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EVENT, SCREENING, SCREENING + DISCUSSION

The Ghost Breakers (with special panel discussion 8/28)

Sunday, Aug 28 at 2:15 pm

Location: Bartos Screening Room

Dir. George Marshall. 1940, 83 mins. 35mm. With Bob Hope, Paulette Goddard, Willie Best, Richard Carlson, Paul Lukas, Anthony Quinn. Hugely successful upon its initial release, this comedy stars Hope as Larry Lawrence, a radio personality who ends up following Goddard’s Mary Carter to Cuba, where she is set to inherit a plantation and (likely haunted) castle. The film also features a fleeting appearance by Noble Johnson, the Black actor-producer luminary in the thankless role of mute zombie, but what lingers is the haunting of all the violence wrought by the white racial imaginary. 

Note: Following the August 28 screening, there will be a panel with writer-researcher Yasmina Price and scholar Dr. David Bering-Porter, moderated by guest curator Kelli Weston. This panel will trace the zombie’s evolution from its symbolic, racialized origins to its current, more raceless depictions, exploring the figure’s rich political overtones, concerning the state, the body, labor, and much more.

About the speakers:

Yasmina Price is a writer, programmer, and PhD student in the departments of African American Studies and Film and Media Studies at Yale University. She focuses on anticolonial cinema from the Global South and the work of visual artists across the African continent and diaspora, with a particular interest in the experimental work of women filmmakers. Yasmina has interviewed filmmakers and participated in panels on Black film and revolutionary cultural production organized by The Maysles Documentary Center, International Documentary Association, New York Film Festival, and more, while her series “In the Images, Behind the Camera: Women’s Political Cinema 1959-1992” played at BAMCinematek in May 2022. Recent writing has appeared in Art in America, Aperture, The Criterion Collection’s Current and Film Quarterly.

David Bering-Porter is Assistant Professor of Culture and Media at The New School in New York City. David has lectured, taught, and published on zombie movies and other forms of Black horror at the intersections of film, digital media, and technology. His current book project is a study of Undead Labor and the ways that race, labor, and value come together in the mediated body of the zombie as well as other examples of biological excess and his academic writing has appeared in journals such as Culture Machine, Critical Inquiry, Flow, MIRAJ, Post 45, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Tickets: $15 / $11 senior and students / $9 youth (ages 3–17) / Free or discounted for MoMI members ($11). Order tickets. Please pick up tickets at the Museum’s admissions desk upon arrival. All seating is general admission. Review safety protocols before your visit.

Ticketholders may add on a visit to the Living with the Walking Dead exhibition for $10.