Proctors and Union College Film Studies present: We Have Just Begun (2023)

Name: Proctors and Union College Film Studies present: We Have Just Begun (2023)
Start: 2025-02-25T19:00:00-05:00
Location: 432 State St, Downtown Schenectady, NY, United States, New York 12305

Schedule

Tue, 25 Feb, 2025 at 07:00 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

432 State St, Downtown Schenectady, NY, United States, New York 12305 | Schenectady, NY

Part of the short series: DECOLONIAL BEATS! featuring live score, narration, introduction and post-screening Q&A by the filmmakers!
Deep in the Arkansas Delta lies the legacy of the deadliest race or labor battle in American history: the 1919 Elaine Riot, Massacre, and Dispossession—hidden and obscured for over 100 years. The following account comes from the Arkansas Democrat Gazette: “On the night of Sept. 30, 1919, about 100 or more people, mostly Black sharecroppers who worked on the plantations of white landowners, gathered at a rural church. The purpose of the meeting, called by the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America, was to strategize about ways to obtain better prices and more reliable payment for their cotton crops from the white plantation owners. When a car with three white men pulled up to the church, shots were fired. Who fired first is disputed, but one of the white men was killed and another wounded. The next morning an estimated 500 to 1,000 white men armed themselves and descended on Elaine to put down an imagined insurrection. The official line was that a few dozen Black people were killed before order was restored. In reality, white mobs slaughtered many more. The Arkansas Legislature has officially acknowledged a death toll of between 100 and 237 Black people. Arkansas Gazette sales agent Sharpe Dunaway, an eyewitness to the massacre, put the death toll at 856. “We Have Just Begun” suggests the death toll may be even higher. “We Have Just Begun” tells this story economically, with restrained fierceness. It marshals the narration of its co-writer Tongo Eisen-Martin, a San Francisco-based poet, and some stunning animation based on archival photographs by director Michael Warren Wilson and music by Joshua Asante and Brandon Kendricks. Along with this retelling are the testimonies and arguments of many of the descendants of victims and survivors of the massacre, through which we catch a sidelong glimpse of how things have — and haven’t changed.” Not rated. 77 minutes.
ABOUT THE LIVE SCREENING
The screening will be introduced by the filmmakers and presented with live music and narration. Performers Joshua Asante and Tongo Eisen-Martin mix rehearsed sequences with improvisations—incorporating a greater and more generative range of references from the archive of testimonies, evidence and experiences the filmmakers encountered during the making and initial Arkansas exhibitions of the finished film. Each screening is a unique performance of images, sound and spoken word— embodying a database cinema approach to the experience.
KEY PERSONNEL IN ATTENDANCE
Co-Writer/Director/Producer: Michael Warren Wilson is a filmmaker and artist who was born in Arkansas, and graduated from Little Rock Central High and Hendrix College without learning about Elaine. Although his great-grandfather was a sharecropper in the Arkansas Delta in 1919, no family stories of the event exist. Wilson’s films, collaborative projects and multimedia art and initiatives have been exhibited at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, San Francisco Documentary Film Festival, Ars Electronica, Entermultimediale, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions and the Rotterdam Film Festival. His first feature documentary, “Silhouette City,” premiered in competition at the Miami International Film Festival, had a theatrical run, aired on the CBC, Russia Today, BBC and was featured at special screenings/panel discussions at Harvard, UCLA, UCSD, Pitzer College, UC Riverside and many other campuses. He has taught film, multimedia and art practice at Pitzer College, UC- Riverside, UC-Irvine, Otis College of Art, San Francisco Film School and Cal-Poly-Pomona. He holds an MFA from Yale School of Art.
Co-Writer/Co-Narrator/Producer: Tongo Eisen-Martin is the Poet Laureate of San Francisco, California. With roots in Clarksdale, Mississippi, he was born in San Francisco and earned his MA at Columbia University. He is the author of “someone’s dead already” (Bootstrap Press, 2015), nominated for a California Book Award; and “Heaven Is All Goodbyes” (City Lights, 2017), which received a 2018 American Book Award, a 2018 California Book Award, was named a 2018 National California Booksellers Association Poetry Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the 2018 Griffin International Poetry Prize. In their citation, the judges for the Griffin Prize wrote that Eisen-Martin’s work “moves between trenchant political critique and dreamlike association, demonstrating how, in the right hands, one mode might energize the other—keeping alternative orders of meaning alive in the face of radical injustice … His poems are places where discourses and vernaculars collide and recombine into new configurations capable of expressing outrage and sorrow and love.”
Composer/Sound Recordist: Joshua Asante is a multi-disciplinary artist who explores themes of identity and possibility from an Afrofuturist perspective. As a musician and composer, Asante describes his sound as “astral soul,” a blend of electronic and soul music that fuses many stylistic influences. Asante released two singles in 2021, a collection of 18 field recorded songs in 2022 and his debut full length album in 2023. His photographs and designs have found homes in both private and museum collections as well arts and news outlets The New York Times, The International Review Of African American Art, The Guardian, ProPublica, Objectiv, MSNBC, Oxford American, The Arkansas Times and others.
SPECIAL THANKS!
Proctors and Union College Film Studies wish to acknowledge the generous support of the Templeton Institute in making this event possible.