Key Black cinema history has been overlooked

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On a new podcast episode, Jacqueline Stewart digs into how films help contextualize Black history.

Stewart, a professor in the cinema and media studies department at the University of Chicago, has devoted her career to the histories of overlooked Black filmmakers and Black audiences. In 2021, she won a prestigious MacArthur fellowship for “illuminating the contributions that overlooked Black filmmakers and communities of spectators have made to cinema’s development as an art form.”

Stewart also serves as the host of Silent Sunday Nights on Turner Classic Movies and is chief artistic and programming officer at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.

On this episode of the Big Brains podcast, Stewart explores the history of Black cinema and explains how preservation and archiving are not neutral acts, but contribute to how we contextualize and understand Black history:

You can find the transcript for this episode here. Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Spotify.

Editor’s note: This episode was originally published on January 6, 2022.

Source: University of Chicago