Film Screenings / Programs / Series
MALCOLM X: MULTIDIMENSIONAL
September 11 – September 21
September 11-21, 2025
To many, the memory of Malcolm X is an image: steady eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses, white shirt and dark tie underneath a sharp suit, radiating composed authority and charismatic fervor. A monumental historical and cultural figure, his hyper-photographed and -televised image was distorted, demonized, and commodified by mainstream media and Hollywood – in life, as in death. Yet Malcolm X, or rather el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, often pictured with a camera in hand, was a virtuosic conductor of his own public persona. He deftly used his image to advance a political and spiritual project for Black liberation and self-determination that expanded into a Pan-Africanist and internationalist vision for freedom from imperialism, colonialism, and global oppression.
MALCOLM X: MULTIDIMENSIONAL brings together a cinematic and audiovisual cultural memory to frame his multifaceted legacy, intertwining Islam, education, Black Nationalism, militant organizing, incarceration, and Third Worldist solidarity. Through mythmaking, recordkeeping, documentaries, and experimental films; network programs of speeches and interviews with Malcolm X as well as his contemporaries and inheritors; documentation by Black television producers; and the radical imaginaries of artists, the series constructs a prismatic perspective on the many people Malcolm X was, and places the individual in a collective picture.
Guest-programmed by Yasmina Price, who also wrote the introduction and program descriptions.
Special thanks to all the filmmakers; and to Ruta Abolins (University of Georgia); Ina Archer & Blake McDowell (National Museum of African American History & Culture); Brian Belovarac (Janus Films); Smokey Fontaine; Mickey Gral (Chicago Film Archives); Michael Holland (Los Angeles City Archives); Bob Hunter (Icarus Films); Anjelica James (WNET); Edward McCarry (Cinema Guild); Karl McCool & Jooyoung Park (EAI); Elen Orson; Jake Perlin (The Film Desk); Paul Richards (Estuary Press); Elena Rossi-Snook (NYPL); Roselly Torres & Shu Wang (Third World Newsreel); and Mike Wendt.
PROGRAM 1: BLACK ARTS AND RETELLING HISTORY
The cultural impact of Malcolm X has proven immense: his assassination marked the birth of the 1960s-70s Black Arts Movement, he became the central icon of 1980s-90s hip-hop, and he has continued to inspire and influence artmaking across every medium. His rhetoric is remixed as rap in documentarian Dick Fontaine’s MALCOLM X: NO SELL OUT (1984) music video, made with Pat Harley. Magicians in an experimental laboratory, artists and filmmakers John Akomfrah and Jenn Nkiru reveal how the intertwinement of aesthetics and politics function to re-author a self-determined Black history. Nkiru’s mesmerizing REBIRTH IS NECESSARY features a trio of NOI women performing a brief salute within a constellation of references points – James Baldwin, Alice Coltrane, Kwame Nkrumah, Kathleen Cleaver, Sun Ra – which converge and collide in a vision of Blackness across time. Made while Akomfrah was a member of the Black Audio Film Collective, the multi-voiced testimony of SEVEN SONGS FOR MALCOLM X (1993) includes Betty Shabazz, Greg Tate, and Thulani Davis in a knotted study of memory making, fusing the mobility of jazz and the sculptural stillness of photography. As historical retellings, they each layer and remix the cultural narrative and aesthetic imprint of Malcolm X.
Dick Fontaine MALCOLM X: NO SELL OUT 1984, 6 min, video
Jenn Nkiru REBIRTH IS NECESSARY 2017, 10 min, digital
John Akomfrah
SEVEN SONGS FOR MALCOLM X
1993, 52 min, video
Total running time: ca. 75 min.
Thurs, Sept 11 at 6:45 and Tues, Sept 16 at 9:00. The screening on Thurs, Sept 11 will be followed by a conversation between film professor Nzingha Kendall and guest-curator Yasmina Price!
