Chaos surrounds us. My reality as a cinema programmer is adapting to the rhythm. I struggle to hold onto––to make room for myself in––a time marked by headlines about the president of my adoptive country, the country where I live. I won’t mention his name. I will find refuge in those who have taken the time to reflect and offer some sort of solution in these convulsive times. The diffusion of knowledge on the web sends me back to the shelter of the analogical. Unable to visit Desert X (https://desertx.org/) or go to a natural park amid the glacial winter brought in by La Niña, reduced to living in a retransmitted world, “vicariously,” as they say here, I keep my radio and my computer turned on. They are faithful, tenacious companions. The paradox we are living in pushes me to seek out information online that forces me in turn to look outside. NPR and its programs accompany me on my walks and to the gym, interwoven with the soundtrack of my music library. Let me repeat: programs. I still refuse to call them podcasts. Maybe the fact that since childhood I’ve fallen asleep listening to the radio gives it a certain legitimacy. Or maybe it’s just a habit. Or no: let’s call it loyalty.
Two bits of news have plagued me in recent days. The first, a drum’s voyage home, from France to the Ivory Coast (https://africa.businessinsider.com/local/lifestyle/france-returns-sacred-drum-looted-from-ivory-coast-after-over-100-years/q6wvrq0), which reminds me of the restitution of a part of the Benin bronzes (the first shipment of which Mati Diop documented in 2024’s Dahomey)––and this carries resonances of an unfinished project, the rise of institutions like the UN and UNESCO in the middle of the preceding century with the mission of building a better world and avoiding global conflict. The second is the death of Jesse Jackson, the great follower of MLK, a man murdered by a country not yet ready to confess its sins. Now, as white male supremacy openly inhabits the highest circles of political, economic, and religious power, it is imperative that we turn back to his teachings.
I keep trying to disconnect. But can I? I visit local museums, and in my inbox, I find an announcement for a long-lost film rediscovered by the Reelblack collective (now back after years of silence during the pandemic): https://shop.reelblack.com/products/riverbend-blu-ray-pre-order-limited-edition). My husband and I meet with a couple of friends at the Philadelphia Film Society, just steps away from the Liberty Bell, to watch Riverbend (USA, 1989) by Sam Firstenberg and share, beneath the dimmed lights, with the director, some of the cast members, and a receptive public, a film in the Blaxploitation mode that has more to tell us about the present moment than the majority of films competing for the Oscars this year. The public, and the walk to the cinema in sub-zero temperatures surrounded by the snow that has enveloped us for weeks, leads me to reflect on my city in this moment dense with historical milestones (with new ones coming almost every minute). We’re on the verge of celebrating the 50th anniversary of Rocky, and in the summer, we have the World Cup and the country’s 250th birthday. It’s frightening to think how our forgotten infrastructure will cope. I suppose the people will be forced to pick up the slack. And once again, they will. A country shaken, maddened, trying relentlessly to find its way through the demagogues and online charlatans, proud heirs of those who, in its earliest days, sold snake oil and pulled teeth and spoke in tongues in thrall to distorted utopian creeds.
I think of the movies filmed here, in places now vanished in the (slow but visible) urban transformation of the past few decades, I remember the Liberty Day celebration and Brian de Palma’s portrait of the city in Blow Out (1981). I watch it again on the screen in my living room. Starring a young John Travolta natural in a way I miss in actors of today, this neo-noir, an American commentary on Antonioni’s Blowup (1966), with allusions to slasher films, to brazen entertainment, an appeal on the behalf of audio (so often the lesser partner in the audio-visual), it takes me back to a project I myself am working on, about exploitation cinema and its contemporary relevance. It restores my faith.
In the art world, determined to turn its back to reality, drunk on a blinkered doctrine of representation, there’s a profound need for self-criticism. How is it possible that people from Spanish-speaking countries, who make up twenty percent of the American population, have been systematically pushed aside? Looking at the latest photo exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, “Where Are We Now? American People and Places: 1955-2025” (https://www.philamuseum.org/exhibitions/where-are-we-now), you might think that this gigantic country has only two colors. This literal black-and-white perspective has been detrimental. It’s alienating .We should have been more prudent. Racial profiling and the rampant criminalization of recently-arrived Latinos, Africans, Asians, Arabs, people from any country who have come here as refugees or exiles or who simply look that way in the eyes of ICE and the Justice Department and in the infantile AI-generated memes posted by the US government, force us to ask what Democracy with a capital D means. It’s not enough, these intermittent attempts at correcting representation, giving visibility to minorities, when class lines are actively suppressed and the color line has become a source of profit for a privileged few. This has become one of my mantras: for years now, the color line has been misunderstood. The abolitionist Frederick Douglass––the most photographed man of his era––was the first to talk about this, in 1881: (https://archive.org/details/jstor-25100970/page/n1/mode/2up). At the dawn of the twentieth century, W.E.B. Dubois would revisit it (https://revisesociology.com/2025/04/21/w-e-b-du-bois-and-the-colour-line-racism-and-black-identity-in-america/), and would declare it the signal problem of the twentieth century in The Souls of Black Folk. Years later, in The Black Jacobins (1938), C.L.R. James would draw the necessary connections between the color and class lines, which pursue us to this day, when we have forgotten or abandoned the things that matter most: access to quality education and healthcare and the need to cultivate a fraternal love that will uproot primal divisions and will push us to meet each other as we are, person-to-person, following the ways of the Quakers who founded this city where I live, Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love.
I repeat: There is hope. In less than a month, at the Barnes Foundation, an exhibition will open at the Barnes Foundation that takes its title from a book by Robin D.G. Kelley, a distinguished student of C.L.R. James: Freedom Dreams (2002, https://www.beacon.org/Freedom-Dreams-P1855.aspx). In this book, he analyzed the world of intellectuals and artists through the concept of the “Black Radical Imagination,” essential to my work as a curator and professor of the cinema and art of Africa and its diaspora. At the Barnes, I will soon find myself with my artistic family, hand-in-hand with Arthur Jafa, Garrett Bradley, and many others. The beauty of their intentions, the pertinence of their messages in the continued expansion of the dialogue of democracy through art, gives me back a sense of the future. Again, I’ll be back with the screens, but this time in the museum’s halls, looking out onto the avenue crowned by the Rocky statue, this year with an informative plaque on its plinth to educate the clueless, who might think the city’s most famous cultural icon is a real person… the tendentious distance between cinema as art and entertainment… the dissolution of the boundary between real and fictional, AI manipulation and fake news… all that we’ll leave for another day.
As an exercise in mental health, after writing these words, I look through the comics that have remained beside me over the past weeks: Brad Neely, Charles Burns (another of Philly’s adopted sons), and Pierre La Police make room for me beside them. Thank you for being there for me, masters of the absurd.
Translated by Nate West.
* Beatriz Leal Riesco is a researcher, lecturer, critic, and curator specializing in contemporary African art and cinema and in the African diaspora.