This month, Movie Madness University (MMU) is excited to announce that a new instructor has joined their team. Jeff Oliver is a filmmaker and teacher who makes his MMU debut with a class on Black Independent Cinema which takes place four Thursdays (8, 15, 22 and 29), 7 pm. Take a trip through the “New Jack Swing” era of Black independents cinema. In the 1980s and 1990s, filmmakers Robert Townsend, Kathleen Collins, Charles Burnett and Cheryl Dunye produced groundbreaking, pioneering work–though it was often neglected in favor of white contemporaries like Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith and Steven Soderbergh. The class will explore and contextualize four key films from pivotal Black directors. Along the way, the class will chart the earliest days of Black independent film with Oscar Micheaux and explore how the industry changed after the glut of Blaxploitation films in the 1970s.
Additionally, Max Swanson presents an exploration of movie musicals that double as soundtrack vehicles Mondays (5, 12, 19, 26), 6:30 pm. Popular music and popular cinema have long collaborated in celebrity-making, with a relationship that exists at the intersection of spectacle and commerce. The class will look at some of the greatest and goofiest music movies of the 1960s-1990s–and the bands that made them. Along the way, questions like: Why do we love to see musicians (try to) act? How did these movies come together? Are any of these movies actually…good? will be explored.
Email education@moviemadness.org with “film titles” in the subject line for a complete list of titles that will be shown in the classes. Registration ($60-$75) at .
