Curating BAMcinématek's Civil Rights Film Series: An Interview with Nellie Killian

BAMcinématek programmer Nellie Killian speaks about the process of researching and curating the monumental 40-film series A Time For Burning: Cinema of the Civil Rights Movement, which culminates on Wednesday, Aug 28, the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington.

Haskell Wexler's The Bus

When did you start working on this series?
I realized this summer we were coming up on a number of important anniversaries in the civil rights movement—the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, the assassination of Medgar Evers, and the Stand in the Schoolhouse Door. It’s also the anniversary of the March on Washington, which in many ways was a response to the escalating violence. It seemed important to commemorate the 50th anniversary, so I looked at all sorts of work from the 1960s that dealt with the civil rights movement.

While researching, I realized I was much more familiar with the late 1960s and early 1970s, and that the later wave of radicalism dominated the way I thought about that era. So I decided that this series would focus on the earlier period of the movement that’s been less represented, and that gave me some parameters, since there was so much excellent work.

We Love You, Shirley!

by Nathan Gelgud

They don’t come cooler than Cool World director Shirley Clarke. A pioneer in sixties independent movies, an innovator of the avant-garde, and key member of filmmaking collectives like Videofreex, Clarke is one of the best things to ever happen in underground American movies, up there with Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas.

BAM is a huge fan of Clarke, having given her an overdue retrospective in 2005 that showed not only her key works like The Cool World and The Connection, but an undeservedly under-discussed Agnès Varda movie in which she co-starred called Lions Love from 1969. Clarke shared the screen with our favorite Andy Warhol superstar Viva in that movie, but it was Clarke’s honest performance that made us such big fans.