Hollywood shuffle: The history and impact of Maya Cade’s black film archive

Distributed by Documentary Educational Resources, 108 Water Street, 5A, Watertown, MA 02472; 617-926-0491Produced by Victor Masayesva, Jr.Directed by Victor Masayesva, Jr.1984, Streaming, 58 mins Itam Hakim Hopiit is a documentary filmed in 1980 during the Hopi tricentennial celebration of their successful revolt against Spanish rule. It was completed and released in 1984. The film depicts one of the last surviving elders from his Hopi clan, Ross Macaya, telling some of the creation stories, stories of struggle against the Spanish and other forces, and Bow Clan migration stories, in a traditional Hopi manner using the Hopi language. The stories are woven together like traditional Native American storytellers tend to weave stories from different times and places into an apparently unified whole. An attentive listener can gain a basic understanding of the struggles of the Hopi people, especially versus the Spanish, and a sense of their visions of their origins. The cinematography and music set a mood that gives the listener a sense of traditional Hopi storytelling. The cinematography is, at times, successful but is overall dull and colorless. There are brief moments of desert beauty and Hopi culture and everyday life that succeed at setting the tone. Too bad these are too few and far between. The music is primarily traditional Hopi, with significant portions depicting drumming. The music does a better job of placing the listener in the Hopi culture than the video images. The stories are narrated in Hopi with an English voice-over. The voice-over does a decent job of letting the listener follow what is said and attempts to translate not only the basic meaning but the nuance and rhythm of Hopi. The Hopi is still clearly discernable in the background, and a Hopi-fluent listener could hear the stories in Hopi. The last portion of the film depicts the pow-wow and ceremonies surrounding the tricentennial celebration. For some reason, a large portion of this is fast-forwarded, which makes this section lose much of its appeal. Allowing the ceremonies to speak more clearly and for a longer time during the film would have significantly enhanced the cinematography and made the cinematography more relevant. Given the abovementioned negatives, a Recommended With Reservations rating is appropriate. The datedness of this film does not really detract significantly from its value since the narrated stories are much older than the few decades since the film launched. The value of the stories is the same today as it was in 1984, hundreds of years earlier, or hundreds of years in the future. The projected audience for this film is quite small. Although filmed at a level even smaller children could listen to and understand the stories, not many modern American children, except some Native American children, are trained and ready to listen to stories told in this manner. It is doubtful that many Native American communities, including Hopi ones, would be interested in this film since the storytelling traditions in these cultures continue today with modern elders telling these stories in their ways to their people. For academics, the primary audience is Native American studies and some multicultural Humanities programs. While reviewing this film, I could not miss the similarities between the stories told in it and some of the Ossianic heroic verses and songs regarding Finn MacCumhill or Fingal in Scottish literature. Although Scottish literature focuses on a particular hero and the Hopi stories lack an individual as a focus, the clan aspects, things discussed in the stories, and underlying philosophies are very similar. This would be an interesting focus for a comparative literature course, intersecting Native American and Scottish/Medieval European storytelling. Awards:Gold Hugo Award at the 1984 Chicago International Film Festival; Inducted into the Library of Congress' National Film Registry in 2022 for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

This is a reference guide to the most significant films ever made in the United States. Chosen by filmmakers and the public under the auspices of the Library of Congress, the 450 titles in the National Film Registry run the gamut from big-budget Hollywood blockbusters to landmark independent, documentary, animation and avant-garde masterpieces and experimental shorts. Unlike opinionated Top 100 and arbitrary Best Of lists, these are the real thing: groundbreaking films that make up the backbone of American cinema. Some are well-known, such as Citizen Kane, The Jazz Singer, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Birth of a Nation, and Boyz n the Hood. Others are more obscure, such as Blacksmith Scene (1893), The Blue Bird (1918), The Docks of New York (1928), Star Theatre (1902), and A Bronx Morning (1914). These are the films that made the medium what it is today.Daniel Eagan's beautifully written and authoritative book is for anyone who loves movies and who wants to learn more about them. An introduction explains how the National Film Registry was formed, and the ongoing need for film preservation. Each entry includes cast and crew credits and a synopsis that explains the importance of the film as well as where and how it was made. Rounding out the entries are sequels, remakes, source materials and information about where to view the films. Organized alphabetically for easy browsing, it can also be read straight through as a history of film.

