This season we celebrate the 30-year anniversary of California Newsreel with an exciting series of films and videos from their Library of African Cinema collection. California Newsreel is a leading distributor of African cinema, of films on African American history and culture, and of media on the economy and working life. Formed in May 1968 as a producer and distributor of radical media, California Newsreel (then San Francisco Newsreel) became a voice for the decade's key movements for social change, including the anti-Vietnam War and Black Liberation movements. California Newsreel set up the Southern Africa Media Center in 1977, and soon after, launched the Media at Work project. About the Library of African Cinema, Cornelius Moore, who will be our guest on September 25, writes:"These films share a commitment to media as a tool for rebuilding Africa's shattered societies. Africa's social infrastructure has been decimated by colonialism and further undermined by its integration into a rapacious international economy and an inescapable global consumer culture. The resultant anarchy, if not its underlying causes, are all too familiar from the nightly news. Unlike Western media, however, the films in this collection also reveal Africans' persistence, imagination, and increasing success in reinvigorating a sense of community in the face of these daunting obstacles. It has often fallen to Africa's artists, rather than its sometimes compromised political leaders, to articulate a shared social vision which could form the basis for a self-reliant, productive Africa in the twenty-first century." Prints and tapes are from California Newsreel, except as noted. Program notes are condensed from the Library of African Cinema catalog, edited by Cornelius Moore.Monday September 14, 1998
