Upon completion of his degree with the DFFB, Skip Norman undertook a series of projects that extended the concerns of his student work into even more rigorous and intellectual terrain, with a series of essay films that brought a Marxist, structuralist critique to issues of Black disenfranchisement in both the United States and Africa.

On Africa, codirected with Joey Gibbs, emerged out of a trip Norman took to West Africa in the late 1960s. Contrasting footage of Berlin—notably the site of the 1884 conference that divided the African continent among European powers—with archival colonial photography and details of its brutality, it later incorporates striking still photographs Norman captured in his travels. His ground-eye view is paired with a voiceover detailing the operation of neocolonial banking structures, mining, and other means of continued exploitation.  

Initially produced as one film before separated for distribution, Washington D.C. November 1970 and Black Man’s Volunteer Army of Liberation take stock of the nation’s capital early in a new decade. The former contrasts a compendium of notable Black and abolitionist figures and American wars with speakers outside a Black Panther Party registration center, and the latter examines a mutual aid network established in Washington, DC, to support drug users, while deconstructing the issue’s root cause. 

—Jesse Cumming