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Feeling First: An Interview with Filmmaker Aarin Burch

Author: Liz Reich (University of Pittsburgh)

  • Feeling First: An Interview with Filmmaker Aarin Burch

    Feeling First: An Interview with Filmmaker Aarin Burch

    Author:

Abstract

Aarin Burch explores her aesthetic praxis, an experimental cinema reaching and transforming viewers in the condensed time of layered looks and identification; and validating her Black lesbian existence with presence. Today, she practices film form across the flatness of racial and visual difference, and from her white mother’s paintings, finding connection.

How to Cite:

Reich, L., (2024) “Feeling First: An Interview with Filmmaker Aarin Burch”, Film Criticism 48(2): 8. doi: https://doi.org/10.3998/fc.6867

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Published on
2024-12-12

Peer Reviewed

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CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0

Introduction:

This interview was conducted by Zoom on September 8, 2023. In the conversation, Aarin Burch (AB) speaks about her investment in creating connection through her filmmaking. AB explains that her aesthetic was shaped by representational, socio-political, and artistic desires – evident in her films Dreams of Passion (1989)1 and Spin Cycle (1991)2 (both recently screened at the March 2023 Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts).3 Across the conversation, we discuss how AB’s intersectional identity as a Black lesbian and a biracial and/or Brown daughter early in her career and still though perhaps differently todayshapes her praxis.

AB’s commitment to employing experimentation and abstraction in her film and sound work to reach and transform others was bound to her need to see herself on screen. She noted the tension between the aesthetic, interpersonal, and representational desires she hoped to address in each shot and across her films. AB describes layering sounds and images that engage viewers and respond to them in what has to be an expansive cinematic temporality. For AB, this is an aesthetic in which she hopes to give each filmgoer what they need – not just across the film but in intuitive, individualized, compressed film-moments. The praxis seems to imply a-priori dialogue, an intersubjective camera that generates time for an interpersonal cinema. (In this respect, AB’s aesthetic would anticipate what Arthur Jafa describes as “Black visual intonation”).4

“The feeling is first.”

– Aarin Burch

For AB, past, present, and future cycle, combine, and inform each other, including the viewer in the making process. The story-description AB offers, transcribed below, feels incredible – as does the experience inside her films: providing an indexicality for Black lesbian life in the context of near-total absence of representation while reworking the texture and medium itself.

Our conversation began with Aarin’s response to a previously emailed question regarding the role of Black women’s film theory and its impact on Black women’s filmmaking.

* * *

Aarin Burch [AB]:

Theory doesn’t typically come first. I don’t believe it’s true for all artists and makers. Some people might want to get across a principle or a theme, and want to [draw on or express such theory], but film is the medium that we choose as artists. I’m not a writer. I play, and I work to tell a story in images and spoken word and movement and music. You know I’m coming to it [filmmaking] in that way.

In Dreams of Passion [(1989), I wanted to see Black lesbian women on the fucking huge screen. I wanted to see them – we really didn’t have many Black lesbian women in film. I wanted to see myself up there. I’Il bet other Black women want to see themselves too. This is a powerful medium.

At the time, I thought, I want Black lesbian women up there as big as life. And then I want them to kiss. Bigger than life – and it gives me chills still [to remember], because at the time I just hadn’t ever seen it. I just wanted to see it. And to have myself reflected. I wanted to validate my being in my existence [on the screen]. I hoped to do that for other people, too, because if I was feeling it, other people were, too. And I wanted to do it in a beautiful way.

These images and messages were not subliminal, unlike other aspects of the film and the ways I’ve [recently] been talking about Dreams of Passion acting on viewers. In this case, I wanted to show the beauty in two Black women.

In the film, at first one woman is kind of dreaming about another woman who isn’t there, ruminating. And then finally they’re in the same space and able to be together and exchange energy. And then it culminates in this kiss.

It’s funny because of how different it was those days, in the nineties. Now you just have a gay person in the scene, and it’s not the main thing.

