Passing Through
The Arts and Politics of the Jazz Ensemble Film Screening and Symposium
Image courtesy of Larry Clark.
Film Screening
Friday, September 18, 6 p.m.
Kopleff Recital Hall, 10 Peachtree Center Ave.
Symposium
Saturday, September 19, 9:30 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Dept. of Communication, 25 Park Place, room 830
Drawing Through Album Release, Gallery Talk,
and Free Jazz Performances
Saturday, September 19, 7:30 p.m.
Mammal Gallery, 91 Broad St. S.W.
FREE and open to the public!
The film Passing Through follows a jazz musician’s struggle against the recording industry while in search of a “sound” that would reconcile his personal artistic vision with the sensibility of his community and the political urgencies of his highly repressive historical moment. Through its aesthetic fluidity and improvisational logic, the film explores ways to “pass through” different media—sound and image, jazz and cinema—and different spaces/conditions—artistic improvisation and systemic oppression, addiction and healing, newsreel footage and fiction, improvisation and recording, live performance and film.
Passing Through circulated internationally as both an art and a political film for the way it connects free jazz to emancipatory politics. It was made by artist and filmmaker Larry Clark in 1977 in collaboration with art communities in Los Angeles and features Horace Tapscott and his Pan-Afrikan People’s Arkestraand. Screened at festivals all over the world, Passing Through continues to resonate with contemporary audiences for its form, mode of production, and visionary politics.
The symposium “The Arts and Politics of the Jazz Ensemble” will bring together a variety of perspectives on Passing Through and the surrounding art scene with particular focus on the figure of Horace Tapscott. It will feature talks from James Tobias (UC Riverside), a scholar of the relationship between sound and image and author of Sync: Stylistics of Hieroglyphic Time (Temple University Press, 2010), Daniel Widener (UC San Diego), historian of black arts in L.A., author of Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los Angeles (Duke University Press, 2010), Matthew Duerstan, a freelance writer working on L.A.’s underground jazz scene, and two celebrated experimental filmmakers, Kevin Jerome Everson (University of Virginia) who will be sharing a short film made in response to Passing Through and Barbara McCullough (SCAD) who will be showing clips from her current project, Horace Tapscott: Musical Griot.
This film screening and symposium continues experimental research already undertaken by liquid blackness throughout the year. Liquid blackness has collected resources on the film and the filmmaker, organized presentations, workshops with the filmmaker, and will issue its fifth on-line publication featuring essays on the film and other forms of relations between arts and politics. To facilitate a repeated engagement with the film, which has never had a theatrical or video release, liquid blackness organized a public screening in April 2015.
Co-sponsored by Georgia State University’s CENCIA, Department of Communication, Creative Media Industries Institute, and School of Music; the Emory University Department of Film and Media Studies; and in collaboration with Film Love.
GSU Faculty Project Lead: Alessandra Raengo, Associate Professor of Communication.