African American Film Research Articles

Review: Pleading the Blood: Bill Gunn’s “Ganja & Hess,” by Christopher Sieving

Review: <i>Pleading the Blood: Bill Gunn’s “Ganja &amp; Hess,”</i> by Christopher Sieving

Minority Views: “Liberator”, American Cinema, and the 1960s African American Film Criticism

The article reconstructs the discourse of film criticism in Liberator – a radical African American magazine published between 1961 and 1971. Employing Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the cultural field, the author situates Liberator within the context of the 1960s, civil rights movement, and Black Arts movement, and analyses the magazine’s role in film culture of the era, as well as the links between the magazine and important black filmmakers and film writers. Four aspects of Liberator’s film criticism are explored: cultural memory of past representations, criticism of genre filmmaking, the need for cinematic realism, and the possibility of creating a distinct black cinema. The case study of the critic Clayton Riley’s career presents an author who wanted to continue his radical criticism in the mainstream press (The New York Times). Liberator’s legacy is framed as essential in understanding the tradition of African American film criticism.

‘Everything About Being Indie Is All Tied to Not Being Black’

In this article I will explore the use of indie music within two African American independent films, Medicine for Melancholy (2008) and Pariah (2011). These two films are rare examples of African American films featuring an extensive employment of indie music, despite a huge growth in such music appearing within feature films over the past twenty years. I investigate some of the racial contours of indie music and examine how it is utilised within the two films under analysis. Both these films employ indie music to explore individuals who do not conform to some of the more stereotypical characteristics of black identities. I frame these analyses within a broader discussion of the links between indie music – particularly indie rock – and whiteness, exploring prejudices against, and marginalisation of, many black music artists within indie music cultures.

Editor’s Introduction

Editorial| July 01 2022 Editor’s Introduction: Acts of Speculation Allyson Nadia Field Allyson Nadia Field Allyson Nadia Field is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and The Possibility of Black Modernity (Duke University Press, 2015). She is also co-editor with Marsha Gordon of Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film (Duke University Press, 2019) and co-editor with Jan-Christopher Horak and Jacqueline Stewart of L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema (University of California Press, 2015). Field was named a 2019 Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and a 2020–2021 ACLS/Burkhardt Fellow. She is currently writing a book on the archival rediscovery and afterlives of Something Good—Negro Kiss (Selig, 1898) and another project tentatively titled The Speculative Archive. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Feminist Media Histories (2022) 8 (3): 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2022.8.3.1 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Allyson Nadia Field; Editor’s Introduction: Acts of Speculation. Feminist Media Histories 1 July 2022; 8 (3): 1–7. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2022.8.3.1 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFeminist Media Histories Search What if the implications for scholarship of the longstanding, ongoing, and pervasive misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, colonialist, and racist environment are not solely a problem of the archive but also of how we discern evidence and produce history? What if we research and write media history differently? What if we engage in scholarship that recuperates the private musings of our research and makes them the instigating questions? This special issue of Feminist Media Histories, building from the companion issue that preceded it in spring 2022, brings together essays that do just that. Loosening our commitments to what was to ask what might have been? and what might be? allows for repressed narratives to surface and alternative possibilities to emerge. This is especially vital for people and subjects excluded from or denigrated by the historical record and thereby the act of writing history. Indeed, an emphasis on the question, “what if?,”... You do not currently have access to this content.

