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Abstract: With this issue we wrap up Volume 14—marking fourteen continuous years of publication of Black Camera, the premier film journal of its kind in the world and ranked in 2019 the fourth most cited film journal by Google Scholar. So much said for that!Like preceding issues of the journal, the content of 14.2 comprises of interviews, essays, reviews, and a close-up and dossier.Featured first in the lineup is an extensive conversation with composer/conductor and experimental and visual artist Renée Baker who describes herself as a “visual artist, film artist, composer, and re-contextualist . . . a true engineer of multi-disciplines.” Here, Baker discusses her artistic practice scoring silent films, particularly her ... Read More PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Black Camera invites submissions for a Close-Up devoted to the documentary by the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, Finally Got the News (1970).The year 2020 marked the fifty-year anniversary of this film and its resounding vision of radical social change. The time that stands between now and the production of Finally Got the News is one that bears witness to great and devastating changes both in Detroit and internationally as deindustrialization has wreaked havoc on organized labor. Yet, perhaps even more devastating, the racial chauvinism against which the League of Revolutionary Black Workers organized remains a stagnant and destructive feature of our society. For this reason, Finally Got the News’s vision ... Read More PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: This Black Camera Close-Up invites submissions on filmmaker, producer, screenwriter, novelist, humorist, playwright, musician, composer, musical performer, actor, graphic novelist, and cultural provocateur, Melvin Van Peebles.Van Peebles scholarship is dominated by a conversation around his genre-defining film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971). This Close-Up revisits Van Peebles particularly by recontextualizing Sweetback, occasioned by his death in 2021 and the release of his collected works by the Criterion Collection.Van Peebles was a man of great complexity and ambition. The variety of his creative labor is fertile terrain for international, intercultural, and interdisciplinary scholarship. Can we ... Read More PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: I’m not just a Black composer. I’m a composer.I’m not just a jazz composer. I’m a composer.Consider that in the United States the presence, reception, and genius of black composers and conductors is fraught by design, marked by the malady of prejudice and discrimination, and so too and not unrelated, barriers to women. To this day, with notable exceptions, these fields remain overwhelmingly a male—white male—preserve where black composers and black conductors labor to have their work recognized and performed. In the long history of composing and conducting, the 1930s was a watershed when William Grant Still debuted the first symphony (“Afro-American Symphony”) by an African American composer performed by a major ... Read More PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: I believe that, regardless of the political views these filmmakers may or may not hold, their bodies and their aesthetic sensibilities became ciphers for a rather special, intense, and rare phenomenon of Black people on the move politically.American culture is replete with derogatory icons of Black women—Jezebel, Mammy, Tragic Mulatto, Aunt Jemima, Sapphire, Matriarch, and Welfare Queen.During the late 1970s and early 1980s, critically acclaimed Black auteur Julie Dash wrote, assisted with, and directed films while attending the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) Film School. At UCLA, she participated in the L.A. Rebellion, a group “with a common purpose to create a new Black cinema characterized by ... Read More PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In the first moments of Haile Gerima’s 1993 film Sankofa, a voice rasps across the seas, hailing the far-flung sons and daughters of Africa to return to their ancestral homeland. Accompanied by the thrashing of the titular spiritual guide’s drums, this scene of conjuring, accompanied by overlain images of cane fields, slave castles, and bronze sculptures, takes aim at the film’s primary audience, itself composed of “stolen Africans,” requesting they take up their birds of passage and return to sacred African soil. The film’s vision of an ancient and primordially coherent African subjectivity works against the dispersal of Africans across the Atlantic world, suggesting a mutuality that predates the settlement of ... Read More PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.Negro art should be trained and developed rather than capitalized and exploited.In 2015, April Reign, a Black woman cultural critic, first used #oscarssowhite in response to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’s erasure of Black actors and filmmakers during the eighty-seventh annual Academy Awards nominations. As Reign’s hashtag quickly circulated on Twitter, it transformed into a rallying cry to challenge Hollywood, and the Academy more directly, for its failure to recognize the artistry of those that have been historically marginalized. Beyond calling out and blemishing Hollywood’s most revered award show, the hashtag helped ... Read More PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: I begin by declaring my position as an active filmmaker in Southern Africa for over thirty years and that this informs my research and intention. I also aspire to the aims of decolonized research that Pier Paolo Frassinelli explains: “The point is not just to define decolonization but also to decolonize research. Decolonized research