the very existence of the blues tradition is irrefutable evidence that those who evolved it respond to the vicissitudes of the human condition not with hysterics and desperation, but through the wisdom of poetry informed by pragmatic insight" (Murray, 1996: 208-209).Although little known outside of critics' circles and dedicated cineastes, Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep (1977) "remains to this day a near mythic object, one of the first fifty films inducted into the Library of Congress's National Film Registry" (Foundas, Independent Lens: Charles Burnett, in Kapsis (ed.) 2011:138).The film "tenderly recounts a few days in the life of a slaughterhouse worker, Stan (Henry G. Sanders), whose existence is as bounded by invisible threads of hopelessness as that of the sheep that he is forced to kill each day" (Hozic, The House I live In: An Interview with Charles Burnett, in Kapsis, 2011: 75).During its brief theatrical release in 1977, the New York Times critic Janet Maslin dismissed Killer of Sheep as "amateurish" and 'boring'.Since then, the film has won awards at festivals and "acquired honorary protection by the National Film Registry accorded to a select few 'masterpieces' such as Citizen Kane, and aided its author in winning a prestigious John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship", popularly known as the "genius award" (Hozic, 2011: 75).In addition to being selected as one of America's fifty most culturally significant films, the film was named one of the "100 Most Influential Films of All Time" by the National Society of Film and gained critical acclaim in Europe.Burnett told film critic Terrence Rafferty in 2001, "It just takes an extraordinary effort to keep going when everybody's saying to you, ' No one wants to see that kind of movie' or 'there's no black audience" (Kapsis, Interviews: Charles Burnett, 2011: ix).The story of this film's 30-year journey from cult classic to re-release by Milestone Films in theaters and on DVD in 2008 is the story of its music in many ways.To pull together the $150,000 for co-

Reviewed by: Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories Robert Goff (bio) Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories. Edited by Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmermann. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Pp. xix+333. $60/$24.95. This is an informative and useful collection of essays on the historical and cultural significance of home movies, or, more broadly, amateur film. It grew out of a conference organized by coeditor Karen Ishizuka at the Getty Institute in 1998 and attended by a group of film archivists, scholars, and filmmakers. Coeditor Patricia Zimmermann introduces the essays and traces the development—before and after the 1998 conference—of a now well-established international movement to collect, preserve, and study amateur films. The collection of essays reflects not only the multicultural and international perspectives of the contributors but also a diverse range of approaches to their subject. Leading film curators present overviews of their growing archives of amateur film or highlight specific films from their collection, filmmakers discuss the uses they have made of home movies, and academics try to make scholarly sense of these “orphan” films. There is much to learn from many of these contributors, but Zimmermann’s “collage” arrangement leaves the reader with little guidance as to how to navigate through all twenty-seven essays. There are no subheadings and seemingly little order to the placement of the contributions. I would have liked at least some attempt at organization by geography or time period, or simply by some identifiable theme. I discovered—somewhat laboriously—that the trauma of World War II as recorded by amateur filmmakers was the content of a significant number of entries, with five essays largely concerned with film of the internment of Japanese Americans. Topaz (footage by an inmate of a Utah internment camp of that name) is only the second home movie, after the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination, to be accepted on the National Film Registry, and this important milestone is discussed at length in the entry on the work of the Registry. The Holocaust is invoked by London’s Imperial War Museum’s home movies of a Belgian family who successfully sheltered two Jewish children during World War II and also by a critical analysis of The Maelstrom, a movie by contemporary filmmaker Péter Forgács, which incorporated home movies of a Jewish family in Holland, most of whose members later died in the Holocaust. Forgács himself contributes a theoretical essay on home movies, with some discussion of his own films. Zimmermann mentions that many amateur filmmakers imitated Hollywood narratives (and she explores this theme in greater length in her 1995 Reel Families, an important social history of American home movies), but none of the contributors seriously examine the links between Hollywood and the world of amateur film. The Academy Film Archive collects not only Academy Award–winning movies but also has a large archive of [End Page 956] the home movies by Hollywood professionals, as does the Library of Congress. This footage raises the question of how “amateur” some of the films in these collections actually are. Certain essays note that film equipment was too expensive for most working-class citizens in Western European countries up to the 1960s, and this lack of affordability still persists for people in many places. Understanding the class perspective of those who made amateur films can be illuminating, and a perceptive reading by Heather Norris Nicholson of some films shot by middle-class hobbyists of factory workers says much about the class structure in northern England in the 1940s and 1950s. Another illuminating essay, by Nico De Klerk, concerns films made in the Dutch East Indies in the early twentieth century. By singling out key shots of Dutch colonialists interacting with their native servants, De Klerk demonstrates that the “situational rootedness” of home movies can cut through abstract theorizing about colonial relationships and reveal important details no other medium can provide. Roger Odin’s theoretical essay on the family home movie is the only one to mention the availability of contemporary home movies on the internet. The increasing significance of YouTube and other web outlets suggests the...

Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan is widely regarded as the most realistic depiction of battle ever captured on screen. The New York Times called its cinematography “reportorial candor” while critic Roger Ebert wrote of its “newsreel feel.” Spielberg won an Oscar for his efforts and in 2014 the film was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, who deemed it “culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant.” Spielberg’s cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski, created a new cinematographic form which came to define the look of the combat film genre with its roots in combat newsreels and photography. Using Mark Cousins’ methodology of ‘schema-plus-variation’ to assess the film’s authenticity, it is clear that Kaminski’s cinematography occupies the ground between the ideologies of verisimilitude and impressionism.

At a conference in 1980s, sponsored by American Historical Association, that brought film historians together with scholars of U.S. history, one of latter commented privately that he found some of former rather whigish.' This was not a Harry Potterism avant la lettre; rather, it was a reference that most historians would easily recognize. The term derives from a small polemical book, The Whig Interpretation of History, by British historian Herbert Butterfield, published in 1931. Butterfield defined object of his critique as the tendency in many historians ... to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasise certain principles of progress in past and to produce a story which is ratification if not glorification of present.2 Butterfield's viewpoint has had a remarkably long run in general historiography; as recently as 2002, it was described as historiographical orthodoxy.3 However, historian at conference was not directing his remark at an interpretation that treated cinema's past as a story of progress; by 1980s, an antiteleological stance had become a cinema studies axiom. Instead, what seemed whigish in this person's estimation was an account of revolutionary success, progress, and ratification (if not glorification) offered by film historians of their own historiographic achievements. Shortly after conference, I recounted this anecdote to a class in film historiography, and offered some additional perspectives. Film historians, I suggested, had not yet fully recognized that practice of historiography is fundamentally dialogic. Historical discourse is constantly being transformed through historians' commentaries and critiques on work of other past and present historians. The historian, as Michel de Certeau puts it, effaces error.... The territory that he occupies is acquired through a diagnosis of false. .... His work is oriented toward negative.4 Present-day film historians had excelled in detecting what they regarded as error in their predecessors and had staked out significant new territories in historical interpretation. What was naturally difficult to accept, however, was that inherent dialogism of their discipline would in turn subject their work to critique. The transformation of historiography would continue, I suggested to class, and in several decades' time emerging film historians would ask new questions about past and debate new perspectives that were likely to be substantially different from those that scholars of 1980s had valorized. Film historiography almost certainly would have moved on to territories as yet uncharted. Several decades have now passed since those incidents. Has my prediction been borne out? A fence-sitting answer would have to be yes and no. If my own thoughts to class had drawn implicitly on Thomas Kuhn's model of paradigm

