Join Saidiya Hartman—author of the new book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments—and Arthur Jafa at the Hammer for a public conversation about their work.
Jafa’s new exhibition at Moderna Museet in Stockholm opens later this month.
From top: Saidiya Hartman, courtesy of the author and Columbia University; Arthur Jafa, Apex, 2018, Luma, Arles, installation views (2); Arthur Jafa, courtesy of the artist.
“My head is splitting! The wine last night, the music, the delicious debauchery!” — CharlesLaughton, as Emperor Nero, in The Sign of the Cross
The sensual freedom that constituted much of the imagery of Hollywood’s silent period persisted into the sound era for four more years until a nationwide morals crusade reached critical mass in 1934, and strict enforcement of the Hays Code began.
Small-town church-goers were pushed to the brink by The Sign of the Cross (1932)—Cecil B. DeMille‘s notorious epic—which purloined a “Christian” story and served up nudity, violence, a lesbian dance sequence, and Emperor Nero as a raging queen. Needless to say, big city audiences responded to DeMille’s decadence with curiosity and enthusiasm, flocking to cinemas wherever it was playing.
In its Forbidden Hollywood—WhenSin Ruled the Movies program, the UCLA Film andTelevision Archive is screening The Sign of the Cross in a 35mm print restored from DeMille’s personal nitrate copy.
Also on the bill: John M. Stahl‘s Only Yesterday (1933)—Margaret Sullavan‘s film debut—depicting out-of-wedlock childbirth, feminist and socialist advocacy, and an openly gay couple (Franklin Pangborn and Barry Norton)—scenarios that would disappear from Hollywood scripts for the next thirty years.
Mark A. Vieira will sign copies of his book Forbidden Hollywood: The Pre-Code Era before the screening.
“Jacques Derrida loved the word observe. He paid special attention to its root word, serve, which tied observation to respect, service, and deference. To observe something, he thought, was an act of humility. You gave yourself over to the details, gathering data and storing it in reserve for the future… *
“StanDouglas uses lens-based media to facilitate this kind of servitude to details. I mention Derrida not to overemphasize the theoretical structures at work in Douglas’ output (and there are many), but rather to point out that the production details Douglas wants viewers to notice in his work are many and fine, and require sustained concentration…. [His work] is an invitation to become curious: about the narratives that have brought Douglas’ subjects to his camera and to the viewer’s gaze; about the processes Douglas uses to make an image look the way it does; and about how his subjects have emerged from seemingly long-lost historical moments and ended up in his pictures.” — Katie Anania
This week, Stan Douglas will give the UCLA Department of Art Lecture at the Hammer.
*See Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 23.
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