Max Roach at 100: Percussion, Protest, and Perseverance

Max Roach at 100: Percussion, Protest, and Perseverance
Friday, March 8, 2:00PM
Michelson Theater 6th Floor, 721 Broadway

We host our recently retired Tisch colleague, the award-winning director/editor/educator Sam Pollard, for a screening of his latest American Masters documentary portrait of the artist/activist/educator Max Roach, Max Roach: The Drum Also Waltzes (Sam Pollard and Ben Shapiro, 2023). Screening followed by live call and response between Sam Pollard and Josslyn Luckett.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Media, Culture & History, The Center for Black Visual Culture at the Institute of African American Affairs, and the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies.

Free and open to the public. RSVP required.

While Sam Pollard's overarching filmography is filled with landmark civil rights documentaries, from Eyes on the Prizes II (1990), 4 Little Girls (1997) and the recent Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power (2023), there is an astounding musical thread through much of his long professional career that moves from editing the iconic hip hop documentary, Style Wars (Tony Silver, 1983), to editing Denzel Washington's performance as Bleek Gilliam in Spike Lee's Mo' Better Blues (1990), to directing and producing feature documentaries on Marvin Gaye, Frank Sinatra, and Sammy Davis Jr. The Oscar nominated, Emmy and Peabody award winning filmmaker also received the 2018-2019 Distinguished Teaching Award here at NYU shortly before retiring after 27 years as a much beloved professor of Film and Television at Tisch.

Josslyn Luckett's first book, Toward a More Perfect Rebellion: Multiracial Media Activism Made in L.A. (under contract University of California Press) centers the formation of the Ethno-Communications Program at UCLA (1969-1973), an affirmative action media training initiative whose participants transformed American film culture of the 1970s and beyond. She is a contributing editor for Film Quarterly and a member of the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress. She is also a screenwriter and in 2021 joined the writing staff of Queen Sugar (OWN) for its seventh and final season.