News from the Black Film Center/Archive Stacey Doyle and Chinedu Amaefula Public Programs This fall, the Black Film Center/Archive hosted a number of film screenings. The first was a series dedicated to the work of independent director and distributor Ava DuVernay, U.S. Directing Award winner at Sundance in 2012. In addition to writing, directing, and producing her own films, DuVernay launched a ground-breaking film distribution venture, the African American Film Festival Releasing Movement (AFFRM), in 2011. In conjunction with her visit, the BFC/A and Indiana University Cinema partnered to show her films My Mic Sounds Nice: The Truth about Women in Hip Hop (2010), This Is the Life (2008), Venus vs. (2013), Middle of Nowhere (2012), and I Will Follow (2011). Also screened were two films distributed by AFFRM: Big Words (2013), directed by Neil Drumming, and Better Mus’ Come (2010), directed by Storm Saulter. During her visit, DuVernay spoke at a master class with Indiana University students, delivered a Jorgensen Guest Filmmaker Lecture at the IU Cinema, attended a brunch with the Black Graduate Student Association, and sat for an interview with BFC/A director Michael T. Martin. DuVernay’s visit was partially funded by an IU Women’s Philanthropy Council Award. In October, BFC/A archivist Brian Graney chaired a panel at the film symposium Orphans Midwest: Materiality and the Moving Image, held at the IU Cinema. The panel, titled “Off the Rails—Hell Bound Train,” discussed the reconstruction issues of film fragments in the Gist Collection at the Library of Congress for the early black films, Hell Bound Train and Verdict Not Guilty (1930–33). Also on the panel were Jacqueline Stewart (University of Chicago) and S. Torriano Berry (Howard University). Later in the month, the BFC/A hosted KB Boyce and Celeste Chan, of Queer Rebel Productions, curators of Exploding Lineage!: Queer of Color Histories in Experimental Media [End Page 213] (2012). The series, which included work by various directors, also included Boyce’s Bulldagger Women & Sissy Men (2010), a tribute to queer artists of the Harlem Renaissance, and Chan’s Bloodlines (2012), a recognition of Chinese immigrants detained on Angel Island due to the Chinese Exclusion Act. Also in October, the BFC/A hosted director Kevin Willmott, professor at the University of Kansas, and screened four of his films: The Battle for Bunker Hill (2008), The Only Good Indian (2009), CSA: The Confederate States of America (2004), and Destination: Planet Negro (2013). In early November, the BFC/A co-sponsored a series on South African film that included Cry, the Beloved Country (1951), Come Back, Africa (1959), and Searching for Sugar Man (2012). This event was in conjunction with IU’s Mathers Museum of World Cultures exhibit, Photos in Black and White: Margaret Bourke-White and the Dawn of Apartheid in South Africa. Additionally, during this semester BFC/A assistant archivist Stacey Doyle presented and discussed Pearl Bowser and Bestor Cram’s documentary on early race movies, Midnight Ramble (1994), with students from the IU Thomas I. Atkins Living-Learning Center, and the BFC/A print of Cheryl Fabio’s Rainbow Black: Poet Sarah W. Fabio (1975), which premiered at the IU Cinema last spring, was screened at Chicago’s Black Cinema House. On November 15–16 the BFC/A hosted the conference Regeneration in Digital Contexts: Early Black Film, funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The conference convened an interdisciplinary group of scholars and moving image archivists to discuss new methodologies and questions emerging through recent scholarship in early black film, and to consider how we render a film as an object of study in transformative digital environments. The conference also included screenings of Richard E. Norman’s The Flying Ace (1926), restored by the Library of Congress in 2010 from an original nitrate print donated by the director’s son, Captain Richard Norman Jr., and Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates (1919). Long thought lost, a single nitrate print of Within Our Gates was discovered under its Spanish release title, La Negra, at the Filmoteca Española in Madrid and reconstructed by the Library of Congress. At conference end the BFC/A, in...