It would be so interesting to hear how we all did these things back then. And I think hearing some of that is why I loved the festivals too. There you would also hear all of these academics [speaking about why the films were made as they were, and how to interpret their deeper meanings]. And then you’d hear us filmmakers say things in response like: Well, I didn’t have enough money to do that scene, actually, or whatever other reason.

The critical thinkers and professors are thinking, “How come you didn’t?” or, “I really saw this!” And [the answers are], Oh – well, actually I did do that. And: In fact, that wasn’t necessarily my intention.

As an experimental filmmaker, I am considering my own questions:

What does this image and this image conjure up when you hear this sound?

What [about] this music or this sound? What does that create?

And when a few images float through and then they’re cut next to this… What then does that create?

You know, it’s not always so literal. And I love it that people get – in Spin Cycle [(1991)] people get all kinds of different things [from watching]. They’re like: “Oh, my God! I had a lot of girlfriends, too!” Other folks are like, “Oh, my God! I live in this kind of confusion as well!” And it wasn’t just the words I said in the film. The chaos was shown. The “spin” was shown in the way I cut the images together, for example.

Liz Reich [LR]:

Say more about this, if you can. And reject this question if it’s not right – but: Can you say more about your aesthetic overall – for instance, the way you cut? And, obviously, it’s specific for each film, but: Could you also say more about what your aesthetic is like? You’ve used words like “flow” and “conjure” so far.

AB:

Yeah, that’s a really good question. I mean, I’m creating a martial arts demo right now to music. And there’s movement, and I’m creating it just like I create a film. And I start with… it’s something about… my feeling of unrest. And [then] this image kind of represents that, and I don’t know where it goes [where to place it] in the film. And then I start playing with it, and I might start in the middle. And then I kind of go, Okay, well, how should it begin, you know? And then how’s the ending gonna be? I mean I had a couple of endings for my first film. Now I totally give myself freedom to start wherever.

But I also felt bad about the way I made films for a long time. I’m not a person who [creates a linear film] like most people. They write a script, and they would start with “Scene One.” And I would think, I have no fucking idea!

Thank god Marlin Riggs did what he did, because it gave me permission. I was like, Oh, my God! And [Trinh] Minh-ha and Barbara Hammer. You know [watching them] I saw, Oh, I can! I can do this however is in me.

That’s why I think it’s funny when people then report back and they tell you what your film means. I do love that, because [the film] has meaning – it truly does. It’s just that my process is not linear to get there. And I can feel really validated by people’s responses – I have never heard someone assign some meaning that the film didn’t have [in some way]; that I didn’t relate to at all. It is in there. And I feel, Wow, yeah, I was just being myself and creating from me and my experience [and these messages did come through]. I don’t know if I answered your question exactly.

LR:

You did! But the one thing you didn’t really talk about — well, let me say it this way: I asked about your aesthetic, and you could have said, “Well, there’s always blue and it’s kind of surrealist. I never have any characters, but the film always has to have movement —”

AB:

Right – I am going to say that there’s movement between the images, and they don’t stick. It’s not heavy cut usually. I don’t do long scenes. It’s short cuts. It’s color. Color is huge for me. Music is huge. Dance. Everything I do will always incorporate dance. Every piece I did, videos for different organizations, everything I’ve done has dance and music somewhere. It’s a way that is not the spoken word.

I want to elicit a feeling of whatever the thing is. And I really want you to get it on the kinesthetic level. It’s an aesthetic that is movement – and in my head, this movement is in the cut.

LR:

But it’s also in how you put in the film what you like.

AB:

Yeah, certainly. What’s there is the material I really like. I mean, I want to eat every frame that I create. I really love creating beauty. And it’s very hard for me too. And of course there are some things that I have done to create a little bit of chaos. But I’m not really one who is going to make things ugly. I’m exploring through beauty and awe.

There’s also the way I work with light – that I don’t like a stark, kind of nothing. I like the mystery – and the way that even now I still can’t get what I want yet. I’m looking forward to still creating, trying to make something, trying because it’s a flat medium.

LR:

It’s flat, even though you’re creating dimension with a film.

