Speed Cinema Presents: Brent Hayes Edwards on Sweet Willie Rollbar's Orientation
Saturday, February 24, 4:45 pm
Speed Art Museum Cinema
Directed by the Black Artists' Group of St. Louis
In the closing keynote for the annual Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900, Brent Hayes Edwards presents a digital restoration, from the original 16mm reels, of the experimental film Sweet Willie Rollbar’s Orientation from 1972. The film was made by, and features, saxophonist Julius Hemphill, the poet K. Curtis Lyle, the actor Malinke Elliott and other members of the Black Artists’ Group of St. Louis. An astounding document of the post-Black Arts moment, the film includes a series of fragmented, surreal “trickster tale” vignettes set in the detritus of the St. Louis ghetto. Edwards will place the film in the context of the Black Artists’ Group in St. Louis and more broadly in relation to other Black experimental currents in the early 1970s such as the "loft jazz" scene in downtown Manhattan.
Edwards is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and the author of Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2017) and The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard University Press, 2003). His research and teaching focus on topics including African American literature, Francophone literature, theories of the African diaspora, translation studies, archive theory, black radical historiography, cultural politics in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, surrealism, experimental poetics, and jazz. Total program 90 minutes.
Co-presented with the Commonwealth Center for Humanities & Society and the annual Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900 at UofL.
Don’t forget to bring your Speed Art Museum membership card to verify your membership.