Amongst archived collections of motion picture materials, home movies occupy an enigmatic position. The National Film Registry of the United States is a high-profile collection that includes home movies and, in the act of collecting, radically reframes the perceived cultural value and politics of the films. Established by the National Film Preservation Act of 1988, the National Film Registry aims to collect films that are ‘culturally, historically or aesthetically significant’ and preserve them in service of maintaining a US film heritage. Yet do the home movies selected represent a ‘significantly’ national symbol? This article examines the private and public trajectories of the home movies selected for the Registry, arguing that the films are selected with the primary goal of mobilizing particular political narratives according to the ideologies and biases of the National Film Preservation Board and Librarian of Congress. Furthermore, this article examines the ramifications of such political selections on the shaping of a US national film heritage. These issues are discussed through three key analyses: (1) an examination of the politics of collecting and canonization with respect to the goals and operations of the Registry as evidenced through publications and accounts of key figures involved in the selection of the home movies; (2) tracings of the trajectories of the individual home movies as they developed from private films into pieces of public history; and (3) a consideration of how the selection of these home movies more broadly affects the construction and consumption of a US national film heritage.

#Archives: Centering the Profession in Critical Conversations and Popular Discourse

O No vem ber 15 and 16, 2013, the Black Film Center/Archives (BFC/A) at Indiana University hosted Regeneration in Digital Contexts: Early Black Film. Funded by a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Office of Digital Humanities grant, this twoday conference and workshop explored the new methodologies and humanities questions emerging through recent scholarship in early black film studies. It also showcased experimental technological approaches to integrating film among other forms of documentation in dynamic structures for discovery, presentation, and analy sis.1 While not formally part of the grant project, the Indiana University Cinema programmed two screenings of early black silent film restorations from the Library of Congress in tandem with the conference: Richard E. Norman’s The Flying Ace (1926) and Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates (1919). The conference drew inspiration from a 2011 article written by film scholar Jacqueline Stewart. Stewart proposes a challenging new avenue for the study of early black film—an area marked by its scarcity of extent documentation—by identifying unmined evidentiary value in what “we can learn from the singularity of each print . . . and what any existing print might teach us about the circulation, exhibition, and content of movies in this under documented film culture. Indeed, when we think of each print as a unique artifact, we are encouraged to reconsider what we think of as a film’s ‘content.’”2 The study of “race movies,” the early motion pictures produced for black audiences in the first decades of the twentieth century, presents an ideal humanities context for framing this inquiry. The many independent producers and distributors, whose work was of en regional in scope and shortlived, lef behind little documentary evidence from which to reconstruct the terrain of the race movie circuit. Of the hundreds of blackaudience films produced since 1905—most notably by Oscar Micheaux—only a small percentage of origi nal film prints are known to exist. Those that survive are of-

Cinema has a distinct originality as an artistic genre due to its mass popularity and ability to reach a wide audience. When "Arab cinema" is considered in the history of cinema, the biggest and most important role in this field belongs to Egyptian cinema.The Egyptian film industry has been and remains the most powerful and influential of its kind in the Arab world. Known for being the only country in the Middle East that produces feature films, Egyptian cinema has been called the "Hollywood of the Arab world". There are different opinions about the beginning date of Egyptian cinema. According to some film historians, the start date is 1896, when the Lumière Brothers' short films were shown in Alexandria; and according to some, it is 1907, the year the first short documentary film of Egyptian cinema was made; according to others, it is the year 1927, the year of production of the first feature-length film, "Leila", directed and scripted by Azîza Amîr, the famous female director and actress of Egyptian cinema. Egyptian cinema, which has become a mirror of Egyptian society by mostly addressing social and economic issues, has sometimes come to the fore with newly written scripts, sometimes with adaptations from films of other countries and sometimes from literary works. Egyptian cinema has gone through important stages until it has reached a level where it can produce directors, screenwriters and actors who have received cinema education, can follow social changes and can express them with a developed artistic language. This study aims to examine the development process of Egyptian cinema, which has an important place and identity in the history of world cinema with its unique style, attitude, language, style and rich vocabulary, from 1927 to the 1970s.