PROGRAM 2: BLACK TELEVISION
Three segments demonstrate how public television and broadcast media were claimed as a vehicle for exercising Black autonomy over communication, representation, organizing, and mass education. “Black Journal” (1968-1977) was the first nationally televised public affairs program to focus on Black people under the direction of Black media workers. Under the leadership of William Greaves and the collaborative network of documentarians and artists, it prioritized independence and self-determination, covering political, cultural, economic, and social topics with international breadth, while also inventing a format copied by mainstream broadcast networks which continues to have an influence on Black documentary practice. “Black Television” includes episodes of “Black Journal” (made for the fourth and seventh anniversaries of the assassination of Malcolm X); Madeleine Anderson’s 1967 A TRIBUTE TO MALCOLM X; and the 1972 WHO KILLED MALCOLM? A groundbreaking documentarian and producer, the centenarian Anderson created a multifaceted portrait of Malcolm X through wide-ranging records, asserting the centrality of Betty Shabazz and charting his evolution from early life to American Black Nationalism to an internationalist struggle for human rights – a point reiterated in Malcolm X’s closing address to students in Selma. WHO KILLED MALCOLM? relies on a comparable wealth of visual materials, including testimonies, to sketch a more detailed profile of his life and to probe the questions left around the circumstances of his assassination. Drawing on an indirect lineage from “Black Journal”, the 1990s video collective Black Planet Productions (whose motto was “The Revolution, Televised”) took an experimental approach to toggle between historical impact and contemporary understandings in X 1/2: THE LEGACY OF MALCOLM X.
Madeline Anderson
A TRIBUTE TO MALCOLM X
1967, 16 min, 16mm
Black Planet Productions
X 1/2: THE LEGACY OF MALCOLM X
1994, 45 min, video
Black Journal [Episode 51]
WHO KILLED MALCOLM?
1972, 45 min, video
Total running time: ca. 110 min.
Thurs, Sept 11 at 9:00 and Wed, Sept 17 at 6:30. The screening on Wed, Sept 17 will be introduced by George Sosa from Black Planet Productions, and will be followed by a conversation with Baba Zayid Muhammad of the Malcolm X Commemoration Committee! This program will be free of charge / suggested donation. Advance tickets are available for a suggested donation cost of $8, or will be available at the box office during the evening of each screening for free, or for whatever donation amount audience members wish.
PROGRAM 3: FABRICATED IMAGES
A selection of experimental films, unedited materials, and surveillance footage critically address the commodification and misuse of Malcolm X as a caricatured image and symbolic currency. FABRICATED IMAGES shows how audiovisual media have been rerouted as a means of authenticating and upholding an oppositional record aligned with his political ends. Although initially part of the LAPD’s own recordkeeping, once released and recirculated, the footage of the MALCOLM X PRESS CONFERENCE ON DEADLY POLICE RAID IN LOS ANGELES (1962) shows the malleability of visual records – the 16mm reel now operating as a way to remember and transmit his condemnation of the murder of Ronald Stokes and wounding of six other worshipers outside a mosque. Ken Jacobs works with what he called “the out-takes of history” – unedited and discarded newscast found footage – to unmask the mechanisms of TV media in the slyly-titled PERFECT FILM (1984), relaying the immediate reactions to Malcolm X’s assassination. Pantomiming the style of MTV, the band X-PRZ (ft. Tony Cokes) critiques the appropriation of Malcolm X’s image to the ends of profit-driven commercial culture through an effective mix of archival images, musical samples, and desktop video technology. Similarly, X – THE BABY CINEMA by Robert Banks deftly uses 35mm celluloid to create an analytical collage exposing the mechanics of power in the visual memory of Malcolm X. Cinéma engagé practitioner Edouard de Laurot collaborated with the Black Panther Party to create the combative, cinematic pamphlet initially titled BLACK LIBERATION, before the pressures of censorship forced a change to SILENT REVOLUTION. A formally agitated call to arms, Malcolm X is claimed to have also been involved behind the camera – which would make this a rare, directly authored piece of his cinematic existence.
MALCOLM X PRESS CONFERENCE ON DEADLY POLICE RAID IN LOS ANGELES 1962, 10 min, 16mm-to-digital
Ken Jacobs PERFECT FILM 1985, 24 min, 16mm
X-PRZ [Tony Cokes, Doug Anderson, Kenseth Armstead, and Mark Pierson] NO SELL OUT… OR I WNT 2 B TH ULTIMATE COMMODITY/ MACHINE (MALCOLM X PT. 2) 1995, 5 min, digital
Robert Banks X – THE BABY CINEMA 1992, 4 min, 16mm
Edouard de Laurot BLACK LIBERATION / SILENT REVOLUTION 1967, 37 min, 16mm-to-DCP
Total running time: ca. 85 min.
Fri, Sept 12 at 6:30 and Wed, Sept 17 at 9:15. The screening on Fri, Sept 12 will be introduced by Kenseth Armstead from X-PRZ, and will be followed by a conversation between film artist Christopher Harris and guest-curator Yasmina Price!
PROGRAM 4: UNLEARNING PRISONS
For Malcolm X – as for many Black revolutionaries – prison was a university. Held captive in a structure of unmediated, punitive state violence, he converted to Islam and entered into a dedicated period of self-education and study, reading widely, unlearning the world taught by white supremacy and catalyzing spiritual, intellectual, and political evolution. Although he did not have an espoused abolitionized platform, his fierce opposition to the racialized brutality of policing and coercive state power draws a clear connection to that dimension of struggle. “Unlearning Prisons” pairs two documentaries that interweave the fight against the carceral state and the centrality of education. Although the magnitude of his contributions is far less known, the radical bookstore owner turned jailhouse lawyer at the center of FRAME-UP! THE IMPRISONMENT OF MARTIN SOSTRE emerges as a parallel to Malcolm X – in their shared dedication to Black Liberation, political education, and internationalist anti-imperialism. Sostre was also at one point involved with the Nation of Islam, and along with an incarcerated comrade, once appealed to Malcolm X to testify in their trial. He was imprisoned at Attica in 1967, where a historic prisoner rebellion took place only a few years later in 1971, forming the subject of TEACH OUR CHILDREN. Choy and Robeson’s film documents the insurgency and interviews those incarcerated there, tracing the development of a broader prisoners’ rights movement and development of an anti-carceral abolitionism to which Sostre contributed hugely.
Steven Fischler, Joel Sucher, and Howard Blatt
FRAME-UP! THE IMPRISONMENT OF MARTIN SOSTRE
1974, 30 min, 16mm-to-digital
Christine Choy & Susan Robeson
TEACH OUR CHILDREN
1974, 35 min, 16mm-to-digital
Total running time: ca. 70 min.
Fri, Sept 12 at 9:00 and Thurs, Sept 18 at 6:30. The screening on Thurs, Sept 18 will be followed by a conversation between filmmaker Christine Choy, activist-educator Rosemari Mealy (JD, PhD), and guest-curator Yasmina Price!
PROGRAM 5: SPIRITUAL TEACHERS
Malcolm X was always both a student and a teacher. From his self-education in prison to the transformation of his religious and ideological beliefs to his clear statement at the founding of the Organization of Afro-American Unity – “Education is an important element in the struggle for human rights” – he consistently embodied and encouraged learning in the broadest terms. He objected to miseducation by the American system which fostered violent injustice and racialized inferiority, instead calling for a political awakening and cultural revolution based on a different kind of learning. Black people needed to know their history, access and safeguard their collective memory, and understand the system of oppression they were within before acting to undo it. Aisha al-Adawiya is a formidable community leader and organizer for whom Malcolm served as indirect teacher: hearing him speak at a rally in the1960s brought her to Islam and compelled her towards a path of movement building, collective transformation, and liberatory education. Hisham Aïdi and Sophie Schrago’s SISTER AISHA: QUEEN MOTHER OF HARLEM chronicles a life of service, consistently pushing anti-imperial efforts to end wars and standing in solidarity with Palestinian liberation, organizing against policing, and working for 30 years at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. In the documentary, poet Sonia Sanchez fittingly compares Sister Aisha to Queen Mother Moore. TWO GODS (2020) traces kindred bonds of mentorship on a quiet scale, centered on Hanif, a Black Muslim casket maker and body washer in New Jersey. Nurturing spiritual peace through his faith and care for the dead, Hanif also mentors two adolescent boys, Furquan and Naz, passing on what he learned in his life to guide theirs. The nature of Hanif’s work also evokes the perpetual sense of mourning and grief which suffuses the remembrance of Malcolm X.
