Midwood Movie is about both a Brooklyn, New York neighborhood and about motion pictures and their development. Shot over 12 years entirely on and around the former site of the American Vitagraph Company, the film presents an array of individual accounts of the site’s varied uses along with subjective appraisals of its importance. In so doing, the film digs up artifacts and artists entangled in harm and intolerance including J. Stewart Blackton who created one of the first animations with his Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906). Excavating through layers of historical obfuscation, Midwood Movie confronts the triggering racist and antisemitic imagery in Blackton’s work while also drawing out the contours of a neighborhood that bears the complex structural and systemic marks of race and ethnicity in America. Blending manifold media forms and formats with animation techniques that Blackton helped pioneer, Midwood Movie examines questions around preservation, contextualizing media and its monuments as contested sites of memory, culture, and politics.
Awarded funding from NYSCA, Individual Artist Award, UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art, Fiscal Sponsor. FY 2022.
Midwood Movie is the third film in a trilogy of “Midwood films” in which the director explores the intricate ways that sexual, ethnic, and racial difference take place in both the discursive and material aspects of media. In each of the three films, the mediated and ideologically freighted inscriptions of culture and history are made present in media practice.
Two companion films are Roll Bounce Parking Lot and An Odd Pair.
Selected screenings
2025Kingston School of Art, Kingston University. London, UK.
2025New York University, Martin Scorsese Dept. of Cinema Studies. New York, NY.
2024Stanford University, Stanford in New York. New York, NY.
2024Brooklyn College, Wolfe Institute for the Humanities. Brooklyn, NY.
2024Prismatic Ground Festival, New York, NY.
2024Labocine live selection, streaming.
Trailer
Stills
