at Temple University, Swarthmore College, and Cinema Studies at The University of Pennsylvania

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Participants will shoot a silent project as a group while learning basic 16mm (Bolex) camera operation techniques, operation of light meters, lighting for film and editing on Scribe’s Steenbeck flatbed film editor. Each participant will also have the opportunity to shoot a 100-ft roll of 16mm film. Additional workshop hours will be required for production and editing exercises.

For more information, please call 215-222-4201 or register online now.

Presented in partnership with Film at International House, Philadelphia Independent Film & Media Association (PIFVA), and the Film and Media Arts Department at Temple University; the Africana Studies and Cinema Studies at University of Pennsylvania and Reelblack members

Frequently basing a work on archival or found footage, Kevin Jerome Everson "resurrects the conditions, tasks, and gestures of a vital moment in time by repositioning them in the present through a variety of mediums such as photography, film, sculpture, artist books, and paintings."

Everson's films combine scripted and documentary moments with rich elements of formalism. His most recent films - shot in single eleven-minute takes on 16mm film - use light flares, over exposed film, and distorted sound to render visible the materiality of film stock and videotape.

Join us for this special presentation in which Everson discusses how he creates his works that document and reflect on the "gestures or tasks caused by certain conditions in the lives of working class African Americans." Everson will screen a selection of his recent short films. Films courtesy of the artist and Picture Palace Pictures.

Register for workshop now: