Jessie Maple’s Early Films: Moody Close-Ups on Harlem, 1975-81

FAIN: HB-294734-24

Chuck Jackson
University of Houston, Downtown (Houston, TX 77002-1014)

Research and writing leading to an article about filmmaker Jessie Maple (1937-2023) and three early films that illuminate her cinematography and 1970s Harlem.

This project seeks funding to continue research and writing for a peer-reviewed, scholarly article on Jessie Maple’s early films and materials held in the Maple Collection at the Black Film Center & Archive (BFCA) in Bloomington, IN. While Maple is a groundbreaking U.S. filmmaker, scholarship on her films remain scant and sustained studies of their form and style do not exist. My project fulfills the need for such work, focusing on the aesthetic moods of Maple’s first three rarely screened, Harlem-based films: the nontheatrical educational short Methadone: Evil Spirit or Wonder Drug? (1975-76); the longer documentary Black Economic Power: Reality or Fantasy? (1977); and her feature-length narrative Will (1981). Through its archival research, and by turning to scholarship that demonstrates cinematic mood’s relation to shot composition and cinematography, this project argues that Maple’s earliest films express the public moods of 1970s Harlem most significantly in their poetic close-ups.