Archival News Compiled by Yalie Kamara Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences The Academy Film Archive, home to over 90,000 titles, is actively preserving the 16mm home movies of Fayard and Harold Nicholas, who, performing together as the Nicholas Brothers, revolutionized dance entertainment in the earlier part of the twenty-first century with acrobatic moves such as "the leap frog" and performances in films such as 1943's Stormy Weather. In 2011, their home movies, which chronicled the dancers at home and on their extensive travels, were named to the Library of Congress National Film Registry, which honors twenty-five films each year for their contributions to the enrichment of America's film heritage. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. The Nicholas Brothers with Carmen Miranda, courtesy of the Fayard Nicholas Family Home Movie Collection. [End Page 304] Black Film Center/Archive, Indiana University, Bloomington In July 2016, the Black Film Center/Archive (BFC/A) received a collection of media and memorabilia representing the musical career and screen appearances of Ella Fitzgerald. Donors Fran Morris Rosman and Richard Rosman of the Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation visited the Indiana University campus in Bloomington to announce the donation. In a convivial ceremony officiated by Media School Dean James Shanahan, those gathered shared stories of their great appreciation and fondness for the iconic jazz performer. The Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation will be leading celebrations in 2017 to honor the centennial of Fitzgerald's birth. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. The Black Film Center/Archive's JaQuita Joy Roberts with Annie Willis and Fran Morris Rosman (from left to right), July 2016. Photo courtesy of James Brosher, IU Communications. The BFC/A completed its work to preserve filmmaker Jessie Maple's second feature, Twice as Nice (1989), through a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation. Her earlier feature, Will (1981), brought Maple recognition as the first African American woman to direct and produce a narrative feature film. With her husband and producing partner, Leroy Patton (Twice as Nice's director of photography), Maple collaborated with BFC/A associate director Brian Graney on the film preservation work at Colorlab in Rockville, Maryland. Screenings of the new preservation print were held [End Page 305] at the Indiana University Cinema, with Maple and Patton in attendance, and at BAMcinématek, where it was featured in the film series "One Way or Another: Black Women's Cinema, 1970–1991." Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 3. Paula and Pamela McGee in Jessie Maple's Twice as Nice (1989), preserved by the Black Film Center/Archive through a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation. BFC/A also hosted recent visits from filmmakers Deborah Riley Draper and Julie Dash. Through her documentary film work, Draper seeks to uncover untold and often forgotten stories of the African American experience. Her films Versailles '73: American Runway Revolution (2012) and Olympic Pride, American Prejudice (2016) were both shown at Indiana University Cinema, with support from the College of Arts and Sciences' Themester program. Dash's visit, a celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of her masterpiece Daughters of the Dust (1991), featured screenings of the newly released digital restoration of Daughters, along with presentations on 16mm and 35mm of her earlier short films, in prints from the collections of the BFC/A and the UCLA Film & Television Archive. [End Page 306] Film & Media Archive, University Libraries, Washington University in St. Louis The Film & Media Archive (FMA) received a donation of original interviews, photographs, footage, and research files related to two documentary films from Berkeley, California–based Paradigm Productions, The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It (2000) and Race Is the Place (2005). All materials in the Paradigm Productions Collection will be available for research to faculty, students, and the public on-site in the Washington University Libraries. Select materials also will be made available online. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 4. A still of Amiri Baraka during filming of Race Is the Place, a documentary by Paradigm Productions, materials for which are now housed in the Washington University Libraries' Film & Media Archive. Also in...