AB:

And there’s limitations. Video was really hard for me, the limitations of it. It felt so flat, and I still honestly haven’t been able to create with it and make it happen. At the end of the day it is a screen – and I’m not even talking about 3D, or whatever there is today. But you go and you sit and you watch a thing. There is something about live performance, live interaction – it’s that feeling that I want to create on the screen.

LR:

This is my favorite conversation ever because you just articulated what I always try to teach in class but have no essay to use – though Julie Dash’s film Illusions5 shows what you’ve described – that film is yearning, no matter what it’s about. And you, the viewer, you are just giving up your reason, willing to believe.

In each class I physically pick-up or push the screen at some point and ask, “What is happening?” for my students. “There’s nothing here – and yet you feel there is and you’re willing to go into a whole world that also never was there. Even that which was being filmed wasn’t necessarily ever there.”

I was thinking of this aspect of film when you spoke about video, though in terms of video I was also thinking about how you might use it as stills in a collage and imagining that you could have video filmed on film.

AB:

Yes, but that feeling on a live screen – I’m always trying to get that layer. It was very hard for me with video because it just doesn’t exist there. People want to look behind the image, see another perspective, and we give them this in film. We cut to another camera or evoke the sense that something else is there – I know I want that, and to be lost in another world.

In this film I’m working on now about my Mom, this dimensionality is also hard to create because I want to be able to get into the paintings that she was painting. I want even to get into the paint. And that’s not even it – it’s a feeling of, What was happening? Why do artists want to do that? And then that? Why? Because they’re broken inside and they want to express this through this particular color – Or whatever. And I’m trying to use this medium, which is an amazing medium. But that’s why experimental [filmmaking] was like some liberation –

LR:

Did you not feel like at the time you started making films that experimental work had already been there? I’m thinking of Maya Deren and —

AB:

No, no – Maya Deren was really the first filmmaker whose films I saw that I related to. And I used to show Maya Deren when I taught film editing, and people were like, “What the fuck is this?” You care about the shadow on the ground, you know, and going down the stairs.

And there were some folks – especially boys, who wanted to make films. And teaching them the art of editing, in Deren’s film watching her go down the stairs – and I didn’t get all of it, but I knew what she was going for. And something was liberated in me that it wasn’t what you watched on TV or in the movies, where it was the seamless perfectness. The scene cuts here. And then there. And then we cut to that perspective….

Thinking about it, I don’t even know why I chose to be a filmmaker. It seems like I should have been a painter, but I wasn’t meant to be. I couldn’t paint.

LR:

You are describing what doesn’t work with video and what you love about film, and what’s tricky. And I hear you describing two different times and places in relationship, both the making and the viewing sides, and you fuse them into one. I like the way you have described this process: that when you make a film, you’re making your side and their side at the same time. It’s almost five dimensional, where you have got two and a half dimensions on each side all pressed together —

AB:

I mean, it’s the reason I decided to be a filmmaker. I thought I’d spend ten years trying to figure out what I wanted to do – I had no idea. But the first time I went to class, I knew it was art that I was gonna do.

I remember the first time I took a film strip. It was found footage, 16 millimeter. And I put it next to another strip, and I put some tape on it, and then I added something else because it was red. Then something else because it had scratches. I don’t know. Then I put it on a reel. And then I looked at it on the wall, and I put some music, beats, some drumbeats. There was a dance, some movement, and I put it up on the screen. It was the first project, you know. And I saw I could mix music, dance, spoken word. It was a powerful medium. I could have a message through all those five things [put together in the first film]. And I was like, This is it! And I can work with a crew. I can work the part of me that loves to be in collaboration. And I could work by my-fucking-self editing, or in building it, or writing it. All those things in one medium: I was sold.

It hit so much of my being that is not linear. So this was: Yes.

LR:

I’ve talked to a number of filmmakers but never heard anybody talk about film quite like you. What you seem to be saying you love is something that you’ve imagined, uniquely. Most filmmakers seem to try to determine what the image they want to make will look like to another person who sees what they are seeing on this flat screen.

