“I Heard It Through the Grapevine” Screening and Conversation with Filmmaker Pat Hartley

As part of the Baldwin Circles project, the Humanities Council and the UCHV Film Forum present a film screening of the newly restored documentary I Heard It Through the Grapevine followed by a conversation with filmmaker Pat Hartley.

I Heard It Through the Grapevine, directed by Pat Hartley and Dick Fontaine, follows James Baldwin as he retraces the history of the Civil Rights Movements after two decades. The film offers a window into the past, as Baldwin makes his way through the American South to listen to the reflections of close friends and central figures of the movement.

Introduction by Esther Schor (English), Chair of the Humanities Council. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Pat Hartley in conversation with Carolyn Rouse (Anthropology) and Erika Kiss (University Center for Human Values), Director of the UCHV Film Forum.

Pat Hartley is an African-American Hungarian filmmaker, actress, native New Yorker, and subject of Andy Warhol’s Screen Test, Prison, and My Hustler at the Factory.

In the early 1980,  Hartley and Fontaine founded Grapevine Pictures in New York—a film production company specializing in documentary, music and original drama. It was under the auspices of Grapevine Pictures that they directed and produced I Heard it Through the Grapevine (1982) and Man With A Mission – Art Blakey: The Jazz Messenger (1989).

In addition to her filmmaking career, Pat Hartley is an actress, having appeared in Chuck Wein’s 1972 film Rainbow Bridge alongside Jimi Hendrix and playing the role of Sadie in Heathcote Williams’s play AC/DC directed by Nicholas Wright at the Royal Court Theatre, London.

Hartley wrote and choreographed and co-directed music videos for Island Records, Tommy Boy Records and Blue Note Records including “World Destruction” by Afrika Bambaataa and Johnny Rotten and “Malcolm X No Sell Out” by Keith LeBlanc.

She has lectured at NYU,  taught the induction course at the National Film and Television School in London, and worked with students in the New York City Public Schools.