“As a critic who has always worked to address audiences inside and outside the academy, I recognized that oral critical discussions of films took place everywhere in everyday life.” – bell hooks, reel to real: race, sex and class at the movies (pg. 5)
Jupiter Goes to the Movies extends our ongoing experiment around “peeling criticism off the page” by bending the form of film criticism into a shape that honors the polyvocal oral traditions innate to the production and proliferation of Black culture. Season 001 documents a group of Chicago-based artists, writers, and curators as they traverse the city and think together in real time about BLKNWS (2025) by Kahlil Joseph, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire (2024) by Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, Siméon (1992) by Euzhan Palcy, and Losing Ground (1982) by Kathleen Collins.
While the majority of criticism that appears on the page is attributed to a singular author, Jupiter Goes to the Movies attunes itself to the chorus by employing handheld video footage to chronicle the riffs and instinctual interpretations that, like oral histories, are so seldom archived. As the group engages in an “oral critical discussions of film” in the immediate aftermath of their shared viewing experience, we propose a mode of criticism that is deeply social and disrupts the conception of the critic as a solitary figure who develops their ideas in isolation. By way of this collective format, the improvised, incomplete, and informal utterances that fall to the wayside of traditional criticism are offered a place to land.
In this sense, Jupiter Goes to the Movies records the beginnings of ideas that may later be devoted to the page, animating the central provocation of this pursuit: If indeed the page struggles to accommodate the chorus, perhaps the screen lets it sing…
Jupiter Goes to the Movies extends our ongoing experiment around “peeling criticism off the page” by bending the form of film criticism into a shape that honors the polyvocal oral traditions innate to the production and proliferation of Black culture. Season 001 documents a group of Chicago-based artists, writers, and curators as they traverse the city and think together in real time about BLKNWS (2025) by Kahlil Joseph, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire (2024) by Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, Siméon (1992) by Euzhan Palcy, and Losing Ground (1982) by Kathleen Collins.
While the majority of criticism that appears on the page is attributed to a singular author, Jupiter Goes to the Movies attunes itself to the chorus by employing handheld video footage to chronicle the riffs and instinctual interpretations that, like oral histories, are so seldom archived. As the group engages in an “oral critical discussions of film” in the immediate aftermath of their shared viewing experience, we propose a mode of criticism that is deeply social and disrupts the conception of the critic as a solitary figure who develops their ideas in isolation. By way of this collective format, the improvised, incomplete, and informal utterances that fall to the wayside of traditional criticism are offered a place to land.
In this sense, Jupiter Goes to the Movies records the beginnings of ideas that may later be devoted to the page, animating the central provocation of this pursuit: If indeed the page struggles to accommodate the chorus, perhaps the screen lets it sing…
Camille Bacon