OLLI Fab Fridays Lunch & Learn Lectures: ‘Screening Race’ with Marsha Gordon

Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UNC Asheville will host Marsha Gordon to discuss “Screening Race” as part of its Fab Friday series on Friday, April 9.

This program will focus on short films from the 1950s to the 1970s that engage with ideas about race, identity, and community. These nontheatrical films—including educational films, home movies, industry and government films, student films, and church films—portrayed the lives of those who were mostly excluded from the commercial movies being produced in Hollywood. Presented by NC State Film Studies Professor Marsha Gordon, who is the co-editor, with Allyson Nadia Field of University of Chicago, of Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film (Duke University Press, 2019), the program will include discussions of a student film about undocumented Mexican workers in a church sewing operation in downtown Los Angeles, a moving portrait of a young African American high schooler living in Watts on the cusp of the 1965 Rebellion, and a classroom film about a Chinese American girl who, against her father’s wishes, wants to be a ballet dancer.  Short clips from a selection of 16mm films will be shown throughout the lecture, and the audience will be encouraged to share their own memories of watching 16mm films in the classroom.

Marsha Gordon is Professor of Film Studies at North Carolina State University and an NEH Public Scholar. She is the author, most recently, of Film is Like a Battleground: Sam Fuller’s War Movies (Oxford University Press, 2017) and is currently completing a biography of the forgotten best-selling American writer, Ursula Parrott.

Register at this link. Once you have registered, you will receive a link to join.