Ben Caldwell’s Medea, a collage piece made on an animation stand and edited entirely in the camera, combines live-action and rapidly edited still images of Africans and African Americans which function like flashes of history that the unborn child will inherit. Caldwell invokes Amiri Baraka’s poem “Part of the Doctrine” in this experimental meditation on art history, Black imagery, identity, and heritage.

The experimental short film is an early student work by Ben Caldwell, who will be discussed during the Cold War Spaces program on Community Space: Multimedia Art and African American Community Formation in L.A. The young L.A. Rebellion filmmaker titled his film Medea, after the tragic mythological figure that also inspired the contemporaneous work of the Eastern European women artists featured in our past exhibition The Medea Insurrection.

Watch the film for free on YouTube, courtesy of the UCLA Film and Television Archive.

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Virtual Film Picks are inspired by the in-person Friday Night Films at the Wende program series. This selection is part of a curated list of weekly movie suggestions that can be watched at home, in conjunction with #WendeOnline.