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Bronzeville in Reel Time with South Side Home Movie Project

February 3 @ 1:00 pm - 3:00 pm

In partnership with South Side Home Movie Project, with support from the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelly Foundation and University of Chicago’s Arts and Public Life, SSCAC is thrilled to host a special screening showcasing select cinema reels of Ramon Williams! Ramon Williams, Black IBEW electrician and film hobbyist, was an early adopter of amateur filmmaking and invested in documenting the Bronzeville community in which he lived — filming major Bronzeville social and civic events between the 1940s and 1960s.

We’re honored to show a selection of these films during Black History Month, to highlight Ramon Williams’s commitment to documenting Black life on the South Side, and the lasting legacy of Black cinema’s power to visualize Black life in real time.

We’ll be joined by SSHMP Assistant Director, Saroop Singh (fka Justin Williams), Bronzeville Historical Society President Sherry Williams, and PhD student in Cinema and Media Studies at UChicago, Avery LaFlamme for a live dialogue about Ramon’s cinema work and legacy in the Bronzeville community.

Donated to South Side Home Movie Project in 2020, the Ramon Williams Collection encompasses 302 film reels, their largest donation yet, representing never-before-seen visual records of Bronzeville authored by one of its few citizens with a movie camera! What was Black social life like during that time? How did Black folks present and fashion themselves? What were significant events that took place in the Bronzeville community? We hope you’ll join us to find out!

SSHMP presents a uniquely successful model for encouraging local residents to recognize the value of their personal archives, to preserve original film prints in optimal conditions, and to digitize home movies for public access, creative projects and scholarly research. Their film vault currently houses over 600 film reels (8mm, Super 8, 16mm) from 33 South Side families. The Project offers a robust line-up of public programs that invite students, neighbors, artists and partner organizations to explore and activate the archive in imaginative new ways.

This program is generously supported by Arts and Public Life at the University of Chicago and the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelly Foundation