For over 40 years, the filmmaking duo of Camille Billops and James V. Hatch have used personal documentaries to explore what it means to be an artist, a woman, and an African-American in this complex land called the United States. The lens of these films have focused primarily on Billops’ life and family. Although these films explore difficult and painful social and political issues, they are marked by humor, enormous inventiveness and a deep and genuine love. Scribe is honored to have Camille Billops and James V. Hatch present a Master Class and a retrospective of their films.
It can be a tricky business putting one’s own life on the screen, but for over 40 years, the filmmaking duo of Camille Billops and James V. Hatch have used personal documentaries to explore what it means to be an artist, a woman, and an African-American in this complex land called the United States. The lens of these films have focused primarily on Billops’ life and family. Although these films explore difficult and painful social and political issues, they are marked by humor, enormous inventiveness and a deep and genuine love.
We are honored to have Camille Billops and James V. Hatch at Scribe to present a Master Class and a retrospective of their films.
Presented in partnership with Film @ International House, The Film & Media Arts Department at Temple University, Swarthmore College, Cinema Studies at The University of Pennsylvania, and the Leeway Foundation
Tuesday, April 3 & Wednesday, April 4
Individual Screening: $10, $8, $5 Scribe members
Film Series Pass: $22, $20 students/seniors, $15 Scribe members
Master Class: $25, $15 for Scribe members
Screenings are FREE for students, faculty and staff of Temple, Swarthmore and UPenn
Tuesday, April 3, 5:00PM – Master Class
Scribe Video Center – 4212 Chestnut Street
The Filmmaker As Subject
Drawing from Billops’ training as a sculptor, printmaker and book illustrator and Hatch’s experience as a theater historian/director, together they have made multilayered “documentary” films that deploy dramatizations and a touch of surrealism. In this Master Class, Billops and Hatch will talk about their filmmaking process – “building” a film using diverse media and narrative devices — family pictures, home movies, drawings, staged theatrical sequences and singing performances. They will also talk about how to keep a critical perspective when the artist is author, subject and object. MORE INFO
Tuesday, April 3, 8:00PM – Film Program One
Scribe Video Center – 4212 Chestnut Street
Take Your Bags
by Camille Billops and James V. Hatch
A ten minute film about Camille’s cousin, Keita at age three, as Camille explains their family’s origins, racism and slavery from Africa to the present. Keita seems to understand. (USA, 1998, 11 min)
A String of Pearls
By Camille Billops and James V. Hatch
Focused on four generations of men in Billops’ family, this film considers why their fathers died so young. The camera turns to grandsons Michael and Peter, both handsome and winsome but in jeopardy. They lack the education, jobs or skills to earn a living and both have children they cannot support. We want them to live, but two doctors from the local trauma unit describe the streets of Los Angeles as a war zone, where the U.S. military sends its doctors to learn about gunshot wounds. (USA, 2002, 56 min)
Older Women in Love
by Camille Billops and James V. Hatch
Inspired by Billops’s aunt, a woman in her eighties with a forty-something lover, this film takes an honest and often hilarious look at older women and their relationships with young men, Incorporating one-on-one interviews and staged scenes of gossip at a dinner party, it celebrates the sexual freedom and vitality of older women while interrogating social mores that often deny the sexuality of older women. (USA, 1987, 26 min)
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Wednesday, April 4, 5:00PM – Film Program Two
Ibrahim Theater @ International – 3701 Chestnut Street
The KKK Boutique Ain’t Just Rednecks
by Camille Billops and James V. Hatch
At once satirical and surreal, this “docu-fantasy” takes us on a guided tour of the KKK Boutique, a multi-level space modeled after the hell in Dante’s Inferno. Here, one can traffic in a variety of merchandise inscribed with racist epithets and images. As we descend through the lower levels, we witness nightmarish and fantastical re-enactments of the violent histories and genealogies of racism and must ultimately face our own hatred for the other, or be forever condemned to the inferno in lowest depths of the KKK Boutique. (USA, 1994, 77 min)
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Wednesday, April 4, 7:00PM – Film Program Three
Ibrahim Theater @ International House – 3701 Chestnut Street
Suzanne, Suzanne
by Camille Billops and James V. Hatch
This is the story of Camille Billops’s sister’s middle class family; Suzanne, their daughter, is abused by her alcoholic father. Suzanne’s mother attempts to protect Suzanne but fails. Suzanne turns to heroin addiction and only after the father’sdeath, whom she loved, is she able to make peace with her mother. (USA, 1982, 30 min)
Finding Christa
by Camille Billops and James V. Hatch
Finding Christa centers on Billops who becomes pregnant by a man who promises to marry her but instead, he joins the air force and Billops is left alone to face her friends and family. The child, Christa, at the age of four, is given to the Children’s Society. She is adopted by a black family who raises her. When Christa becomes a teenager, she begins a search to find her birth mother and finally succeeds. The latter half of the film faces the difficulties that mother and daughter have in emotionally resolving their past. (USA, 1991, 55 min)
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Artist Bios
Known as a filmmaker, Camille Billops has produced and directed six film documentaries. Suzanne, Suzanne was chosen by the Museum of Modern Art for its New Directors Series in 1983. Finding Christa won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 1992. Her last film, A String of Pearls was chosen “premiere” film for the Planet Africa series at the Toronto Film Festival in 2002.
In 1975 Camille Billops, together with her husband, founded the Hatch-Billops Collection, Inc. an archives of African American cultural materials. This library has interviewed over 472 minority artists and published their lives and work in 30 annual journals of Artist and Influence.
Billops has exhibited at the Studio Museum of Harlem, as well as in Hamburg, Germany; Cairo, Egypt; Los Angeles and New York. She wrote and published The Harlem Book of the Dead, featuring the poetry of Owen Dodson and the photography of James Van Der Zee. In 2003 she lectured on the Bob Blackburn Printmaking Workshop at the Library of Congress.
Billops has received grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, The Rockefeller Fellowship in Filmmaking and the Skowhegan Award for contribution in the arts. She has exhibited in the photo retrospective for Percent for Art Exhibition in NYC, at the Parsons School of Design, and was elected to the Advisory Board of WAAND—The National Directory of Women Artists Archives at Rutgers University at New Brunswick.
James V. Hatch, Ph.D. is Professor Emeritus of English and Theatre, City University of New York. He has published eleven books, the most recent, A History of African American Theatre with Errol G. Hill, 2003 for which they received the Theatre Library Association’s George Freedley Award for the best book published in theatre that year. Hatch is recipient of two Barnard Hewitt Awards from American Society of Theatre Research.
Given two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, Hatch has lectured and directed plays for the U.S. Information Agency in the Philippines, India, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan. He has held three Fulbright teaching/lectureships—Egypt, Germany, and Taiwan. In the creative arts he is recognized with two Obies for Off-Broadway productions. He shares with Camille Billops the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival for Finding Christa.
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Producers’ Forums are supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Philadelphia Cultural Fund, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
