The Speculative Archive: Ina Archer and Crystal Z Campbell

Presented as part of The Speculative Archive: Contemporary Black Experimental Film and Video, Crystal Z Campbell and Ina Archer in conversation with Jennifer DeClue, Christopher Harris, and Allyson Nadia Field.

RW (Ina Archer, 2004, 2’) 

Using the dream/hallucination structure often associated with “film noir”, RW “gazes” at Archer's mother’s favorite actor, Richard Widmark. Cab Calloway and Toshiro Mifune join in.

Chlo-e:OK Ina! (Ina Archer, 2013, 4’) 

Dandied up in a rodeo-do stetson and chaps, Ina channels Oklahoma Bob Albright appropriating Spiritual singer, Jules Bledsoe, crooning Chl-oe!

The Lincoln Film Conspiracy (Ina Archer, 2005-2021, 30’) 

The Lincoln Film Conspiracy is both a 30-minute film and a six-minute multi-screen installation that combines archival film footage, new video segments, and digital image manipulation. Archer recreates the sound and imagery of vintage sci-fi, and musical films to imagine an anthropologist’s discovery of vanished black movies that had previously been abducted by aliens. The Lincoln Film Conspiracy is set in the present, reflects on the past and imagines the future. The film humorously confronts the practice of film preservation and archiving, particularly of work by minority and regional artists.

Go-rilla Means War (Crystal Z Campbell, 2017, 19’) 

Go-Rilla Means War, and its faded and discolored frames, are a metonym for Bedford-Stuyvesant’s deterioration by way of neglect, media demonization of Black bodies, and the War on Drugs, all of which formed a constellation leading to Bed-Stuy’s current gentrification.

Viewfinder (Crystal Z Campbell, 2020, 18’) 

Viewfinder was shot entirely in the resort town of Varberg, Sweden and features recent migrants to Sweden. This immersive film installation takes cues from Swedish folktales, gestures, and movements to explore belonging, allyship, and living monuments. If our bodies are archives, what is the currency of place, of movement, of memory?

Ina Archer is a filmmaker, visual artist, programmer, and writer. An advocate for film preservation, she is a Media Conservation and Digitization Specialist at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture, and the former co-chair of New York Women in Film & Television Women’s Film Preservation Fund. Her artwork and filmmaking examine the intersections of race/ethnicity, representation, and technology. Her practice explores the intersection of the archive, materiality, self-representation, performance, and speculative imaginings of Black pasts, futures, and alternative presents. The Lincoln Film Conspiracy, in its 3-channel form, reimagines the fate of the Lincoln Motion Picture Company films—race films made by one of the earliest Black film companies for Black audiences—and a fabulated subsidiary, “Archina Productions.” Preceded by two short films activating the archive of film history, RW (2004) and Chlo-e:OK Ina! (2013). 

Crystal Z Campbell is a multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of Black, Filipinx, and Chinese descents. Campbell finds complexity in public secrets—fragments of information known by many but undertold or unspoken. Campbell’s works use underloved archival material to consider historical gaps. Campbell’s creative practice spans painting, sculpture, performance, film, writing, and site-specific installations. Go-Rilla Means War (2017) is a filmic relic of gentrification. Featuring 35mm film salvaged from a now demolished Black civil rights theater in Brooklyn, the film is a parable weaving intersections of development, cultural preservation, and erasure. Viewfinder (2020) was filmed entirely in a Swedish spa town and takes cues from political gestures and decisive movements to explore belonging, allyship, and monuments. 

Jennifer DeClue is Associate Professor in The Program for the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College. She is a queer studies scholar who specializes in Black feminism, gender and chattel slavery, queer of color critique, film studies, popular culture, and the avant-garde. She earned her doctorate in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California and has been teaching at Smith College since 2015.

Made possible by the generous co-sponsorship of the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts & Inquiry, the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, Chicago Studies, the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture, the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, Department of Cinema and Media Studies, Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity, and the Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality.