Harpur Cinema Presents: Skip Norman: Here and There

Skip Norman, West Germany, 1966-1969, 75 min

Friday, October 18, 2024, and Sunday, October 20, 2024: Lecture Hall 6, 7:30 pm. Doors open at 7:00 pm. $4 Single Admission.

Skip Norman remains a significant yet often ignored force in the history of African-American cinema. In 1966, he was accepted into the inaugural cohort of students at Berlin’s DFFB Film School, where he befriended and worked alongside a group of artists and activists interested in the revolutionary potential of film, including Harun Farocki, Holger Meins, Helke Sander, and Gerd Conradt. In this program (titled The DFFB Years), produced between 1966 and 1969, these early student films range from deconstructed narratives and deceptive agit-prop to experimental essays, revealing not only the protean, multifaceted style of the young Norman, but an incendiary conceptual throughline that would inform later self-authored projects and collaborations, including a commitment to social justice and critiques of hypocritical liberalism.