But you are imagining and describing the image traveling through the moment into the perceptual time-space of the viewer. And you are capturing that in the film that you know will be projected onto a flat screen. But the film you’re making is that many dimensions. Technically, video could capture that, too. But it doesn’t seem like it could for you, because you feel the dimensionality of film, because you can see time in it like you see space in it. Based on your descriptions, I think it’s because of the way that the film gets reanimated with light through time. Is this right? And video is not doing that.

AB:

You know, I would get in front of the camera and sit and talk about things like I do when journaling or with my diary. But that wasn’t it. Film is in the cutting and in the layering. It has to be to work for me – Bam, bud-da-da, ba-da-ba-da, ba, wha, bada, bud-da-da [the sounds and physicality of collisions of cuts and layers]. And to hear a few words.

I am trying to create something for the viewer that gives them the experience I want them to be IN. I want them not just to see this pretty thing, not just Ah, but also, Ew. See behind, look at their own lives, and go —

I almost don’t know what the feeling is that I have or want, but I know I want them to be taken to where they need to go. I do want them to go into their own love, their own feelings of desire, humanness.

And not to say I haven’t heard some dialogues that I’m like, Oh, wow! That was a long cut, and I was engaged. It’s just not the filmmaker I am at all. I never will be. I have no desire.

LR:

It is almost as if there’s something about the effusiveness and thickness and crazy capaciousness of film, specifically, like that light and that celluloid, and that which doesn’t get to be shown, but is in the shadows, or could be, or around the corner, like you said. It is like you imagine all of it, and then try to represent it, the whole experience.

AB:

But it stops me in my tracks because I cannot and I have not been able to manifest this.

LR:

Because you’re talking about time and another viewer, and that you would want to manifest the whole relationship experientially in an image. Of course everyone aims to give something to the viewer. But you’re talking about trying to capture the experience of the viewer before you provide it to them. You’re already in the future of it, and the way you describe it is almost like film implies more dimensions are somehow there —

AB — no judgment against you [for theorizing]!

LR:

Ha, no. But I’m happy to share my thoughts on theory too, which are basically this: If it doesn’t say something useful, why is it getting said? People could be doing something instead. And we all have to go through our self-centered moments at times but in the meantime –

I just love thinking about this idea that film implies these times and dimensions which other consciousness would be engaged. And then you want to catch that, capture it on film and retroactively give it to the other consciousness.

AB:

I struggle. I’m always aiming to do something like this. And I’ve been successful at, I’d say, some of it. I’m somewhat successful. I’m trying to create something for the viewer … I want them to not just see this pretty thing over there. But to see behind. I want them to look at their own lives and go, Oh, yeah, like that just hit that core place in me.

LR:

It’s almost more like you want them to feel it and come to know through feeling, right? So it’s experiential or embodied, right?

AB:

I almost don’t care what the feeling is. I want them to be taken to where they need to go. I mean, I want to have an impact with my work – I don’t want them thinking about their dog and how their dog is dying if I’m showing this lesbian kiss. So I guess it’s not totally true that I just want them to go anywhere.

I do want them, in that situation, to go into their own love, their own feeling of desire, their own humanness and understanding of the power of love and connection. I want them to think, Look at the lesbians kissing over there. I haven’t seen anything like that before.

LR:

It’s almost like the idea of representation, like just the flat image of the thing, is triangularly related to this thing you want, which is affective, physiological, related to that topic sort of, but not only to thinking about the image. And not fully separate from the image. Otherwise the work would be completely experimental – like, in some ways what you want is still literal. It’s moth and light — and it’s completely figurative. And with Mothlight [by Stan Brakhage]6, if you don’t get the comment on the nature of film, you never know what you’re seeing. If someone doesn’t tell you, and because you can’t even make a pattern and it’s just light and parts of a moth taped to film. You don’t need a camera to have made it. You just need the projector. But somehow for me it does give the feeling that is a moth flying in light at night – It’s just beautiful, like something flittering.

It’s an image kind of trigger, what you were talking about, I think.

