BLACK, 2009, France

7pm, Thursday, April 1, 2010
ICE Theaters Chatham 14
210 E. 87th Street • Chicago, IL
773-892-3204 - General Admission: $5.00
After film Discussion: Nina Cartier,
Doctoral Candidate, Screen Cultures, Northwestern University*

A groovy 70s-style adaptation of Richard Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra (you know, the theme music from 2001: A Space Odyssey) sets a funky tone for the opening of BLACK, which moves briskly and efficiently from a slickly-shot "armored car robbery gone bad" in Paris to a modern update of Shaft in Africa to a lunatic, witchy, bastard offspring of Cat People and Ssssss. It's gloriously lunatic.

Think of it as the The Bourne Identity if Jason Bourne was an ambitious, African-born Parisian criminal set loose on the streets of Dakar, Senegal. The title character, impressively played by rap artist MC Jean Gab'1 (District B13), survives a botched heist and then gets a phone call from his cousin in Dakar. It seems that a tiny bag filled with big diamonds has been placed in a local bank's safe deposit box for safekeeping, and cousin has the key to the box. All they have to do is blow through inadequate security and pay off a few underpaid guards, and the diamonds will be theirs. Black's eyes light up, and before you can count to three, he's on a plane to Dakar with three of his buddies.

Black was born in Senegal but moved away as a child and has never returned. He views his homecoming through opportunistic, criminal eyes, disgusted by the poverty and apparent simplicity of the people, and all too ready to take advantage of his cousin's tip. His arrival is the tipping point in a series of ever-escalating, mad adventures.

MC Jean Gab’1 is BLACK
One of the most powerful voices of the first generation of French Hip Hop artists, MC Jean Gab’1 (pronounced Gabin like the classic French actor famed for his portrayals of criminal low-life) was no stranger to Black’s dilemma, having once been jailed on robbery charges. He made his screen debut in 2003 in District B13, followed by Seul Two and District 13, Ultimatum He will be publishing his autobiography in 2009 and releasing his second album, the long-awaited follow-up to Je t’emmerde. His true-life story and explosive personality make his portrayal of Black powerfully authentic.

*Nina Cartier is a Doctoral Candidate at Northwestern University. She studies the representations of blackness in film and changes in narration, particularly in blaxploitation, early cinema, and race films. Her most recent research projects include “Reel Niggas?: Examining White Constructions of Urban Blackness in Blaxploitation Films,” “Somethin’ Just Ain’t Right: ‘Quareness’ as a Paradigm for Probing Narration in Early Black Cinema,” and “Do the Robot?: Black Modernity, the Spectacle of Dancing, and Early Cinema.”  Her first publication will be a chapter included in the Women and the Silent Screen Conference Proceedings,  for her paper “I Get Lifted?: Delineating Uplift’s Restrictions Upon Black Female Desire in Silent Era Race Films.” Her dissertation explores the changes blaxploitation wrought upon the representations of the black body in time and space and the narrational strategies the genre utilized.