Patricia Zimmermann, Professor of Screen Studies and Codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, published a chapter in a new book, William Greaves: Filmmaking as Mission (Columbia University Press, 2021), edited by Scott MacDonald and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart.
Her chapter is entitled “A Guy Who Could Think Around the Corner: Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey.” It analyzes the social, political, and aesthetic context of the last film Greaves produced as a multi-platformed investigation into African American intellectual thought and transnational geopolitics of race and decolonization in the 20th century.
William Greaves: Filmmaking as Mission provides the first comprehensive overview of Greaves’s remarkable career.
It brings together a wide range of material, including a mix of incisive essays from critics and scholars, Greaves’s own writings, an extensive meta-interview with Greaves, conversations with his wife and collaborator Louise Archambault Greaves and his son David, and a critical dossier on Symbiopsychotaxiplasm.
Together, they illuminate Greaves’s mission to use filmmaking as a tool for transforming the ways African Americans were perceived by others and the ways they saw themselves. This landmark book is an essential resource on Greaves’s work and his influence on independent cinema and African-American culture.
https://www.ithaca.edu/intercom/article.php/20210525143446429