Zeshawn Ali
TWO GODS
2020, 82 min, DCP
Hisham Aïdi & Sophie Schrago
SISTER AISHA: QUEEN MOTHER OF HARLEM
2024, 47 min, DCP
Total running time: ca. 135 min.
Sat, Sept 13 at 5:15 and Thurs, Sept 18 at 8:45. The screening on Thurs, Sept 18 will be introduced by filmmakers Hisham Aïdi & Zeshawn Ali!
PROGRAM 6: YOU REMEMBER INTERNATIONALISM
Just before his life was cut short – and not by coincidence – Malcolm X had internationalized his vision of the struggle against domination and discrimination. He unmasked the façade of democracy draped over U.S. imperial hegemony, keenly understanding white supremacy as an architecture of global power in the context of the Cold War and Civil Rights movement, anti-communism, and the endless predation of capitalism. The solution was the transnational interdependence of all colonized and oppressed peoples. MALCOLM X: STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM is a capsule of how this Third-Worldist perspective consolidated only months before his assassination, during a period of travels to Mecca, Africa, and Europe. Opening with an internationalist newsreel montage by photographer John Taylor, the documentary sees Malcolm X in Paris at a critical juncture. It was made by Lebert “Sandy” Bethune, a Jamaican poet, educator, and documentary filmmaker who worked in an orbit of Black writers, artists, and thinkers linked to Négritude and revolutionary militancy. Crucially filling out the picture of Malcolm X’s ties to the African continent and Sudan in particular, MALCOLM X AND THE SUDANESE draws from his exchanges with economist Ahmed Siddig Osman. After meeting in Harlem in 1962, Osman made the arrangements for his Hajj to Mecca and influenced his shift to Sunni Islam. The documentary is a rare glimpse into his evolving spiritual life and political thought within a Pan-African historical memory. MALCOLM X SPEAKS (1971) frames this final stage within the story of his life – the Nebraska childhood that preceded the young city-hopping Malcolm X, incarceration and conversion, and his entry and exit from the Nation of Islam – before movingly closing by intertwining Betty Shabazz and their children. Together, the three documentaries of “You Remember Internationalism” form a cinematic historical memory of how he came to be, a prismatic perspective on the Malcolm X who stood in solidarity with Palestinian Liberation, the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, the Cuban Revolution, and the anti-colonial efforts of the Vietnamese and Algerian peoples.
Sophie Schrago
MALCOLM X AND THE SUDANESE
2020, 26 min, DCP
Charles Hobson
MALCOLM X SPEAKS
1971, 44 min, 16mm. Print courtesy of the Reserve Film and Video Collection of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, with funding from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
Lebert Bethune
MALCOLM X: STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM
1967, 22 min, 16mm. Preserved by the Reserve Film and Video Collection of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, with funding from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
Total running time: ca. 95 min.
Sat, Sept 13 at 8:45 and Fri, Sept 19 at 6:30. The screening on Sat, Sept 13 will be introduced by Hisham Aïdi (writer and producer of MALCOLM X AND THE SUDANESE)! The screening on Fri, Sept 19 will be followed by a conversation with Lebert Bethune and Baba Zayid Muhammad of the Malcolm X Commemoration Committee!
