African-American Cinema: Then and Now
2 lecture/screenings by Richard Peña, Visiting Professor, University of Hong Kong
Parallel with its struggle to achieve full political rights, the US African-American community fought to make its image seen and its voices heard in that most dynamic of American art forms, the Hollywood cinema. For most people, even for dedicated cinephiles, the African-American cinema began with the first works in the 1980s of Spike Lee, John Singleton or Julie Dash. Some with longer memories might recall the films with stars such as Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte or Eartha Kitt from the 1950s. But in fact there has been an active African-American cinema since the silent era, a cinema produced by and for the African-American community and almost completely unknown to other Americans. These films included comedies, westerns, horror films, religious films and especially musicals; even when shot with minimal budgets, the best of these films exhibited impressive innovation, powerful social criticism and the development of a uniquely African-American film aesthetic. Even as we celebrate today the increasing participation of African Americans and other US minority communities in the film and television industries, the spirit of those early African-American independents continues to live on, offering a decidedly distinct perspective on life and society in the contemporary United States.
PROGRAM 1: Faded Glory: The First African-American Cinema, 1912-1952
Date:
October 22, 2025 (Wed)
Time:
3:00 - 5:30 PM
Venue:
RRS 321, 3/F, Run Run Shaw Building, Main Campus, HKU
For this illustrated lecture, Columbia University Professor Emeritus Richard Peña will trace a history of this little-known corner of American cinema, moving from the silent era to the movement’s high point in the 1930s, with clips from key films as well as a screening of Spencer Williams’ 1941 THE BLOOD OF JESUS (56 minutes), a work included in the US Library of Congress’s registry of the most significant works of American film art. Following that screening, Prof. Peña will offer a brief analysis of the film as well as address audience questions.
PROGRAM 2: RESIDUE, 2022, Merawi Gerima, 90 min
Date:
October 28, 2025 (Tues)
Time:
3:30 - 6:00 PM
Venue:
RRS 321, 3/F, Run Run Shaw Building, Main Campus, HKU
An aspiring filmmaker, Jay returns to his Washington DC neighborhood after years of being away, hoping to make a movie about the world in which he was raised. It soon becomes clear, however, that much of that world is gone: many of his childhood friends have become bitter middle-aged men, battered by the social and economic forces from which Jay had escaped years before. Moreover, the neighborhood has been “discovered,” with middle-class, mostly white homebuyers moving in, slowly forcing out the area’s longtime African-American residents. Few recent American films have had the courage to take on such a complex, sensitive political issue; even fewer have approached such subjects with the grace, insight, compassion and poetry as RESIDUE, the debut feature of native Washingtonian Merawi Gerima. Professor Peña will introduce the film and lead a post-screening discussion.
About Prof. Richard Peña
Richard Peña is an Emeritus Professor of Film and Media Studies at Columbia University, where he specialized in film theory and international cinema. From 1988 to 2012, he was the Program Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Director of the New York Film Festival. At the Film Society, Richard Peña organized retrospectives of many film artists, including Michelangelo Antonioni, Abbas Kiarostami, King Hu, Robert Aldrich, Roberto Gavaldon, Ritwik Ghatak, Kira Muratova, Youssef Chahine, Yasujiro Ozu, Carlos Saura, Nagisa Oshima and Amitabh Bachchan, as well as major film series devoted to African, Cuban, Polish, Hungarian, Spanish, Chinese, Hong Kong, Arab, Korean, Swedish, Turkish, and Argentine cinema. In 2009, Peña co-curated at Lincoln Center the largest exhibition of early African-American cinema ever organized. Together with Unifrance, Peña created Rendez-Vous with French Cinema in 1995, the largest showcase for contemporary French film in North America.
A frequent lecturer on film internationally, in 2014-2015, he was a Visiting Professor in Brazilian Studies at Princeton; in 2015-2016 a Visiting Professor in Film Studies at Harvard; and in 2022 a Visiting Professor in Art History at La Sorbonne. He has also taught courses at Beijing University, Gedai Art Institute (Tokyo), la Universidad de Cine (Buenos Aires), the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro, Universidad Católica de Chile, and the University of São Paulo. In May 2016, he was the recipient of the “Cathedra Bergman” award at UNAM in Mexico City, where he offered a three-part lecture series “On the Margins of American Cinema.” In 2024, he was the Walt Disney Professor of American Art and Culture at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and in Spring 2025 was a Visiting Professor at Georgetown University Qatar.