The Life History of Juli Jones, Junior by William Foster

The Life History of Juli Jones, Junior by William Foster Allyson Nadia Field (bio) Imagine what new histories could emerge from a commitment to doing more with less. —Ashley D. Farmer (2018)1 By accident I reached Chicago. … What was I to do in this big Windy City? —William Foster writing as Juli Jones, Jr. (1910)2 William Foster is a frustrating figure for the film historian. One of the first African American film producers—quite possibly the first—Foster made short comedies and actualities in Chicago in the 1910s, including his celebrated one-reel farce The Railroad Porter (US, 1913). He was also a prolific author for newspapers and other publications, writing extensively about Black vaudeville and musical theater, the film industry, and opportunities for Black entrepreneurship, and serving as a highly respected authority on African American sports and entertainment in the early twentieth century. Yet Foster has eluded sustained engagement from historians and film scholars. A central reason for this is that, despite the volume of his writing, he elides details of his life, career, and creative output. And, as with many early African American filmmakers, none of Foster's films are known to survive.3 In my work, I've sought to find methodologies for writing with, rather than despite, such absences, turning them into generative sites from which to create film histories that aren't deterred by archival lacunae but find in them different forms of presence.4 If, in Michel-Rolph Trouillot's [End Page 82] terms, the archive's "silences" are functions of power, there's an imperative to accounting for what we cannot see, motivated as well by "the political and ethical demands of the present," requiring us to reorient ourselves towards the gaps and elisions of the archive.5 Yet, while Foster didn't leave extensive records of his filmmaking or details of his life and career that we know of, he did publish multiple autobiographical anecdotes and narratives. Many of these seem to be forms of satire, either of himself or of others. Foster also wrote two "memoirs": a 1910 "Life History" of his alter ego, the journalist Juli Jones, Jr., published in the Indianapolis Freeman, and a 1928 article consisting of his recollections of Black theater performers (but no discussion of his own life or work) that appeared in the inaugural (and only) issue of The Official Theatrical World of Colored Artists.6 Film historians, including me, have drawn from his journalism in discussions of his theatrical and filmmaking work, and the 1928 "memoirs" are regularly cited by scholars of Black musical theater, despite its omissions.7 However, the "Life History," a fictional memoir, has not been acknowledged or engaged with, likely because it is so clearly satiric fabulation with no evident correspondence with the actual events of Foster's life. It eschews the gravitas of the memoir form in favor of irreverent, even sarcastic, fantasy. How should we read it? What place does such a text have in works of history? Foster wrote "The Life History of Juli Jones, Junior" when he was about fifty years old and three years before he turned to filmmaking. I discuss it here not to dispel its self-mythologizing, or to provide a "true history" that refutes its stances, but to take the account seriously as an extant self-presentation of a figure whose absence looms over Black film historiography. The "Life History," as with Foster's persona and career, lends itself to speculative interpretation. The ephemeral traces of Foster's life and work are, in the aggregate, an indeterminate archive of an elusive figure. In embracing indeterminacy, José Esteban Muñoz finds value in "ephemeral evidence" rather than the "traditionally evidentiary."8 As he writes, speaking of queer lives in particular, "Ephemera includes traces of lived experience and performances of lived experience, maintaining experiential politics and urgencies long after these structures of feeling have been lived."9 In the case of Foster's fictive self-fashioning, his own performance of lived experience, publicly presented and widely circulated, constitutes autofiction—even autotheory—a fictocritical self-portrayal that itself is speculative and invites speculative engagement.10 This approach recognizes that Foster's self-satire...

An Air Map for World Cinema: Aeroflot as an Infrastructure for Cinematic Internationalism

The expansion of global air travel in the Cold War era fueled diverse forms of state‐sponsored internationalism, including international writers' congresses, concert tours, and especially art and film festivals. Film festivals served as a key stage for cultural competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, as well as the main way for decolonized Asian and African states to showcase their new national cinemas. The Soviet state airline, Aeroflot, shaped international participation at the Moscow International Film Festival (1959‐) and Global South participation at the Tashkent Festival for Asian, African, and Latin American Cinema in Uzbekistan (1968‐). This article analyzes Aeroflot as an infrastructure for cinematic internationalism. The socialist economics of air travel shaped “world cinema maps” that emerged at Moscow and Tashkent. Aeroflot enabled Soviet cinematic diplomacy, but also constrained it: it delayed Tashkent festival's expansion to Latin America, where the airline had few inroads. For local publics, films brought in airplane luggage at the last minute provided uncensored transnational cinematic experiences that occasionally elided not just Soviet, but also Syrian or American diplomatic control. Aeroflot's inefficiencies put foreign delegates face‐to‐face with Soviet everyday life and reproduced global inequalities: filmmakers from the Global South, whose travel was covered by their Soviet hosts, were at the mercy of Aeroflot's delays, while festival guests from Western Europe and the United States could count on their own national airlines for transportation. Free Aeroflot tickets ensured nearly comprehensive participation of Global South nations, in order to promote Soviet filmmaking as the model for emergent Asian and African cinemas. Yet Third Worldist alliances forged at Moscow and Tashkent—among African organizers of the Pan‐African Federation of Filmmakers, or between Cuban and Vietnamese militant cineastes—often bypassed, contradicted, or exceeded Soviet diplomatic goals. More broadly, I argue that Soviet official internationalism—its technologies, bureaucracies, and expenditures—should be analyzed as an infrastructure that enabled multiple internationalist projects, some conceived elsewhere and working toward goals tangential or inimical to Soviet state purposes. Much existing work on Soviet internationalism zeros in on the state's attempts to win the “hearts and minds” of Soviet or foreign citizens. Conversely, the infrastructural approach focuses on informal transnational alliances and personal ties built on Soviet terrain, while also accounting for Soviet institutional, economic, and technological power that shaped the “contact zones” where these encounters took place.