PROGRAM 7: THIRD WORLD REVOLUTION
Through the flames of a cleansing fire, the Black migrant worker and protagonist of SOLEIL Ô (1970) sees a portrait of Malcolm X, conjured next to those of Patrice Lumumba, Che Guevara, and Mehdi Ben Barka. The Mauritanian filmmaker Med Hondo was part of the swell of Third Worldist and Pan-African filmmaking of the 1960s and 1970s, a global circuit of cinematic reckonings with labor, empire, migration, and colonization. With his incendiary debut feature, he directly analyzed and condemned the conditions of immigrant African labor in Europe in an audiovisual assault against domination told through a fragmented patchwork of allegory, Marxist theory, psychic alienation, and autobiographical experience. Hondo – who loathed Spike Lee’s biopic and loved Amiri Baraka’s critique of it – ended his eruptively militant, jaggedly stylized, and caustically funny experimental film by placing Malcolm X amongst a cadre of Third World revolutionary leaders. The final vision of SOLEIL Ô condensed the breathtaking cinematic polemic into a visual political compass, cementing a call to arms for an international rebellion against all forms of exploitation under colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism.
Med Hondo
SOLEIL Ô
1970, 102 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In French and Arabic with English subtitles.
Preceded by:
Sohail Daulatzai FROM THE RUINS: A PRELUDE 2025, 6 min, digital
FROM THE RUINS: A PRELUDE is a reckoning with the histories of radical internationalism that Malcolm X demanded and a portal into the tensions between the catastrophic and the quotidian, here and there, then and now.
Total running time: ca. 110 min.
Sun, Sept 14 at 5:45 and Fri, Sept 19 at 9:00. The screening on Sun, Sept 14 will be followed by a conversation between writer Sohail Daulatzai and guest-curator Yasmina Price!
PROGRAM 8: AUTOBIOGRAPHY ON SCREEN
It would be difficult to overstate the impact, popularity, and readership of “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”, which was published the same year as his assassination, and became the primary source material for numerous filmic adaptations and unfulfilled scripts (notably, one by James Baldwin). At once a classic of the genre and a break with convention, it was co-authored with a journalist, delivered “as told to Alex Haley.” The text is therefore a mirror and a mask, a first-person narrative written by a second person, an exercise in mythmaking and collaborative creation that gets closer to the process of filmmaking than it might have otherwise. Arnold Perl’s 1972 MALCOLM X: HIS OWN STORY AS IT REALLY HAPPENED – which benefited from the advisory role of Malcolm X’s widow Betty Shabazz – is guided by James Earl Jones reading from the text. The documentary like the book is haunted by loss: after Arnold Perl passed away during the editing, it was completed by producer Nancy Reals Perl, his widow. A rich compilation of newsreel footage, speeches, interviews, and contextual archival material, MALCOLM X: HIS OWN STORY AS IT REALLY HAPPENED maps out the transformational arc from Malcolm Little to el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, opening with Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit”, which sets a tone of mourning as the precursor to a life of militancy.
Arnold Perl
MALCOLM X: HIS OWN STORY AS IT REALLY HAPPENED
1972, 91 min, 35mm-to-DCP
Sun, Sept 14 at 8:30 and Sat, Sept 20 at 4:15.
PROGRAM 9: MALCOLM AND/OR MARTIN
Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. are often presented as two opposing sides of Black Liberation: self-defense and separatism vs. non-violence and integration. Both assassinated at age 39 following a political turning point, they also share the fate of having their individual and related legacies oversimplified and defanged. Bill Duke’s THE MEETING (1989), adapted from a 1987 one-act play by Jeff Stetson, attempts to stage a more complex picture through a speculative, covert exchange that takes place in a Harlem hotel room. A few years earlier, Duke had made his feature debut with THE KILLING FLOOR (1984), a jolting and lucid account of interracial labor organizing in Chicago’s stockyards leading up to the 1919 Race Riot. His process of careful research and consciousness of class struggle also inform this later film. Couched in an ensnaring atmosphere of tension and palpable danger, THE MEETING is set on February 14, 1965, in the immediate aftermath of the firebombing of Malcolm X’s home – which occurred while he, Betty Shabazz, and their four young daughters were inside – and exactly a week before his assassination. Though the imagined conversation between Malcolm and MLK sometimes teeters into an overly schematic compare-and-contrast that is too on the nose (they do arm wrestle), the film strives towards clarity of political philosophies and psychological nuance. The cramped space of a hotel room becomes an expanded theatrical container for the riveting and peculiar historical “what-if” of an unmediated conversation between the two leaders.
