Rider hosts film symposium on Spike Lee and African American Film

Rider University will host the 2016 Film and Media Studies/Cinema Studies Symposium on Feb. 26 and 27 on its Lawrenceville campus. This year’s theme, Spike Lee and African-American Film, focuses on the work of a filmmaker whose central themes of race and identity have erupted back into the national conversation after a series of controversial citizen deaths at the hands of the police.

Dr. Cynthia Lucia, professor of English and the director of Rider’s Film and Media Studies program, organizes the annual film symposium, bringing the perspective of scholars and professionals to students, faculty, staff and the broader community each spring. Recent symposium themes have included animation, film comedy, the horror film, and the interplay between Broadway and Hollywood. She also has organized special film programs, most recently Film Music Inside and Outside of Hollywood and a scholarly conference devoted to the works of Oliver Stone, which the filmmaker attended. The events help build and sustain a film culture on campus and in the community.

One of the highlights of this year’s symposium is a roundtable discussion on Feb. 26 that will feature several scholars on Spike Lee and African American film, including Paula J. Massood, film professor (CUNY Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center) and the author of Black City Cinema: African American Experiences in Film; Michael Gillespie, an associate professor at City College of New York and the author of the forthcoming book Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film; and Ashley Clark, journalist, film programmer and the author of Facing Blackness: Media and Minstrelsy in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled.

Over two days, movies will be screened and both students and faculty will present their work on Lee's Do the Right Thing, Bamboozled, She’s Gotta Have It, as well as films by other directors on African American film and history, including Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates and Hal Ashby’s The Landlord.

At Rider, Lucia teaches across several programs, including English, American Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Law and Justice. She is currently working on a book about the actress Natalie Wood. In addition to frequent appearances in the film journal Cineaste, where she has served on the editorial board more than two decades, she has also written for Film Journal International and The Guardian and has had essays published in numerous anthologies.

Lucia’s previous books include Framing Female Lawyers: Women on Trial in Film (University of Texas, 2005), as well as the four-volume Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012); American Film History: Origins-1960 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), and American Film History: 1960 to the Present (Wiley Blackwell, 2016), all of which she co-edited.

The symposium is free and open to the community. No registration is necessary. A detailed schedule, with times and locations, is available at www.rider.edu/events/film-symposium.