Cultural Nationalism (1969)

Skip Norman (Wilbert Reuben Norman, Jr.) (USA) was a filmmaker, photographer, cinematographer, and visual anthropologist born in Baltimore in 1933. He is best known for a number of remarkable, multifaceted films he created after relocating to Germany in the early 1960s: deconstructed narratives and agitprop allegories that brought structuralist critique to bear on topics such as the Black Power movement, systemic racism, and liberal hypocrisy. In 1966 Norman joined the inaugural class of the newly formed German Film and Television Academy (DFFB), and there made numerous films of his own or in collaboration with other students interested in the revolutionary potential of film, including Harun Farocki, Helke Sander, and Holger Meins. For their efforts, many of the students were expelled from the DFFB, arrested while shooting Sander’s Break the Power of the Manipulators (1968), had their films banned from broadcast on German television, and—in Meins’s case—would later die in prison after joining the Red Army Faction. Norman nonetheless completed at least eight films while in Germany, including three in 1969 alone. He returned to the USA in 1975 and worked as cinematographer on films by Haile Gerima and Mirra Bank, obtained a PhD from The Ohio State University (1984), and turned to working as an ethnographic photographer. Norman’s films have recently been the subject of considerable renewed interest, with retrospectives of his work organized at Open City Documentary Festival and the National Gallery of Art (Washington) in 2023, and restorations of his films undertaken by Deutsche Kinemathek. He died in Washington, DC in 2015. The full legacy of his complex career has yet to be apprehended.