[Chicago Crossings: Bridges and Boundaries, ITVS Sample]

A rough cut of the first part of the documentary created by Kartemquin Films about the Spertus Museum of Judaica's 1992 exhibition "Bridges and Boundaries."

1:24Copy video clip URL Intro sequence. A series of shots showing the artists working in studio is accompanied by a non-diegetic soundtrack, “Eliyahu” by Chicago native and jazz pianist Ben Sidran.

2:36Copy video clip URL Kerry James Marshall talks about seeing a photo of Baruch Goldstein wearing the six-pointed star, and then seeing it used around his Bronzeville neighborhood as a gang symbol. “I see an equivalence, in a lot of ways, between the dynamics of the way [the Israeli Kach] group operates and gang-banging.

3:52Copy video clip URL John Pitman Weber says he thinks that for many whites, focusing too much on race “becomes a way of distancing oneself from problems.” He says he wants to find some way to represent the barrier between the viewer and the image.

4:59Copy video clip URL Esther Parada is shown photographing Marva Jolly. “I’m trying to get equivalent positions for all the people, and then we’ll end up doing some blending. I want to do it just like the Time magazine where they had all the different ethnic and racial types on the x-coordinate and on the y,” Parada explains while referencing  the November 18, 1993 issue of Time.

5:22Copy video clip URL Sonny Venice (pseudonym of Hamza Walker) is shown holding the aforementioned issue of Time while maintaining that the creators of the cover have mistaken the idea of diversity with homogeneous blending.

5:50Copy video clip URL Parada is shown manipulating the images taken of Marshall. “Let’s go for the Michael Jackson effect,” Marshall jokes, met by a rouse of laughter.

6:39Copy video clip URL Fan Warren introduces the problems that Blacks and Jews are having, saying that these problems are “over the black and white issue, which is really not our issue.”

6:54Copy video clip URL All twelve artists are seated around a table discussing Louis Farrakhan, leader of the religious group Nation of Islam. Jolly argues that the anti-Semitic views expressed by Farrakhan are “not an issue in my house, so don’t come to my neighborhood with that.” She goes on to say, “Let the people who need to deal with denouncing that do it,” to which John Rozelle, Gerda Meyer-Bernstein, and Edith Altman respond that Blacks and Jews cannot move forward until the issue is addressed as a community.

7:52Copy video clip URL Jerry Blumenthal asks Rozelle whether or not he thinks Jews are different from other white people, to which Rozelle responds, “Well, they are and they are not. I think that as soon as they latch on to the professed arrogance and professed superiority of European culture, I think they’re just like any other white person. And I think they’re different in that they have this oppression that has been with them for ages,” he explains.

9:08Copy video clip URL Meyer-Bernstein comments on the histories of both groups of people. “We’ve got 400 years of Black slavery and we’ve got 2,000 years of Jewish persecution, and it’s going to be a super-difficult thing to try to have this process of healing.”

9:28Copy video clip URL Othello Anderson says that he thought the Black–Jewish issues were just isolated incidents in places like New York, and did not see it as a cultural phenomenon.

9:40Copy video clip URL Jolly says, “It has become almost a tabloid kind of issue, which I think is most unfortunate.” She feels there’s a lot said that doesn’t have much substance, “but [there’s] a lot of pain connected to it.” She also mentions there isn’t the same sense of Holocaust with black people, which makes it hard to talk about shared sufferings.

10:13Copy video clip URL The film cuts to Altman alone with her installation where she indirectly responds to Jolly’s previous claim. Altman alludes to an Illinois Assembly meeting in which the word “holocaust” was mentioned in reference to the “Black holocaust,” in which “100 million Black Africans… that had died, that had been squeezed on the boats, the children and the adults, just like the Jews were squeezed in the trains. I share with them, unfortunately, the holocaust,” Altman says.

11:14Copy video clip URL Rozelle expresses his hopes for the show, saying he’s looking for “more dialogue to be created” because “people are afraid to talk about stuff, or they’re afraid to be honest about stuff.”

 
 
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