The Black Film Ambassador

In celebration of the Pacific Film Archive at 50, Josslyn Luckett, a former student of PFA programmer and UCBerkeley professor Albert Johnson reflects on the global reach of his career and legacy. One of the founding “co-conspirators” of Film Quarterly, Johnson presented African, Asian, and Latin American cinema at the PFA for three decades, while programming U.S. directors from Vincente Minnelli to Melvin Van Peebles across the globe. While Johnson became known for his iconic “Craft of Cinema” profile series at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF), this article highlights under-acknowledged aspects of his film curation and writing, including his early championing of many of the independent Black directors known now as the L.A. Rebellion.

Imaginary Nation of Wakanda in Black Panther: The Neo-colonized African Continent

Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther as a high-profile black superhero film has been lauded especially by African descendants for its features such as diversity of actors and expression of Afrofuturism. As a Hollywood film that is produced under the grand project of Marvel Cinematic Universe, Black Panther is celebrated for representing African (American) characters without distorting them. Thus, in this stance, the film is located within the historical context of African American film production that has long attempted to represent just and empowering images of the Black race. On the other hand, few scholars criticize Black Panther for its way of using African continent which does not differ from popular and everlasting culture prop. Starting from this point, this paper explores in particular the power dynamics surrounding Africa as the Third World via Wakanda as an imaginary space which generates the multi-layered perspectives for approaching the representation of Africa. Although this imaginary nation is supposed to be a leading image of liberating Africa through a cinematic imagination, it only comes to reiterate the existing position which dismisses and devalues African continent since it fails to embrace the continent. In further focusing the relationship among the African, the African American, and Wakanda, this paper also delves into what lies behind the idealistic surface of Black Panther. The detailed examination of the tension between T’Challa, the African, and Killmonger, the African American, will allow this paper to critically engage with Pan-Africanism the film stands for, and concludes that the film, although unintentionally, reinforces U.S. nationalism.

Evelyn Preer and Black female stardom in the silent film era

ABSTRACT Evelyn Preer was an African American stage and film performer who achieved popularity in late 1920s. Before her untimely death in 1932, at the age of 36, Preer starred in 16 films, most of which were directed and produced by a prolific Black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. Although a potent symbol in Black domain, her status as a screen star remained largely unexamined by contemporary white critics. Instead, the popular press concentrated on stage performances, such as Preer’s titular role in Broadway adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé. This article examines the debates that surrounded Black female entertainers—especially Preer, but also Florence Mills—by drawing on Chicago Defender, New York Age and other African American newspapers of the era. It uses Preer as a primary case study to characterise the ways in which Black stardom was discursively similar to, but also necessarily different, from the constructions of dominant, Hollywood stardom. It situates African American within the gendered rhetoric of respectability, the New Negro discourse, and patriarchal ideas of the acting profession. Preer’s visibility in the white domain constituted an act of resistance, and a reminder of the Black struggle for equality.

Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, the Soviet Union, and Cold War Circuits for African Cinema, 1958-1978

Based on previously unexamined documents in Soviet archives, this essay shows Paulin S. Vieyra's key role as a "cinematic internationalist" who used the socialist and Cold War film networks to advance African cinema. As a filmmaker, producer, scholar, and Senegalese government official, Vieyra took part in Soviet film life, beginning with the 1957 International Youth Festival in Moscow. Vieyra participated in the making of the Soviet documentary about the First Negro Arts Festival in Dakar, African Rhythms; represented the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers at the Tashkent Festival for African, Asian, and Latin American Cinema; and advocated for African films on the Moscow International Film Festival jury in 1971, 1973, and 1985. He also traveled to the United States, as a member of a FEPACI delegation in 1973 and as a participant in a major Senegalese cinema retrospective at the Museum of American Art in New York and the Pacific Film Archive at Berkeley in 1978. Vieyra's advocacy connected two politically disparate film cultures that supported African cinema during the decolonization era—Soviet cinema and militant Third Cinema. He used Cold War infrastructures in the Soviet Union and the United States to promote and establish African cinemas internationally.

Introduction, or The Things We Did Not Lose in the Fire

Introduction, or The Things We Did Not Lose in the Fire Diana W. Anselmo (bio) I am touching a strip of film from the 1910s. Composed of sixteen frames, it depicts a man on horseback, galloping down a woodsy trail. In all likelihood, the motion picture these frames belonged to does not exist anymore; it is estimated that only 14 percent of US silent features survived time, neglect, floods, and fire.1 And yet this piece of sepia nitrate rests in my hands, available despite early cinema’s rampant ephemerality. Its survival is due to one movie-loving girl, Eleanor G. Fulton, who decided to assemble a hundred-page scrapbook honoring Jack W. Kerrigan, one of the first screen heart-throbs. Between 1913 and 1917, the twenty-something fan had access to Hollywood’s sprawling lots, so it is possible she gathered the discarded filmstrip herself, on one of her trips to the new Universal studio; there Fulton met her idol at least twice. In addition to the filmstrip, the personal scrapbook includes a snapshot of Kerrigan awkwardly standing by a trailer, the girl fan’s shadow cast by his feet. A proud declaration of authorship is penned under the vernacular reproduction: “Warren Kerrigan posed for this picture at Universal City, October 12 1915. I took it with my Kodak,” Fulton notes, signing off “EGF.”2 An autographed headshot is also preserved among hundreds of Kerrigan-related newspaper clippings and memorabilia. The blue ink scrawled across the star’s face is glossy, as if perpetually wet (Figure 1). Access and ephemerality are the key terms framing this dossier on “Alternative Archives.” I have access to Kerrigan’s snapshot and handwriting—to [End Page 160] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Jack W. Kerrigan’s autographed headshot in Eleanor G. Fulton’s annotated movie scrap-book (1913–1917). Photo by author. [End Page 161] a material piece of his largely lost filmography—because of a female fan’s archival labor and the knowledge exchange abetted by the World Wide Web. Fulton’s movie scrapbook found me in 2014 through an auction advertised on the online marketplace eBay. Without the portal of mass communication and commerce that is the internet, this peephole into early film reception and celebrity would have remained unavailable to me, and by extension to academic scrutiny. Trafficking in transience, fan artifacts from the silent era have a low survival rate. Most material sources conferred institutional protection and discursive currency have originated from within capitalistic enterprises, functioning to legitimize the systems of power that afforded their production; scrapbooks crafted by no-name screen-struck girls rarely qualify. Pushing against the erasure of female labor in early Hollywood, Janet Staiger, Shelley Stamp, Karen Ward Mahar, Amelie Hastie, Mark Garrett Cooper, Hilary Hallett, and Richard Abel, among many others, have shed light on how women helped implement a lucrative star system as directors, producers, screenwriters, columnists, patrons, and players.3 However, with their credits systemically unpreserved, female legacies of film authorship and agency continue to flirt with oblivion. Silence constitutes an invisible form of violence since it is difficult to mount a historical argument in the void of material evidence. Digital preservation has greatly contributed to the expedient diversification and accessibility of media history. Projects such as the Media History Digital Library, Lantern, Women Film Pioneers Project, and Early African American Film are research-based, non-profit databases that offer open access to (mostly English-language) productions, periodicals, and biographies of workers from the silent and sound eras, spotlighting women and people of color who have not received sufficient attention in scholarly and popular debate.4 Leveraging archival data to increase public awareness of diverse media histories, these databases are extraordinarily useful, particularly to instructors and students. Nonetheless, knowledge of early female moviegoing remains circumscribed to secondhand reports found in the periodical press and the memoirs [End Page 162] of film personalities, resources framed by commercial intent. That intent drives content, which drives exclusion through copyediting bias, market research, and consumer expectations. Black and queer people, for example, are seldom identified in these industry-sanctioned sources. Though undoubtedly part of the heterogeneous connective tissue comprising early US audiences...