I wonder if this is what Jordan Peele is also trying to describe. His films are super narrative, of course, but still it is the flash of light, or the one moment of being able to be fully conscious with a Black nervous system – that brings all of Blackness back. And the whole person comes with it.

AB:

Did it do well? Because I, even myself who can read between the lines and get the references and the access to a lot of the messaging in there – I mean, even I’m not sure if he is doing it all fully and intentionally. I’m talking about the more nuanced thing. I really would love to hear about his thoughts on that. Why he spent as much time as he did with the scenes at the end, and – I haven’t seen it for a while, but Get Out. Wait – that wasn’t the last one I’m thinking of, was it? What was the last one he did?

LR:

Nope?

AB:

That’s the one I’m talking about. So it’s a little bit harder to be sure. With Get Out it was like, Yeah, fuck, yeah. But with Nope, he got a little bit esoteric.

LR:

I was thinking of Get Out because of that trigger, the sound or the image, and then suddenly the whole person comes with it. You can have taken out the Black brain, taken it out and colonized the body with whiteness – A slavery worse than slavery in some ways, in Get Out.

You have that haunting, fed-up, nothing’s-right feeling, but you don’t know why. You see Georgina and you don’t know what’s wrong with her. She is not like a white lady. And it’s not that it is race, but, then, what else is it? There is this racial story, but that’s not enough to create all of the haunted experience – and it isn’t really until the very end when you realize he [protagonist, Chris Washington] has kept himself from ending up dead by stuffing his ears with cotton so that he can’t hear and be hypnotized by white tactics. Right? So the model of the nervous system is Black. Because everything else is taken out of the Black body, but the body won’t work if you don’t leave that one tiny part [of the brain] in – and it contains all of the person’s living Black consciousness. If you trigger it.

So similarly: I’m going to ask about your image, the lesbian kiss. When you talk about that kiss, it’s so concrete. I almost cried just hearing you talk about how you wanted it. I made my documentary for the same reason; I’d never seen a gay kid. And I just wanted to see. I thought maybe we wouldn’t die so much if we were shown more often.

AB:

It’s so primal. And it’s even there in all of the esoteric plot. And people say things like – “We don’t believe that this means that… Bad representations are worse than no representations…” While I don’t care if we’re fucking in the streets with talking heads…

LR:

So you made the concrete kiss and the experimental film together. And that is why you’ve said to me in the past, “I’m a film art, art person.” Hmm, I don’t even know that I even have the question –

AB:

So can you rephrase it?

LR:

You’re talking about the need for an image, and that it’s a concrete thing. And that the image has to give the feel, right –

AB:

I’d almost say that the feeling is first.

LR:

So my question then is, if in the midst of all of this, where would you be if you were also, at the same time, part of a lineage or history of Black women representing somehow. I’m not saying this thing has to be done – but I’m just wanting to ask – if it is, if there is this happening, then where are you in this broad project?

AB:

Well, I’m not working on anything that is about being a Black woman. I’m working on this piece about my Mom as an artist, and wanting to get you into the art itself. And even closer to me, there is my work that I will pick up again after [completing this film], around being mixed race. And – again – How do you express the mixed-race experience? My dad is black and my mom is white, and I feel in the middle in this, or I feel like I’m a bridge, or – there’s the different words, but what is the experience? How do I get across what it might feel like to be a mixed-race person? How do I get the viewer to go: Wow! I feel that! That’s the trip.

To do some of that, I have a scene that I wrote where a woman is standing on the corner, a white woman, and there’s a little Brown girl, and then the mom is holding the daughter’s hand. And in the film, I – or this mixed race person – comes up, and the framing goes to the close up of the hands. So this is my white mother and little brown girl. And the little girl is at the corner like this, and looking up to me. And you see that there’s a connection there that this little girl does not have with her mother.

Mother? Wow! Because it cannot be. This is a white woman. This is a Brown child. There’s love, there’s connection. This is Mommy. But there is not a Brown Mommy. And then this person comes and, Oh, my god, I feel a connection to you, and you’re not my mother and you’re a total stranger. But we’re like each other, and this is my blood.