is meant to be transformative. It does not just try to understand the world, but also aspires to help change it.”1The struggle for independent filmmakers in South Africa and particularly for filmmakers of color to reach an audience is deeply rooted in systemic issues that continue to challenge the creation, financing, distribution, and particularly the marketing and exhibition of ... Read More PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: What we remember is that which we choose not to forget. Just as individuals choose to forget, or to remember only what they need to get by, a society as a whole chooses the past that it needs and on which it can construct a future. This is, of course, not bad, but necessary. However, it means that whatever record the archivist selects to keep, it will be confronted in time by a social memory that contradicts it.1First presented as a keynote at the 8th I-Rep International film festival held in Surulere, Lagos, Nigeria in March 2018, this paper triangulates the links between processes of archivization, African filmmaking, and activist cultural work. The central theme of that year’s I-Rep film festival, “Archiving ... Read More PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The protagonist of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther, released in 2018, based on the 1966 comic by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, is considered to be the “first African/Black superhero in American mainstream comics.”2 The character of T’Challa, which is the given name of the Black Panther, was created “the same year that the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee worked to politically organize Black residents of Lowndes County, Alabama,” and they “chose as its logo a drawing of a black panther.”3 The connection to the American Civil Rights Movement in Black Panther’s origin story not only sets it apart from other Marvel Comic Universe (MCU) characters but gives it a story line that continuously interfaces with the fraught ... Read More PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The desire to read Chadwick Boseman’s body of work in a representational way is already complicated—consider Spike Lee’s interview with The Atlantic;2 he describes his casting choice of Boseman in Da 5 Bloods (2020) not as an expression of a singular vision but as the result of a collective manifestation of Boseman’s embodiment of African American History: “Here’s the thing for me. This character is heroic; he’s a superhero. Who do we cast' We cast Jackie Robinson, James Brown, Thurgood Marshall, and we cast T’Challa. Chad is a superhero! That character is Christlike!” The conflation of Boseman’s body with these iconic figures moves beyond simply reading his performances as performance. Lee’s film was released ... Read More PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The Frenchman does not like the Jew, who does not like the Arab, who does not like the Negro.To live with hatred as our most intimate possession becomes, then, the truly difficult task of our dreams.Fuck tha PoliceI woke up screamin, “Fuck the world!”In this essay, I draw on Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the direct time, or crystal, image in Cinema 23 to examine how Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (1996, France) articulates the structure of state violence in relation to the ethno-religious and racial categories of the Arab, the Jew, and the Black. More precisely, I argue that the circuit Kassovitz creates in La Haine between the actual and the virtual, the present and the past, that is constitutive of the direct time ... Read More PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Nigerian film exhibition studies are rare, thus rendering incomplete the available histories of film in the country. Consequently, when there was an opportunity to make a short documentary on the Nigerian film industry,3 I chose to focus on the exhibitors. From a historical point of view, that proved to be a difficult task, since very little has ever been documented on commercial exhibition. The places4 to search have disappointingly insufficient materials for any completeness to be claimed. And the few surviving independent exhibitors prior to the video boom are either out of reach5 or remember very little.6 While lamenting this gap in cinema history, Jonathan Haynes writes that “memories also decay and those who ... Read More PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The past is a living thing. You own it—owe it.1Many argue that Jordan Peele’s box-office success Get Out (2017) prompted a resurgence in films and television programs that explicitly examine the connection between race and the horror genre.2 This Close-Up situates itself within this current popularity for what can be called black horror.3 Important to this discussion is the knowledge that visual media have played with the relationship between race and horror for decades. Films such as I Walked With a Zombie (dir. Jacques Tourneur, 1943), George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), Ganja & Hess (dir. Bill Gunn, 1973), or Queen of the Damned (dir. Jorge Saralegui, 2002), and even music videos like Michael ... Read More PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Candyman begins with a series of shots that introduce all the multiple plotlines. An aerial shot of the Chicago freeway system opens the visuals. The camera tracks left, moving across the city, as the Philip Glass score comes up. Approximately fifty seconds in, we briefly hear some voices, the first indication that something happened here. Forty seconds later, the film cuts to a close-up of bees in a hive, and we hear Candyman’s (Tony Judd’s) voice for the first time: “They say I have shed innocent blood. What’s blood for if not for shedding' With my hook for a hand I will