The Devil Finds Work Program

An illustrated discussion and presentation of clips of films discussed by Baldwin in The Devil Finds Work, including The Exorcist, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, The Defiant Ones, Lady Sings the Blues, In This Our Life, All About Eve, and Dead End. A sustained and animated engagement of the text, this panel and selected screenings will take up Baldwin’s aesthetic analysis of the films and commentary on how these works operate in American culture and spectatorship. Panelists include Michele Wallace and Trey Ellis. Discussion moderated by series co-programmer Rich Blint.

Panelists:

Trey Ellis, Emmy-nominated screenwriter, American Book Award Winning novelist, and playwright, is Associate Professor in the Graduate Program in Film at Columbia University School of the Arts.

Michele Wallace is Professor of English, Africana Studies, Women’s Studies and Film Studies in the Ph.D. Program in English at The CUNY Graduate Center and at the City College of New York. She is the author of Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, which was recently reissued in a 35th Anniversary Edition as a Feminist Classic by Verso Books.