Framing Black Performance

Recent African American film scholarship has called for an attention to the structures of black representation on screen. This work echoes the calls made in the 1990s by black feminist film and cultural scholars to resist the allure of reading for racial realism and to develop more appropriate critical tools and terms to acknowledge black artistic innovations. This essay takes up and reiterates that call, drawing attention to the problems of film interpretation that attend to a version of historical analysis without an understanding of form and medium. Foregrounding film as a terrain of struggle, the essay mobilizes an analysis of the 2014 film Selma to illuminate the multiple resonances of the concept representation. Focusing on the film’s representation of women and girl characters, the essay argues that cinematic play with the terms and conditions of representation comment powerfully on the limitations of cinematic and historical discourses to speak about the black femme as a political subject. Analysis of Selma exposes the key problems of reception and criticism facing contemporary African American film. The film speaks to the failure of de jure representational regimes in post–civil rights movement America and offers up the cinematic terrain as an important twenty-first-century site of African American struggle.

Elements of Post-Katrina African American Documentary Film

Elements of Post-Katrina African American Documentary Film

Emerging from the Shadows: Alice Burton Russell—African American Film Producer, Actress, and Screenwriter

The first black women filmmakers frequently remain unacknowledged for their contributions to the early years of black cinema. This essay examines the life and career of Alice Russell Micheaux (wife to black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux) who worked for the Micheaux Film Company between 1926 and 1948, where she served in a variety of capacities. Given her contributions, this essay argues that she deserves recognition among other early black women filmmakers in her own right as a significant film pioneer whose involvement propelled the development of this emergent cinema. I consider her formative years as the daughter of black newspaper editor and publisher Robert Russell, explore her adult years in Montclair, New Jersey, and critique the services she provided to the Micheaux Film Company

Police Brutality, Over-Policing, and Mass Incarceration in African American Film

This article seeks to examine the role of the police in African American film. Looking at the last three decades of filmmaking, five films stand out as important examples for this study: Do the Right Thing, Boyz n the Hood, Set it Off, Training Day, and Get Out. These films are both consistent in the message regarding the police and African American communities, and are separated by time to demonstrate the distinct differences in how that message has been shown. An examination of the real-world relationship between the two groups is also studied, to better understand the accuracy of the films. The gendering of film and police brutality is a further discussion within the article in regard to the lack of female African American directors in Hollywood and the less frequently discussed police violence against African American women. These issues are addressed through a combination of film analysis and secondary source data on the police interaction and brutality in the African American community.

World cinema at Soviet festivals: cultural diplomacy and personal ties

ABSTRACT This article traces informal world cinema networks at Soviet film festivals. It argues that the cultural diplomacy approach, where state objectives determine the value of cultural exchange, fails to account for the full range of connections made at Soviet film festivals during the Cold War. Personal ties have been crucial to the development of film festivals and the cinematic movements they engendered. The Soviet state aimed to position Soviet cinema as a better alternative to decadent European and commercial Hollywood cinemas, and as a model for film cultures in socialist Eastern Europe and decolonization-era Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This article first demonstrates how the Moscow International Film Festival (1959-present) and the Tashkent Festival of Asian, African, and Latin American Cinema (1968–1988; Latin America included from 1976) constructed a more inclusive map of world cinema than major European film festivals at Cannes, Venice, and Berlin. It then shows how African, Cuban, and Vietnamese delegations forged informal alliances around the emergent Third Cinema (militant Third World cinema) movement at the 1967 Moscow festival. Strong unofficial connections formed by international festival guests transcended and contradicted the aims of Soviet cultural diplomacy.