H ow did a forgotten 1930 logging film become a marker of regional identity for many Maine residents? How did its unexpected resurgence in the 1980s lead to the creation of Northeast Historic Film, a model regional archive? How did this obscure, amateur 16mm production land on the National Film Registry in 2002? To answer these questions it is necessary to retrace the history of the 28-minute amateur film From Stump to Ship. The movie, which was rediscovered and reconstructed in the early 1980s, depicts a vanished chapter in the history of the Maine woods. While just its recovery is culturally significant, the critical factor in From Stump to Ship's widespread popularity is that the.4ilm was made deliberately accessible to the people of Maine. While some archival films are carefully protected and seen only by archivists and scholars within a controlled environment, From Stump to Ship broke free from the archival setting and went on the road. Viewed by thousands of people from various socioeconomic backgrounds in cities and small towns across the state of Maine, the film helped to foster a collective memory of woods life. It also helped to publicly commemorate the work of early twentieth century woodsmen, enhance a sense of regional identity and increase interest in Maine history. The From Stump to Ship phenomenon was created by a combination of factors: serendipity, hard work, the understanding that amateur film has the power to connect people, places, and communities, and an artifact that provides contemporary viewers with a social history of early twentieth century woodmen. Discovering From Stump to Ship Alfred Ames, the president of the Machias Lumber Company in Washington County, Maine, purchased a 16mm moving picture camera to document the twilight of his family's business the long lumber industry. Ames took full advantage of the mass marketed, amateur-film technology that was invented in 1923 and popularised throughout the 1920s, for the film is full of the industrious activity of Ames' employees and the natural motion of the Machias River.1 In 1929-30, with the help of a friend, Dr. Howard Kane, who did some of the filming with his professional quality movie camera, Ames meticulously recorded the extraordinary labour of both woodsmen and horses. He documented his employees sawing down trees; horses hauling great loads of logs though the woods; river drivers agilely running over logs in rushing rivers; the powerful current of the Machias River forcing thousands of logs to tumble and roll; men expertly clearing log jams at the head of the river's falls; men in bateaus flying down river rapids; the proficiencies of mill employees cutting logs with a 48-foot band saw, and finally, the schooner Lucy Evelyn, loaded with more than two million laths, setting out to sea. In short, Ames' amateur film

The Hollywood industrial complex delivers entertainment to millions of people through the manipulation of images on the silver screen. Hollywood images of Africans in Africa and its Diaspora begin with negative stereotypes and gross misrepresentations about the Black experience. Yet, there are other images of Blacks that are more diverse and realistic. Haile Gerima has been at the forefront of the Black independent film movement to eradicate stereotypes while offering wholesome and complex stories about what it means to be Black from an international perspective. In the following interview conducted by historian Diane D. Turner and Muata Kamdibe, Gerima brings to light his early influences and his journey from Gonder, Ethiopia, to the United States. He gives insight into how he becomes one of the most important Black independent filmmakers in the history of Black film. He also provides information about the struggles to create meaningful Black films as well as his analysis of Black filmmakers and the Black film industry.

A long-view interview with filmmaker Billy Woodberry conducted by screenwriter and scholar Josslyn Luckett gives the filmmaker his due and reflects on his prolific career as an independent filmmaker. The unfolding of Billy Woodberry's career—both his own new work and the recent critical revaluations of his classic work, such as the naming of Bless Their Little Hearts (1983) to the National Film Registry in 2013—makes words like “rebellion” or “revival” only marginally useful. Any research into the full range of his film work, including his multiple roles as film actor, film narrator, video installation artist, and film history and production professor at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) since 1989, reveals a Woodberry who might be more properly termed an underground “renaissance” man than a rebel.