Evading Capture: Black Women in Cinema Shorts Program

In celebration of the exhibition Simone Leigh, filmmaker and Leigh's collaborator Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich presents Evading Capture: Black Women in Cinema, a guest-curated film series exploring what happens after refusal. When desire is too bold or too risky to reveal, Black women have created other ways to express themselves—ways that blur the line between subject and object.

The program begins with this special online selection of short films, offering glimpses into bold and imaginative storytelling—from outlaws to orphans and beyond. Then, join us in person for a screening of Diva, the story of a singer who chooses to keep her art on her own terms, with a pre-show performance by classical singer Abiodun Koya and a post-screening conversation between Hunt-Ehrlich and scholar, curator, and critic Tiffany Barber.

Online Shorts Program

Killing Time
Fronza Woods
1979, 15 minutes
Preserved by the Academy Film Archive

Part of the mediamaking movement that first gave centrality to the voices and experiences of African American women during the late 1970s and early 1980s, these two re-releases are no less groundbreaking today. Killing Time, an offbeat, wryly humorous look at the dilemma of a would-be suicide unable to find the right outfit to die in, examines the personal habits, socialization, and complexities of life that keep us going. In Fannie's Film, a 65-year-old cleaning woman for a professional dancer's exercise studio performs her job while telling us in voiceover about her life, hopes, goals, and feelings. A challenge to mainstream media's ongoing stereotypes of women of color who earn their living as domestic workers, this seemingly simple documentary achieves a quiet revolution: the expressive portrait of a fully realized individual.

Breakdown
Simone Leigh and Liz Magic Laser
2011, 9 minutes

"Leigh, who is best known as a sculptor, and Laser, whose practice often turns public and political speech into performance scripts, decided to creatively collaborate when they discovered a shared interest in the depictions of "female hysteria" in popular media. For the initial score for Breakdown, they gathered scenes from soap operas, plays, movies, and reality television shows featuring characters expressing psychological crisis. The artists then worked with Alicia Hall Moran, the renowned mezzo-soprano, to interpret direct quotes and poses from this research material, which developed into the final libretto and choreography for the video.

In her tour-de-force performance, Moran's artistic range and improvisational ability transform the repetitive phrases and shrill cries of hysteria into musical layers that are associated with gravitas, heroism, and history. The overall operatic style aligns this Black woman's emotional release with a traditionally elitist European high-art form, raising questions about which expressive displays are valued or criticized, and whose personal dramas are legitimized or dismissed. The performance also includes touches of the blues, jazz, and gospel hymns—African American musical forms that are themselves creatives balms for the psychological and spiritual impacts of racial inequity and violence.

Though alone in a balcony, Moran points through the screen to us, her imagined audience. What role does our witnessing play when personal pain is presented for public consumption?"

—Musical Thinking: New Video Art and Sonic Strategies, 2023

Outfox the Grave
Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich
2020, 5 minutes

Outfox the Grave is a short film and a spell of protection. Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s rich and often surreal works blend narrative and documentary to explore the private worlds of Black women. Rooted in archival and field research, Hunt-Ehrlich’s practice uses abstraction as a mode of resistance in depicting subjects deprived of self-autonomy under the exploitative gaze of the colonial camera. In these four films, she relays a fragmentary history of the United Order of Tents, a semi-clandestine organization of Black women founded in the 1860s; looks at her grandmother’s life and musical compositions; interrupts the white gaze of the Western canon; and meditates on a series of anonymous photographs of Black life, speculating on the inner lives of photographers and subjects.

Florida Water
Numa Perrier
2014, 6 minutes

Numa Perrier reimagines the story and moments in a distinct photograph of her mother. What results is a complex merging of memory, absence, and imagery set against the backdrop of Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

10:28,30
Paige Taul
2019, 4 minutes

"As a part of the larger constellations of works concerning familial relationships, 10:28,30 examines the relationship between myself and my sister, and our relationship to our mother. I am interested in the dissonance of our lives apart and the tension in the desire to be together."

—Paige Taul