Film Screening: South by South – Ja’Tovia Gary

Quiet As It’s Kept, 2023, (26min) is a contemporary cinematic response to The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison’s first novel, published in 1970. Set in Ohio in 1941, the book is an evocative illustration of the everyday particulars of colorism and its ravaging effects on the intramural. Themes of embodiment, psychoanalysis, and beauty are explored in both the source text and the answering film. Instinctual and eviscerating, the film encourages viewers to make meaning that is rooted in the subjective and examine their position within looking relations.

The film is an intimate collage of vintage Hollywood, direct animation, original super 8 and 16mm film footage, and documentary conventions. Meditating on the gaze and Black women’s particular embodied realities, Gary also re-contextualizes contemporary social media footage. Creating conceptual links for each viral clip to a character, event, or thematic element from Morrison’s story, the film emphasizes questions around the book’s themes of internalized and externalized anti-blackness in contemporary culture.

The Giverny Document, 2019, (single channel, 42min) is a multi-textured cinematic poem that meditates on the safety and bodily autonomy of Black women, filmed on location in Harlem, USA and in Claude Monet’s historic gardens in Giverny, France. Through audacious formal experimentation, filmmaker and artist Ja’Tovia Gary unleashes an arsenal of techniques and materials including direct animation on archival 16mm film, vox populi, and montage editing to explore the creative virtuosity of Black femme performance while interrogating the histories of those bodies and lives as spaces of forced labor and commodified production.

Content Warning: These films contains depictions and discussions of trauma, grief, and police violence

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