Bill Duke
AMERICAN PLAYHOUSE: THE MEETING
1989, 74 min, video. Courtesy of the Peabody Awards Collection, University of Georgia Libraries.
Mon, Sept 15 at 6:30 and Sat, Sept 20 at 6:45.
PROGRAM 10: THREE FACES OF THE MOVEMENT
A triptych portrait, the NET-produced public television special THE NEGRO AND THE AMERICAN PROMISE (1963) presents Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and James Baldwin as the three faces of the Civil Rights movement. Educator and psychologist Kenneth Clark acts as host, setting the discursive scene around “the racial confrontation in America,” interspersed with contextual documentary footage. The three guests are each interviewed separately, filmed in tight close-up, emphasizing an organizational logic in which the program focuses on their points of difference, as they touch on organizing strategies, morality, governance, religious ideologies, and childhood. Establishing a hefty historical record, the program productively sequences Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and James Baldwin as witnesses and engineers of an at-once unchanging and transforming national landscape.
Fred Barzyk
THE NEGRO AND THE AMERICAN PROMISE
1963, 59 min, 16mm. Print courtesy of the Reserve Film and Video Collection of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, with funding from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
Mon, Sept 15 at 8:45 and Sat, Sept 20 at 9:00. This program will be free of charge / suggested donation. Advance tickets are available for a suggested donation cost of $8, or will be available at the box office during the evening of each screening for free, or for whatever donation amount audience members wish.
PROGRAM 11: MISSISSIPPI TO CHICAGO
Both places where Malcolm X made his mark, Mississippi and Chicago, are the coordinates of a historical and geographic trajectory of Black life in the U.S. – the Great Migration, the SNCC, the Black Panther Party, violence, kinships, survival, and struggle. From the work of photographer Harvey Richards, WE’LL NEVER TURN BACK (1963) collects the testimonies of sharecroppers and voter registration activists (including the extraordinary community organizer and civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer) as a crucial record of the motivations and stakes of the struggle to access avenues of political participation. The documentary is a crucial record of the immense danger and violence experienced by sharecropping communities in the South – threats, intimidation, retaliation in employment and housing, beatings and murder – and their efforts to oppose it. Two years later, in 1965, Malcolm X would deliver his “Advice to the Youth of Mississippi” speech, naming the enemy depriving Black people of their rights, and prescribing a plan of action: “Treat them like that and fight them, and you’ll get your freedom.” During a 1969 speech on Malcolm X’s birthday, Fred Hampton praised how he modelled “constructive, revolutionary criticism.” Hampton was a fellow electrifying speaker, galvanizing leader, and martyr of Black Liberation. Initially intended as a chronicle of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party by Howard Alk of The Film Group, the documentary took an investigative turn at the crossroads of Hampton’s assassination, orchestrated as a police raid implicated with FBI counterinsurgency. Entering the scene in the early aftermath, THE MURDER OF FRED HAMPTON (1971) brings together Hampton’s powerful leadership and the BPP’s extensive organizing for self-governance with an exposé of brutal suppression. Each of the films in “Mississippi to Chicago” expose the dialectic of insurgency and repression, offering a way to remember Malcolm X within a network of organizers, revolutionaries, and everyday people.
Harvey Richards
WE’LL NEVER TURN BACK
1963, 29 min, 16mm-to-DCP
Howard Alk
THE MURDER OF FRED HAMPTON
1971, 88 min, 35mm. Photochemically preserved in 2017 by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. 35mm print courtesy of Chicago Film Archives.
Total running time: ca. 120 min.
Tues, Sept 16 at 6:15 and Sun, Sept 21 at 7:00. The screening on Tues, Sept 16 will be introduced by archivist Andrea Battleground!
