STAGE & SCREEN PHOTO COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
When did you first develop an interest in film? I watched a lot of old movies with my aunt late at night. I had never realized before that there were so many stories inside of movies. My aunt would tell me, “These two stars had an affair,” or a certain star was at a certain studio. I realized movies are connected to each other. You could follow what was going on with a star or a director. That was fascinating to me and really stuck with me. When did you first start exploring your love for film?
From Hyde Park to Hollywood An interview with Jacqueline Stewart. BY SONYA ALEXANDER
J
ust like the various regions of America are what make it whole, the many cities that contributed to the growth of the U.S. film industry make it what it is today. Chicago—and Black Chicago—was prolific in film production before Hollywood became the hub of the industry, and it was a center of film innovation in the early 1900s. Black contributions to the nascent days of film are often overlooked, but thankfully current-day torchbearers are working to preserve and disseminate
little-known facts about Black film and filmmakers. University of Chicago film studies scholar Jacqueline Stewart is one such leader—a griot by nature but an inquisitive film analyst and archivist by trade. On the U. of C. faculty since 2013, she was until earlier this year the director of the university’s Arts + Public Life program; she’s also the founder of the South Side Home Movie Project, and the host of the Turner Classic Movies’ weekly programming series “Silent Sunday Nights.” Very few of us
are lucky enough to take “home” with us wherever we go, but Stewart, a Chicago native, is this year able to represent her community even while distanced from it. On leave from her position at the university, she’s the newly appointed chief artistic and programming officer for Los Angeles’s Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, which opens its doors September 30, 2021. The Weekly spoke with Stewart about her work, past and future. This conversation has been edited for clarity.
When I went to college. I grew up on the South Side of Chicago; I went to Kenwood Academy. I got into Stanford University—amazing. I wanted to be a journalist; I started taking some classes in literature. It was around the time that Spike Lee was coming on the scene. I saw She’s Gotta Have It (1986), and I was so deeply conflicted. I’d never seen a Black film like that before by a Black director. We were all rallying to support this young original voice. There’s a rape scene in that movie. It seemed like it was a movie about a woman, but seen through the perspective of a man. I was grappling with it—how could I love it but have these kinds of questions about it at the same time? That’s when I discovered that people study film, and they pursue questions like that. I was reading stuff that bell hooks wrote about Spike Lee’s career. I started learning about feminist film theory. I was applying it to this immediate question I had in my mind about how to think about Spike Lee’s films, and that’s what I ended up writing my B.A. thesis about. What is your exact title now, and what does it entail? I’m the chief artistic and programming officer at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. In that role, I oversee four areas: curatorial, so all of our exhibitions and our collecting strategies. Publications, because we’re doing books and catalogues related to many of our exhibitions, including an JUNE 10, 2021 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17