split you from your groin to your gullet.” The film cuts to a long shot of the blue sky as a massive swarm of bees rises behind the Chicago ... Read More PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Anything dead coming back to life hurts.Time has little meaning to us.One year before the fearsome figure of the black2 vampire projects onto the screens and into the nightmares of viewers everywhere, another awakens on the page, not abject or monstrous, but eternally, radically feminist and queerly futurist. She emerges in Audre Lorde’s 1971 poem “Prologue,” which ambivalently and remarkably lies at the close of her 1973 collection From a Land Where Other People Live. By locating her prologue at the end of the book, as a final word, Lorde both undermines the purpose of the form, deliberately misusing it, and reflects on its revolutionary potential. For though a prologue is conventionally written after the ... Read More PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: The slavery film as a genre is tied to the literary tradition of the slave narrative on which many adaptations are based, including ABC’s TV series Roots (1977), Jonathan Demme’s Beloved (1999), and Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave (2013). While such texts explore the horrors of enslavement by depicting its cruelty in graphic terms, including through “the choice of resorting to a whipping scene, especially of slave women, who were oftentimes half-naked, [which] was deliberate [. . .] intended to move the reader emotionally as well as physically,”1 few films actually avoid turning the black body into an object of abjection when translating words into images.2 The brutal spectacle of slavery objectifies the body of ... Read More PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: There have been several horror watersheds, depending on who you are asking: those films or clusters of films that intervene in the genre so significantly that, after them, things would never be the same, as well as films that create a new subgenre that will become so dominant that it may as well have reinvented horror. Psycho (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), Night of the Living Dead (dir. George A. Romero, 1968), and Texas Chainsaw Massacre (dir. Tobe Hooper, 1974) have all been cited as such films, establishing, respectively, the psychosexual slashers, flesh-eating zombies, and low-budget extremity that still, in various forms, reign over horror. Given the sheer amount of discourse about the film in multiple ... Read More PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: This dossier gathers key questions, concepts, and resources for artists, scholars, teachers, curators, and admirers of contemporary black horror films. The form and content of each of its sections offers a way to think about the intersection of blackness, spectacle, and cinema as a point of collaborative thinking, aesthetic connection, and citational practice:Section 1: A Conversation between the Authors Section 2: The Sunken Places Image GalleryAnd finally, Section 3: A Resource List for Study and/or Teaching Almost a year to the day the COVID-19 outbreak was declared a global pandemic we hosted “Spectacles of Anti-Black Violence: Teaching Horror ‘With Everything Going on Right Now,’” a seminar at the 2021 Society ... Read More PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Je ne suis pas du tout féministe. Je suis féminisante. Je defends le cas des femmes . . .(I am not at all feminist. I am “womanistic,” I defend the cause of women . . .)1Fad signifies ‘arrive’ and Jal means ‘work,’ ‘work’ because when you arrive at this farming village called Fad’jal, you must work. When you work, you’re happy, and if you don’t work, people will mock you.2I introduce Safi Faye’s words as a point of departure in the exploration of the womanist work of African women’s cinematic practice. Her words invoke the often vexed relationship that Afro-descendant women and women of the South have with Western feminism, fraught with a contentious past, spurned by those who reject its historical practices of ... Read More PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: Denis Villeneuve’s film Dune (2021) provides interesting insight on how notions of race, gender, and empire that are at the core of current post-colonial critique are being transferred into popular culture. Analyses of the short- and long-term consequences of colonialism in the contemporary world pervade public discourse in shows and documentaries for mainstream media, blockbuster movies, institutionally financed film festivals, and art exhibitions. From a political perspective it is possible to distinguish two broad approaches. On the one hand there is a critique from the left which is focused on the deconstruction of race and ethnicity. On the other hand, there is a critique from the far right that aims at ... Read More PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
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Abstract: In October 2022, the Black Camera team were pleased to welcome to Indiana University Bloomington our editorial board member Delphine Letort and her colleague Charles Joseph, both from the University of Le Mans, France. In addition to visiting the Black Camera offices, they also perused materials in the Lilly Library and the Black Film Center and Archive.African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary PoliticsCajetan Iheka, Duke University Press, 2021A Century of Brazilian Documentary Film: From Nationalism to ProtestDarlene J. Sadlier, University of Texas Press, 2022Afrofuturism in Black Panther: Gender, Identity, and the Re-Making of BlacknessRenée T. White and Karen A. Ritzenhoff (eds.), Lexington Books, 2021The ... Read More PubDate: 2023-03-10T00:00:00-05:00
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