“That’s When I Saw The True Face Of Fear…”
In present day, many years after the last of the Cabrini towers were torn down, Anthony and his partner move into a loft in the now gentrified Cabrini. A chance encounter with an old-timer exposes Anthony to the true story behind Candyman. Anxious to use these macabre details in his studio as fresh grist for paintings, he unknowingly opens a door to a complex past that unravels his own sanity and unleashes a terrifying wave of violence.
- From the Internet Movie Database, “Candyman (2021)”
Join us for a screening of Nia DaCosta’s 2021 film, Candyman, a direct sequel to the 1992 film of the same name. University of Illinois Chicago professors Jane Rhodes and Cynthia Blair will take part in a pre-film panel to talk about the important themes of racism, gentrification, ghost in the urban landscape, and police brutality in the film.
RSVP for this FREE event below!
PLEASE NOTE: Candyman is rated R and is intended for adult audiences. The film contains graphic violence and gore, depictions of body horror, depictions of racism, strong profanity, and suggestive themes. The film also contains sequences of flashing imagery. Viewer discretion is advised.
Featured Speakers:
Cynthia Blair
Cynthia Blair is Associate Professor in UIC’s Department of Black Studies and the Department of History. She is also the Director of UIC's African American Cultural Center. She studies the intersection of race and sexuality in U.S. history, and race, gender and sexuality in American film and popular culture.
Her first book, I’ve Got to Make My Livin’: Black Women’s Sex Work in Turn-Of-The-Century Chicago, explores Black women’s sex work in Chicago during the decades of some of the city’s most explosive growth, expanding not just our view of prostitution, but also of black women’s labor, the Great Migration, the emergence of modern sexuality, and the criminalization of Black women in the early twentieth-century city. She is currently at work on a book project, "Moms Mabley: A Cultural Biography." a study that examines the life and career of the African American comedian Jackie “Moms” Mabley. A second project, “In a Time Like This”: Jamaican Migrants to the United States, 1940-1970," employs oral history and documentary film to explore the migrations of men and women from Jamaica to the Midwestern United States at the middle of the twentieth century.
Jane Rhodes
Jane Rhodes is trained as a mass media historian with a specialization in African American history and culture. She focuses on the study of race, gender, and mass media; the history of the black press; media and social movements; and African American women’s history. She is particularly interested in how aggrieved communities have used print culture, film, electronic media, music, and other expressive cultures as modes of resistance and empowerment. Her work also explores the gender politics of African American communities and the experiences of transnational black subjects.
Rhodes’ first book Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century was named the best book in mass communication history by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. A second edition is in development. Her second book, Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon is now in its second edition (University of Illinois Press, 2017). Her current project is a biography of a black American expatriate and psychoanalyst: “Transatlantic Blackness in the Era of Jim Crow: The Life of Marie Battle Singer”. Rhodes is also building on her long-standing interest in how persons of African descent use media to carve out spaces for political, intellectual, and cultural exchange with a book-in-progress, Rebel Media.
