Image: Barbican Centre, London
The Barbican Centre in London is staging “I Am Furious Black: The Films of William Greaves”, a cinema retrospective devoted to the American filmmaker, producer and activist William Greaves. The season is billed from Wednesday 21 October to Saturday 28 November 2026, with an earlier programme, “Wealth of a Nation” followed by a conversation, on 9 October.
Greaves was born in Harlem in 1926 and worked first as an actor and dancer before building a long career as a producer, songwriter and director across fiction, documentary and experimental film. The Barbican highlights his central role on the long-running television programme Black Journal, where he supported many Black directors at a time when opportunities were scarce.
The season takes its title from a piece Greaves wrote for the New York Times in the summer of 1970. According to the Barbican, his anger at systemic racism and at the neglect and distortion of Black communities in the media drove his work, and the programme sets out to trace his career and influence across the 20th and 21st centuries.
The schedule includes “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One”, his experimental film built around a screen test of a couple arguing in Central Park, shown on 27 October with an introduction and again on 7 November with a panel discussion. The season closes on 28 November with “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2½”. Other programmes pair “The Voice of La Raza” with “Nationtime”, and set the 1969 and 1988 workshop documentaries “In the Company of Men” and “The Deep North” side by side.
Greaves also appears on screen in the 1949 drama “Lost Boundaries”, in which he plays a young college graduate, while a 35mm double bill revisits the independently produced “race films” “Souls of Sin” and “Miracle in Harlem”. Two programmes of short films cover 1959–1974 and 1981–1988, the latter including work on Black history and on women working at NASA, and a further programme is devoted to his documentaries on Booker T. Washington and Ida B. Wells.
The season also looks beyond Greaves’s own films. A free screening on 7 November presents an episode of Black Journal, a programme on 21 November features work by Madeline Anderson, St. Clair Bourne and other young Black filmmakers he mentored, and Kathleen Collins’s “Losing Ground” is screened on 18 November with an introduction.