Mother, white person! I’m Brown. We don’t have that.

LR:

What happens in the film? Where is it about the image or that cut that would make an audience member know? Was the shot supposed to reverse-cut back to the Mom?

AB:

I think it’s from the girl’s perspective, the shot of the hand. And you see that, and it’s for the audience to see that close-up of the hand connecting. Then it’s the girl – she’s the camera and the camera is looking from her perspective. And it’s looking up, and we feel that we see that – you know that perspective of like up high – it’s the movement. It’s the angle. And it’s quite a literal scene – more than most things.

But it’s not colors, and the reverse shot doesn’t go back to the mom. Instead the camera pivots, and probably I will have something that moves around it that does show that connection. And that there isn’t that one with the Mom.

But I want the person watching to be able to think about that.

LR:

Well, how come it’s like this? Why wouldn’t there be more connection? I don’t ask that because I believe there would or should be, but because you said a few minutes before, “I’m not making anything about being a Black woman right now.” But [maybe] you are – and I think you may have thought I meant my question just topically –

But even topically the film is about Black identity, whether she wants to address it or not. Right?

AB:

Well that was my response from the place of a mixed-race person. From me as a mixed-woman. That’s where that came from, because there’s my own feelings of – I’m not all Black, so that seeps out sometimes, and it can feel like, “Well, I’m not really making real Black film, not real.”

LR:

I’m always struck by this with friends who feel this way at times because, what Black family isn’t part white in the U.S.?

AB:

Yes, and even as I’m doing this piece about my mother, I am doing it as a lesbian Black woman filmmaker. And I forget that sometimes, because I’m doing a film about a white woman. And that was my question: If you look at it just in black and white. And then it’s clear this is why it’s very important.

The framing of this film is through the daughter’s eyes – ho is all of these things, you know. So it’s not a biopic about a white lady who was a famous artist.

It’s very much, How do I explore some of the issues of race, of being a woman, being a white woman, being a woman of color, being gay, being – How do all those things come up against this woman who has this successful career? How does this piece all interconnect throughout? It’s a way for me to comment on the world.

LR:

And even if it weren’t, it still would be, right? Because who you are, how you make film, is tied to your historical experience, and it’s therefore raced.

It’s sort of like my young kid who the other day was commenting on not being gay, and I said, “But you are queer.” And he said, “I’m not.” And I said, like a jerk, “Well good luck then, because you’re stuck in a queer family.” So what are you going to do? How do you get un-queer? How are you not making a film a Black film when it’s made by you? If I made it, it wouldn’t be a Black film – unless I talked about what’s really in it, then maybe…

AB:

You know that’s right. But it is a Black film, even if no one ever knows it.

LR:

Yeah, because maybe it just is. But then, your Mom isn’t Black the way my kid is queer, not the same way, is she? I mean, maybe there is a better term, like kinfolks, right? Or something?

There’s one specific question I didn’t want to forget –

In this other conversation I had with three filmmakers [Juanita Anderson, Tracey H. Strain, and Zeinabu Irene Davis] there was this kind of tension – not debate or argument but just a live, complex feeling and discussion about how a story could be held – how there could or should be a huge collective history about Black women’s filmmaking. One concern was that any history would, and any effort at producing this collective or collection, would mean that people would get left out – not on purpose, but just left out. So my question is: So say that’s right, and something to be concerned about, then how do you do it? And then, it is sad – things are going to be left out –

AB:

It’s like, fuck, first of all – But let me hear the end of your question. What’s your —

LR:

That was it. This is a history, you’re seeing it right now as it lives and as it disappears – and that’s the story too. This feeling that the pain is inexhaustible, the amount of what has already been left out is inexhaustible. And so therefore, we can’t do it in that wake, not without every name, every thing, so the leaving-out doesn’t continue. But then, in that case, the time was yesterday. But the time is now, and it’s possible that it’s right now. Or maybe not. And that’s the question – if, and then, how, you do it?

AB:

I can just say that the thing that comes up for me is – Does it all need to be in one body in one place? Does it?

