Series Site
January 25–February 29, 2024
American filmmaker, cinematographer, photographer, and scholar Skip Norman (a.k.a. Wilbert Reuben Norman Jr.) was born in Baltimore and moved to West Germany in 1966 to study filmmaking at Berlin’s DFFB Film School. While there he befriended and worked with a group of filmmakers and activists interested in the revolutionary potential of the art form, including Gerd Conradt, Harun Farocki, Holger Meins, and Helke Sander.
In addition to serving as a cameraman and assistant director on several of his classmates’ works, Norman produced a remarkable but little-seen body of documentary, experimental, and essay films in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Building upon and contributing to the incendiary work of his collaborators decrying the Vietnam War, Norman produced a number of equally urgent films about his experience as a Black man in both Germany and his home country. Upon his subsequent return to the United States, he continued to collaborate with notable filmmakers like Haile Gerima.
While there have been selected presentations of Norman’s film work in Germany in recent years, his crucial and timely body of work is almost completely unknown elsewhere. This touring retrospective is the first dedicated to bringing his work as a cinematographer together with his work as a filmmaker. Furthermore, and importantly Skip Norman Here and There expands upon the modest attention that has been given to Norman’s work produced in Germany by considering his little-discussed work produced in the United States throughout the late 1970s.
—Jesse Cumming