Contributors

Contributors

Professional Notes and Research Sources

Professional Notes and Research Sources Megan Connor and Katherine A. Johnson Megan Connor and Katherine A. Johnson Several influential critics and filmmakers have died in the past year. In their memory and contributions to African and African American cinema, we take note and salute their passing. Med Hondo, 1936–2019 Med Hondo, a French-Mauritanian filmmaker born Abid Mohamed Medoun Hondo, died in Paris at age 82 in March. Hondo was among the founding fathers of African cinema, given his career-long dedication to making films that explored the history of colonialism and postcoloniality in metropolitan France and the African continent, such as his award-winning debut feature, Soleil O (1967), which screened at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival, and was awarded the Golden Leopard at the Locarno International Film Festival. Beyond his directorial efforts, including Soleil O, West Indies (1979)—widely considered to be Africa's first musical and at the time, the most expensive African film production in history—Sarraounia (1986), and his last film, Fatima, I'Algerienne de Dakar (2004), Hondo also acted throughout his career, originally studying under French actress Francoise Rosay and forming his own theater company, Shango (named for the Yoruba god of Thunder) which toured France featuring plays by African and diaspora writers. Additionally, Hondo was known for his voice dubbing work of Hollywood films, especially dubbing Eddie Murphy in roles like The Nutty Professor (1996) and the Shrek franchise. For more on Hondo see: https://www.indiewire.com/2019/03/med-hondo-dead-african-cinema-1202048352/. S. Pierre Yameogo, 1955–2019 Following a long illness, influential Burkinabe filmmaker S. Pierre Yameogo passed away in April at age 63. Yameogo, known for his passionate and politically engaged work that focused on his home country of Burkina Faso, directed six films, beginning in 1987. Yameogo's often controversial subject matter was the subject of censorship, most notably for Silmande—Tourbillon (1998), which critiqued economic and political corruption through the tale of a Lebanese family in Burkina Faso and was boycotted and banned [End Page 462] by Lebanese and Cote d'Ivoire theaters. In addition, several of Yameogo's films were screened at the Cannes Film Festival, including Laafi—Tout va bien (1991), Wendemi (1993), and Delwende (2005), which was awarded the Prize of Hope at the 2005 edition of the festival. John Singleton, 1968–2019 The first African American nominated for an Oscar for best director for his first feature film Boyz N the Hood (1991), John Singleton died at the age of 51 after having suffered a stroke. Like Spike Lee, Leslie Harris, Julie Dash, et al, Singleton was a filmmaker who gave audiences of the 1990s stories about characters they recognized, but had not seen yet in the movies. Singleton's success allowed him to do more than tell the stories of black people, it also allowed him to help other black stars, like Tupac Shakur and Ice Cube, navigate predominantly white media industries. He graduated from USC in 1990 and released Boyz N the Hood only a year later. Less than a decade after that, he directed several more features, including Poetic Justice (1993), with Janet Jackson and Shakur, and Shaft (2000), starring Samuel L. Jackson. Throughout his career, Singleton encouraged and supported black communities, their representation, and the work of black filmmakers and musicians. Up until his death, he was directing for television shows like, Empire (2015-) and Snowfall (2017-). He will be remembered as a significant figure in the pursuit of representational diversity. For more on Singleton, see his New York Times obituary: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/29/obituaries/john-singleton-dead.html. Camille Billops, 1933–2019 A significant figure in the film and art world, Camille Billops is best remembered for her documentary films, especially Finding Christa (1991) where she details her own story of reconnecting with the daughter she gave up as a toddler so that she could become an artist. Billops made a number of documentaries through her production company, Mom and Pop Productions, which she created alongside her husband, James Hatch. Her films were typically about difficult social issues, such as Suzanne, Suzanne (1982), a documentary about a substance-abusing teenage girl who...