I think about where, you know. I’ve had opportunities to archive my work in different places. Not a lot, but you know we’ve talked about it; there’s Chicago and people talking to me about it; and there’s also Lynn Keller. I don’t know if you know who she is.

Here in the Bay area there’s already something started. And I go, Wow! Where should I put my work, you know, so there’s like a little bit of : Should I put it over there? Or should I put it over there? And then I’m kinda like: I wanna put it everywhere that will take it. And you know I could say, I’m in the Smithsonian, and, I’m in Chicago. I want to say that, absolutely. It feels good. But actually, I want to be like, Yeah, you want to, please? I’d love for you to have it!

LR:

Please, please, do! Because an archive will say, Well, we have to be the original holders. Or otherwise your work is not valuable enough for us to spend the time on. Okay, then, change the system of value. Say, “We’ve been excluded from archives and especially from value for a real long time.” So now that your work is hot, your answers can be “Yes, thank you!” To all of them. “Because in the past, I didn’t get to maximize my work.”

AB:

What I don’t know is where institutions fall on this. You know, this would be a longer conversation, because I have a feeling that institutions are a little bit like, Well, we want it. And then another one says, Well, we want it. And, Well, we — and I’m not saying everyone is going to be fighting over me. But I am saying that this seems to be how people work. Well, who has Zeinabu’s work? Who’s gonna have Audrey’s work? Rather, I mean Angela Davis. I know her work is in a couple of places. And Lizbet, who is the archivist, is really working to put it in more than one place.

LR:

We have to go!

AB:

We do! Good!

Notes

  1. Aarin Burch, Dreams of Passion, directed by Aarin Burch (1989; Berkeley, CA: Aarin Burch Productions, 1989).
  2. Aarin Burch, Spin Cycle, directed by Aarin Burch (1991; Berkeley, CA: Aarin Burch Productions, 1991).
  3. The Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts was a symposium on Black women’s filmmaking held at the University of Chicago from March 2-4, 2023.
  4. Nabih Deura, “Arthur Jafa and Black Visual Intonation,” Confluence, NYU, accessed April 28, 2024, https://confluence.gallatin.nyu.edu/context/interdisciplinary-seminar/arthur-jafa-and-black-visual-intonation.
  5. Julie Dash, Illusions, written and directed by Julie Dash (1982; Los Angeles, CA: American Film Institute Independent Filmmakers Program, 1982).
  6. Stan Brakhage, Mothlight, directed by Stan Brackhage (1963; United States: American Film Stan Brakhage, 1963).

Biographies

Aarin Burch is an internationally-recognized experimental filmmaker who earned her B.F.A in film from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1991. Director of Dreams of Passion (1989) and Spin Cycle (1991), both recently screened at the 2023 Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts at the University of Chicago, Burch was one of the first out-Black lesbian filmmakers to depict Black lesbian sexuality on screen. Burch also directed and produced My People Are (2007) exploring youth pride in multiracial heritage. Having launched the Laurel Burch Studies in 2012, she is now in production on a feature about her mother, well-known painter Laurel Burch. Burch has also collaborated on numerous additional productions, music videos, and moving-image media with artists KD Lang, Lily Tomlin, Indigo Girls, and Patti Labelle, among others, and for A Place of Rage (1991) featuring Angela Davis and June Jordan; Warrior Marks (1993) with Alice Walker; and Reflections Unseen (1900), a documentary about the lives of eight HIV+ African American women. She is also an internationally awarded 6th degree Black Belt in Hand to Hand Kajukenbo martial arts, which she continues to share and teach.

Liz/Elizabeth Reich is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of Pittsburgh and author of Militant Visions: Black Soldiers, Internationalism and the Transformation of American Cinema; coedited collection, Justice in Time: Critical Afrofuturism and the Struggle for Black Freedom, is under contract at University of Minnesota Press. Her book-in-progress is “Reparative Ecologies: Time and the Globe” and she is coeditor of special issues, “New Approaches to Cinematic Identification,” in Film Criticism and “Reliquary for the Digital in Nine Key Terms,” in ASAP/J.