Christopher Harris: An Interview

Christopher Harris is an American experimental filmmaker whose formally rigorous work reconfigures cinematic language through a deeply personal, historically attuned lens. Growing up in Saint Louis in a working-class Black family, Harris found in music an early portal to interior life, aesthetic wonder, and creative purpose. Though a frustrated would-be musician, he has described his filmmaking as “music making by other means,” layering visual rhythm, silence, and contrapuntal sound to evoke new forms of Black experience and history.

His earliest films fuse influences from neorealism, jazz improvisation, and avant-garde practice, while also addressing the historical weight of Black representation, from silent film stereotypes to Angela Davis and the iconography of Blaxploitation. In this interview, Harris traces his unlikely journey of filmmaking, shaped by moments of artistic revelation and the liberating potential of experimental form.

“I had these unnamed impulses to create,” Harris reflects. “Filmmaking became the space where I could draw from music, images, and theory; and imagine a world for myself.”

This On Art and Artists interview was filmed in two parts, on March 22, 2024 and on June 25, 2024.