(USA/1943—directed by Vincente Minnelli) 

Mortally wounded while gambling, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson gets a heavenly reprieve thanks to prayers from his wife Ethel Waters, but Rex Ingram’s “Lucifer Jr.” has a secret weapon in the battle for Anderson’s soul: Lena Horne’s sultry and sweet Georgia Brown. Despite the competition, Waters proves to have “everything you’ve got and a whole lot more.”

Director Vincente Minnelli’s first major movie musical cast of some of the top Black talent of the day, including Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and his Orchestra, Butterfly McQueen, and Mantan Moreland—but above all Cabin in the Sky remains a stunning showcase for Waters’ legendary singing and comic genius. (98 min.)

This program is part of a companion series of film and music events presented in celebration of Regeneration: Black Cinema, 1898–1971, on view at the Detroit Institute of Arts Feb. 4–June 23, 2024. Regeneration is organized by the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.   

(USA/1961—directed by Daniel Petrie)  

When Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun premiered on Broadway in 1959 it was the first written by a Black woman, and the first with a Black director and cast nominated for Best Play, Best Actor (Sidney Poitier), Best Actress (Claudia McNeil), and Best Director (Lloyd Roberts) at that year’s Tony Awards®.

A film adaptation followed quickly, with several key members of the original cast reprising their roles, including McNeil as the matriarch of the close-knit Younger family and Poitier as her married son. Combined with supporting performances from Ruby Dee, Lou Gossett, and Ivan Dixon, this brilliant ensemble captured the struggle of Black families to nurture dreams for the future at the same time they are being forced to the edges of American society. (128 min.)  

“There are times it seems as if every member of the cast is striving for an Oscar and coming near to copping it.” —Marjory Adams, The Boston Globe, 1961 

This program is part of a companion series of film and music events presented in celebration of Regeneration: Black Cinema, 1898–1971, on view at the Detroit Institute of Arts Feb. 4–June 23, 2024. Regeneration is organized by the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.   

(Argentina/1951—directed by Pierre Chenal)  

One of the most controversial novels of its day, Richard Wright's Native Son (first published in 1940) exposed the relentless injustices of urban Black life, as seen through the eyes of the main character, the complicated, violent chauffeur-turned-murderer Bigger Thomas. In prison for murder and sentenced to death, Thomas reflects on the circumstances that led to his fate.

Wright himself stars in this new restoration of the 1951 film adaptation. Native Son is preceded by a filmed introduction by the historian Jacqueline Najima Stewart. (84 min.) 

This program is part of a companion series of film and music events presented in celebration of Regeneration: Black Cinema, 1898–1971, on view at the Detroit Institute of Arts Feb. 4–June 23, 2024. Regeneration is organized by the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.   

(France/Luxembourg/Netherlands/2023—directed by Wang Bing)  

The latest epic work of observational nonfiction from Wang Bing continues the filmmaker’s chronicle of the economic, social, and personal upheavals happening across a transforming China. Youth (Spring) is a remarkable account of rural migrant workers employed in textile factories in Zhili, a town outside Shanghai.

This film is specifically about the lives of the young, and forcefully and humanely depicts—with its director’s reassuring patience and unassuming formal rigor—the consequences of the country’s rapid growth on the minds and bodies of a new generation of workers. Official Selection, Cannes, New York, and Toronto International Film Festivals. In Mandarin with English subtitles. (218 min.) 

“Wang Bing sits at the pinnacle of the Chinese documentary groundswell.” —Nicolas Rapold, The New York Times 
 

(USA/1955—directed by Otto Preminger)  

Composer George Bizet's opera Carmen—the tragedy of an honorable soldier who is led to perdition by a passionate but reckless woman—has become standard repertoire in concert halls since its premiere in 1875. Its unique syncopated score was taken from Spanish and Cuban dance rhythms, the same source of inspiration for early Black jazz pioneers such as W. C. Handy.

It was adapted as the Broadway musical Carmen Jones in 1943, with the scenes reset to a WWII parachute factory. Preminger’s film version of this production has a powerful all-Black cast that includes Harry Belafonte as the soldier and Dorothy Dandridge in the title role, and pioneering cinematography using the new widescreen Cinemascope format.

Dandridge’s incandescent performance as a proud spirit who refuses to conform to social expectations earned her the first Academy Award® nomination for Best Actress given to a Black woman. (105 min.) 

This program is part of a companion series of film and music events presented in celebration of Regeneration: Black Cinema, 1898–1971, on view at the Detroit Institute of Arts Feb. 4–June 23, 2024. Regeneration is organized by the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.   

