This article demonstrates how the soap opera Personal Problems reveals a crucial yet overlooked moment of Black media production in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Tracing the evolution of the show from radio drama to television program, I illuminate how video technology, generic innovation, and collaborative networks provided the foundation for new representations of Black life. While scholarly accounts typically focus on Hollywood and the LA Rebellion, I argue that the crew's location shooting animated a critique of New York City's media-focused urban redevelopment policies while challenging the broader inequities of creative industries. The trajectory of Personal Problems serves as a model for rethinking Black film history.

This article explores an overlooked third strand of the 1920s British film industry's distribution and exhibition practices: amateur filmmakers. Our analysis of the UK amateur networks that were created through the 1920s and into the early 1930s offers a challenge to accepted ideas that British cinema exhibition was limited to a small number of metropolitan mainstream or independent art cinemas. By tracing the amateur cinema's move from an interaction with mainstream exhibition venues to the introduction of a national amateur network, we offer a more nuanced understanding of amateur-film culture and its community-led model of distribution and exhibition.

This article contributes to scholarship on small-gauge and home cinema by situating the advent of the Pathé Baby within interwar French politics and society. Through close analysis of period advertising, it argues that Pathé mobilized pronatalist and imperialist discourses to make 9.5mm home projection and filmmaking attractive to white, middle-class, metropolitan consumers, presenting home cinema as means of encountering the French Empire on the one hand and of promoting the so-called French race on the other. In drawing such connections, the study also seeks to enrich the growing body of scholarship on the entanglement of domestic cinema, gender, empire, and race.

The Chevrolet-General Motors–sponsored film American Look (1958) harnessed technologies of Hollywood spectacle to make their production bigger and bolder than many previous sponsored films. Beyond merely selling a car, the film engaged its viewers with an exhibition of General Motors' corporate persona, aligning its products with the prestige of good design on a grand scale in a Technicolor, widescreen, sponsored epic. Locating my analysis within the cultural and geopolitical context of the Cold War era, this paper argues that American Look expands current rubrics for understanding sponsored and industrial films.

This paper analyzes the first two years of operation of Marc Ferrez & Filhos (Marc Ferrez & Sons), a pioneer of film distribution in Brazil. As exclusive representative of French Pathé Frères in the country, the company oversaw the expansion of permanent movie theaters in Rio de Janeiro starting in 1907, created a national distribution network, and shaped the budding film market in Brazil. The paper shows that the increase in domestic film production after 1908, the so-called belle époque of Brazilian cinema, resulted from Marc Ferrez & Filhos' dominance in programming at the best movie theaters in the capital of Brazil using their own original and exclusive representation model.

This article examines the relationship between policing, film censorship, and right-wing extremist politics through a case study of the Detroit Police Department Censor Bureau's censorship of leftist cinema during the 1930s. This period saw the police Censor Bureau repeatedly target films suspected of harboring sympathy for communist ideology as well as films openly critical of Hitler and fascism. I place this history within the context of the rise of nativist and fascist movements in southeast Michigan as a whole, and within the Detroit Police Department in particular, during the years leading up to the Second World War.

The article analyzes the use of archival footage in the Portuguese film Brandos Costumes (Mild Manners, 1975), directed by Alberto Seixas Santos (1936–2016). The film was shot in 1972–73, in the wake of the political opening that followed António de Oliveira Salazar's retirement, a period known as Marcelismo (1968–1974); however, it did not premier until September 1975, that is, several months after the military coup that put an end to the regime in April 1974. I identify the archival material and examine how it was incorporated into the film. Drawing on contemporaneous and more recent sources, I then discuss the film's dissonant reception and political equivocations.

The documents published here shed light on some of the female film profes sionals in prerevolutionary Russia and aspects of their work. These documents are varied in form (a portrait, an article, a photograph, etc.), and each of them represents a certain cinema profession: a distributor and a producer, a screenwriter and a journalist, an assis tant director and an editor. Different case studies presented in this piece fill in some gaps in early cinema history and open a perspective for further research on women film pioneers.