Skip Norman

Scenes from Berlin: Kids playing football, a man tries to light a fire in his stove, a film team sets up a shot in a park, students discuss politics.

Short experimental film by (and starring) Skip Norman dealing with racism, black/white relations, the blues.

This short snippet of silent 8 mm film was filmed by Ingrid Oppermann in West-Berlin, possibly close to her apartment in Kurfürstenstraße, where Harun Farocki’s The Words of the Chairman (1967) was shot. The snow that is reflected in the shop window indicates that it must have been the Winter of 1969/70.

Clearly influenced by Brecht and Jean-Marie Straub, criticizes the reduction of human relations to economic relations as well as the US imperialism in Vietnam.

Short experimental film by (and starring) Skip Norman dealing with racism, black/white relations, the blues.

Short experimental film by (and starring) Skip Norman dealing with racism, black/white relations, the blues.

Recordings of a speech Bobby Seale held in Scandinavia intercut with roving streets and images.

Skip Norman shot ‘On Africa’ after graduating from the German Film and Television Academy (DFFB). On the level of the image, we see tracking shots through West Berlin, information detailing the economic gains of colonialist exploitations, and photographs from West Africa, while the soundtrack shares facts about the continent’s conquest and decolonization. As Norman himself put it: “The starting point is the relationship between Europe’s prosperity and Africa’s poverty; Europe’s destruction of societies and cultures, and the simultaneous use of Christianity and racial theories as justification for a massive exploitation of the colonized.” ‘On Africa’ was first shown in 1970 and then broadcast on television by WDR in 1972. In 2020, the Harun Farocki Institut was able to digitize a 16mm print from the archive at the WDR.

A quiet scene in the snow, a black child in an anorak runs mumbling towards the camera. The pictures are underpinned with a powerful monologue by the co-founder of the Black Panther Party Bobby Seale.

An emotional dialogue between a man and a woman, around whom a camera circles in a 360-degree turn.

An emotional dialogue between a man and a woman, around whom a camera circles in a 360-degree turn.

Starting from a failed Black Panther Party convention (in Washington D.C., November 1970) for a constitution based on their 10-point programme, the film analyses the social condition of black communities. It shows especially the self-help of the blacks in their fight against social repression.

Short documentary by Skip Norman.