(Romania/2023—directed by Radu Jude) 

Radu Jude is among the most radical filmmakers working today and one of the few unafraid to diagnose the absurd evils that make contemporary living what it is. In his latest and most darkly comic film, Jude explodes conventional boundaries of narrative, charting a course through one day in the life of a severely overworked film production assistant, Angela, who drives around Bucharest filming accident victims auditioning to be in a safety video for a multinational corporation.

At the same time, the sleep-deprived Angela upkeeps her own side project—a trash-talking alter ego with more than 20,000 online viewers that serves as the film’s perverse Greek chorus. Through ingenious intercutting, Jude initiates a conversation with his country’s past and present about the ability of the captured image to exploit, and to contort the truth. In Romanian with English subtitles. (163 min.) 

(USA/1924-28—directed by Solomon Sir Jones)  

The Reverend Solomon Sir Jones was a successful Baptist minister and early documentary filmmaker in Oklahoma during the 1920s. He was a defender of the movement for all-Black Oklahoma towns that would be built and governed by Black inhabitants. Starting in 1924, Jones recorded life in the towns of Taft, Clearview, Melvin, and Boley with the then-new 16 mm film equipment.

The surviving footage preserves images of daily life — worship, sporting events, schools, parades, Masonic meetings, picnics, funerals, and Juneteenth celebrations. Jones’ 29 reels of silent black-and-white celluloid are now considered the definitive film record of the Great Migration of the 1920s. (60 min.)  

This program is a compilation of unedited footage from the films of Solomon Sir Jones, presented with a musical score by Alvin Waddles (piano), Marion Hayden (upright bass), and Leslie Deshazor (viola). 

This program is part of a companion series of film and music events presented in celebration of Regeneration: Black Cinema, 1898–1971, on view at the Detroit Institute of Arts Feb. 4–June 23, 2024. Regeneration is organized by the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.  

(USA/1933—directed by Dudley Murphy)  

The Emperor Jones is an early sound film based on Eugene O’Neill’s groundbreaking 1920 theater work. The story follows a Black Pullman porter accused of murder, who evades prison by escaping to a remote Caribbean island where he sets himself up as the titular emperor.

The play toured New York and London in 1925 with a young Paul Robeson in the lead, delivering searing performances that made him an international star. The film adaptation — Robeson’s most important screen role — was made outside the prevailing restrictions of the Hollywood studio system by avant-garde director Dudley Murphy (Ballet Mécanique).

Had it come out a year later, O’Neill’s transgressive themes on race and critiques of colonialism would have been censored by the puritanical Motion Picture Production Code. (72 min.) 

Made prior to the implementation of the Motion Picture Code, The Emperor Jones remains a potent parable about power, exploitation, and race. This original, uncensored version of the film includes language, racial epithets and cultural characterizations that may be offensive and disturbing to viewers today, as they were in 1933.

This screening will be introduced by Sam White, founding Artistic Director of Shakespeare in Detroit, who will discuss the legacy of Paul Robeson’s performance and the connection to Eugene O’Neill’s original stage production of The Emperor Jones.

This program is part of a companion series of film and music events presented in celebration of Regeneration: Black Cinema, 1898–1971, on view at the Detroit Institute of Arts Feb. 4–June 23, 2024. Regeneration is organized by the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.   

(USA/1981—directed by Francis Ford Coppola)  

After finally—and successfully—completing his famously troubled production of Apocalypse Now in the Philippines, Coppola turned to the controlled interiors of Hollywood studios for this stylized musical romance, with cinematography by the great Vittorio Storaro (Last Tango in Paris) and an innovative score by Tom Waits.

Teri Garr and Frederic Forest are a couple who break up during their fifth anniversary celebration in Las Vegas, encountering surprises and complications in the persons of Raul Julia, Nastassja Kinski, and Harry Dean Stanton.

Critics and exhibitors dismissed the film after seeing an unfinished preview and it was rarely screened, but the movie’s delicacy and conceptual daring more than justifies this newly minted restoration from a true cinematic pioneer. (107 min.)  

“Dazzling. Coppola’s film is sensuous, gaudy, dreamlike, baroque... a hymn to Hollywood tinsel.” –David Ansen, Newsweek 

When Ryuichi Sakamoto died last March at 71, the world lost one of its great musicians: a classical composer, a techno-pop artist, and a piano soloist who elevated every genre he worked in and inspired music lovers across the globe. As a final gift, filmmaker Neo Sora (Sakamoto’s son) constructed this stunning elegy starring Sakamoto himself in one of his final performances, in Tokyo in 2022.

This intimate and beautiful one-man show features just Sakamoto and a Yamaha grand, as the composer glides through his most haunting, delicate melodies. This unique work was described by the 2023 New York Film Festival as “bringing us so close to a living, breathing artist that it feels like pure grace.” In Japanese with English subtitles. (102 min.)