The Black Film Ambassador: The Ecstatic World of Albert Johnson

October 30–November 26, 2021

Dedicated to a pillar of the Bay Area film scene, film critic, curator, and educator Albert Johnson (1925–1998) the films in this series gesture toward the breadth of his interests and provide a welcome opportunity to celebrate his brilliant legacy.

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Daughters of the Dust
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
Charulata
Passing Through

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Past Films

Charulata
Satyajit Ray
India, 1964
Saturday, October 30 4:30 PM
Introduced by Edith Kramer
A shared interest in literature draws the wife of a political journalist to her husband’s cousin. One of Ray’s finest works, this is “a gracious, dignified character study” (Albert Johnson).
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Passing Through
Larry Clark
United States, 1977
Presented in collaboration with Film Quarterly
Sunday, October 31 2 PM
Larry Clark and Josslyn Luckett in Conversation
Passing Through theorizes that jazz is one of the purest expressions of African American culture, now hijacked by a white culture that brutally exploits musicians for profit. “An invaluable film-outcry” (Albert Johnson).
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Daughters of the Dust
Julie Dash
United States, 1991
Sunday, November 14 7 PM
Introduced by Ra Malika Imhotep
Experienced in sequences, from the perspectives of several generations of women, this film creates a fabric of universal themes: the conflicts between personal and collective history, and spiritual and industrial life.
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The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
Jacques Demy
France, 1964
Friday, November 26 4:30 PM
In this paean to Catherine Deneuve, French design, 1960s chic, MGM musicals, and Michel Legrand, a boy and girl love, lose, love again, and lose again against an assortment of fabulous wallpaper.
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The Black Film Ambassador: The Ecstatic World of Albert Johnson

October 30–November 26, 2021

Taking its title from Josslyn Luckett’s Fall 2021 Film Quarterly article, this spotlight series is dedicated to film critic, scholar, curator, and educator Albert Johnson (1925–1998) and is part of our ongoing celebration of five decades of year-round film programming at BAMPFA. A pillar of the Bay Area film scene, Johnson helped to create a thriving local film culture. He was a cofounder of Film Quarterly, a senior lecturer in the Department of African American Studies at UC Berkeley, and program director of the San Francisco International Film Festival from 1965 to 1972. A lover of and authority on musicals, he was described in the Guardian by film critic and historian David Robinson as “an all-singing, all-dancing scholar and a teacher who exerted the enchantment of a pied piper.” An inveterate traveler, Johnson presented American independent films alongside Hollywood classics around the world and brought the best of world cinema back to the Bay Area. The four films in this series—Satyajit Ray’s Charulata, Larry Clark’s Passing Through, Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, and Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg—gesture toward the breadth of his interests and provide a welcome opportunity to celebrate his brilliant legacy.

Luckett will be in conversation with director Larry Clark at the screening of Passing Through, presented in collaboration with Film Quarterly.

—Kate MacKay, Associate Film Curator

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Funded in part with support from the National Endowment for the Arts. Thanks to B. Ruby Rich and Rebecca Prime, Film Quarterly; Taylor Morales, Academy Film Archive; Todd Weiner and Steven K. Hill, UCLA Film and Television Archive; Tim Lanza, Cohen Media; and Brian Belovarac, Emily Woodburne, and Ben Crossly-Marra, Janus Films.

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Film Quarterly