Midwood Movie: The Origins of American Film and Dreams in Brooklyn
Thursday, September 26
11:00 AM to 12:30 PM
Woody Tanger Auditorium
Brooklyn College Library
Midwood Movie is a feature experimental documentary about both a Brooklyn, New York neighborhood and about motion pictures and their development. Shot over twelve years entirely on and around the former site of the American Vitagraph Company, which began producing silent films there in 1906, the film digs through layered histories, presenting an array of individual accounts of the site’s varied uses along with subjective appraisals of its importance. While excavating manifold media forms and formats, the film encounters artifacts and artists entangled in harm and intolerance. In so doing, Midwood Movie contextualizes media and its monuments as contested sites of memory, culture, and politics. Midwood Movie is the third film in a trilogy of “Midwood films” in which the director explores the possibilities for making discursive and material manifestations of culture and history present in media practice and place.
Join us for a conversation with New School Professor Melissa Freidling, the filmmaker; Brooklyn College Anthropology Professor Kelly Britt; and University of Indiana Professor Cara Caddo, whose work informs the film. Select clips of the film will be shown during the event.
To obtain a link and code that will allow you free access to the film from Sept. 12th to Sept. 26th, please email: wolfeinstitute@brooklyn.cuny.edu
Melissa Friedling, PhD, is Associate Professor of Filmmaking and Director of MA Media Studies at The New School. She is a film and media artist, scholar, and educator interested in the mediated jumble of human and more-than-human matter. Her creative work has been presented at numerous international festivals, screening venues, galleries and museums. She has been awarded fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo and the International Studio and Curatorial Program and is the recipient of a Fulbright Award and artist’s grants from the NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music and Theatre, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the New York State Council for the Arts. Her writing on film, art, and culture has been published widely including essays in Journal of Environmental Media, Portable Gray, Flash Art International, Afterimage, and Discourse and a book, Recovering Women: Rhetoric, Feminisms, and Addiction (Westview Press, 2000). She lives in Brooklyn and is an Associate Professor of Filmmaking at The New School in New York City.
Cara Caddoo is an Associate Professor of History and Cinema & Media Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. She researches, writes, and teaches about film, media, and social movements in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American history. Her first book Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life (Harvard University Press) was a Huffington Post “Best Film Book" selection, a Slate “Great Books You Should’ve Heard About” choice, a recipient of the 2015 biennial Vincent P. De Santis Prize for the best book on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and a finalist for the Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Book Prize. She is currently writing a history of early Native American filmgoing and exhibition, as well as a biography of the actor, writer, and film producer Noble Johnson.
Kelly M. Britt is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology (Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY) as well as the Director of the Center for Brooklyn and Chair of the Museum and Cultural Organizational Studies minor (Brooklyn College). Her collaborative projects are located in urban settings and focus on gentrification, climate change, and trauma. She also works in a collective of anthropologists exploring COVID-19 materiality as a response to trauma, and with the Van Cortlandt Park archaeological legacy/orphaned collection from the NYC’s LPC’s Archaeological Repository: The Nan Rothschild Research Center. These research themes are highlighted in her writing, including her latest co-edited volume on Archaeology and Advocacy: Urban Intersections that was published in the spring of 2023.
Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life by
Viewing turn-of-the-century African American history through the lens of cinema, Envisioning Freedom examines the forgotten history of early black film exhibition during the era of mass migration and Jim Crow. By embracing the new medium of moving pictures at the turn of the twentieth century, black Americans forged a collective--if fraught--culture of freedom. In Cara Caddoo's perspective-changing study, African Americans emerge as pioneers of cinema from the 1890s to the 1920s. Across the South and Midwest, moving pictures presented in churches, lodges, and schools raised money and created shared social experiences for black urban communities. As migrants moved northward, bound for Chicago and New York, cinema moved with them. Along these routes, ministers and reformers, preaching messages of racial uplift, used moving pictures as an enticement to attract followers. But as it gained popularity, black cinema also became controversial. Facing a losing competition with movie houses, once-supportive ministers denounced the evils of the "colored theater." Onscreen images sparked arguments over black identity and the meaning of freedom. In 1910, when boxing champion Jack Johnson became the world's first black movie star, representation in film vaulted to the center of black concerns about racial progress. Black leaders demanded self-representation and an end to cinematic mischaracterizations which, they charged, violated the civil rights of African Americans. In 1915, these ideas both led to the creation of an industry that produced "race films" by and for black audiences and sparked the first mass black protest movement of the twentieth century.
Reframing culture : the case of the Vitagraph quality films by
The works of Shakespeare and Dante or the figures of George Washington and Moses do not often enter into popular conceptions of the silent cinema, yet, between 1907 and 1910, the Vitagraph Company frequently used such material in producing "quality" films that promulgated "respectable" culture. William Uricchio and Roberta Pearson situate these films in an era of immigration, labor unrest, and mainstream American xenophobia, in order to explore the cultural views promoted by the films and the ways the audiences--the middle classes as well as workers and immigrants--related to what they saw. The authors associate the production of quality films with a top-down forging of cultural consensus on issues such as patriotism and morality, and reveal the surprising bottom-up negotiations of these films' "meanings.". Devoting chapters to the literary, historical, and biblical subjects used by Vitagraph, this book draws upon plays, pageants, school textbooks, and even product advertisements to illuminate the conditions of cinematic production and reception. It provides a detailed look at one aspect of the film industry's transformation from "despised cheap amusement" to the nation's dominant mass medium, while showing how cultural elites engaged in a struggle similar to that of today's American academy over the literary canon and national value systems.
Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications by 
Deep Mediations Thinking Space in Cinema and Digital Cultures by 