Talent X Relationships / Knowledge: An Interview with Roy Campanella II

Talent X Relationships / Knowledge:An Interview with Roy Campanella II Nicholas Forster (bio) Roy Campanella II is one of the most prolific black filmmakers of the last fifty years. Despite his extensive credits as a director of film and television (including a DGA-nominated episode of I'll Fly Away, and several episodes of Beverly Hills, 90210, and Frank's Place), he remains an underrecognized figure in the history of black cinema. Scholarly absences in the study of black life are nothing new; within the context of this Close-Up, however, his life and work reflects some of the complicated questions that surround the New York Scene and its ever-in-flux makeup. For five decades Campanella has sought to change the film and television industry, both on screen and behind the scenes. His career includes time at Boston's WGBH (a PBS affiliate), work at CBS News, where he helped found the CBS Black Employees Association, and an independent production deal with BET, where he produced ten original movies in 1998. His life and experience reveals the intricate balance required of black filmmakers eager to have a career within the industry and also create independent work. Still at work today, he has never abandoned the directing chair. Within the industry he has been recognized for his creativity: in 1992, he won the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Dramatic Shows for Brother Future, which aired on PBS affiliates in 1991. More recently, he has won awards for directing two romantic comedies: Masquerade (Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame, 2003) and The Company We Keep (Urban Media Makers Film Festival, 2011). This transcript is an edited version of more than five hours of dialogue that focused on the earlier part of Campanella's career spent on the East Coast. We discuss his formative education at Harvard and his subsequent efforts as a director, cameraman, and editor on WGBH's news and documentary series Say Brother, before moving on to his experience as one of the first African American film editors at CBS News. The conversation then turns to the challenges of being a black independent filmmaker in New York, [End Page 118] before concluding with a thorough discussion of the production histories behind Campanella's early narrative works Pass/Fail (1978), Impressions of Joyce (1979), and The Thieves (1979). While scholars including Nelson George and James Snead have championed Pass/Fail in the past, the film remains difficult to see and is seldom screened. This interview is meant to reignite interest in a cross-sectional world of artistic labor in the history of black image making. Nicholas Forster: Rather than begin with your father (the famous baseball player) or the first film you worked, I want to begin with your formal and informal education. I know you grew up in New York and then attended Harvard at a time when Boston was undergoing a number of political, social, and artistic changes. You were there just before the major desegregation of the public schools and busing programs. The city was a locus for documentary filmmaking and important programs like Say Brother—how did your time in Cambridge inform your interest in filmmaking? Roy Campanella II: I began at Harvard in 1966 and graduated with honors in 1970. My major was anthropology, and I took courses in archaeology, paleontology, and linguistics. But my primary area of concentration was cultural anthropology. Historically, relationships within and between cultures have determined how we adapt, change, and progress. As a student of cultural anthropology at Harvard, my primary focus was ancient and modern tribal life. In general, the term "tribal" relates to all kinds of human interactions, such as rituals, ceremonies, myths, politics, economics, psychology, the arts, social relations, and belief systems. The life that we depict on film is both fiction and nonfiction, and it often reflects the tribal nature of human experience. So, the discipline of cultural anthropology has had a very strong influence on the kinds of creative choices I've made in my film work. Good storytelling, whether drama or comedy, often involves the examination of personal conflict. The more intimate, the better. And when we look at tribal...

Science-women: arcane knowledge and African spirituality in independent African-American cinema of the 1990s

ABSTRACTThis article explores the significant role played by arcane knowledge and expressions of African spirituality in the iconography of powerful black women in three films directed by independent African-American filmmakers in the 1990s: Sankofa (Haile Gerima, 1993, USA), Mother of the River (Zeinabu irene Davis, 1995, USA), and Eve’s Bayou (Kasi Lemmons, 1997, USA). My discussion draws on the orature and legendary tales of West African-based cosmologies in the African diasporas of the Americas and the concept (and practice) of ‘conjure’ in African–American cultures. It argues that heroic black women characters possessing extraordinary or supernatural powers not only predate the current vogue of cinematic superheroism, but that the iconography of such ‘science-women’ is embedded in culturally specific, African-rooted cosmological, epistemological and spiritual contexts. I argue that the feminine power celebrated in the films by the independent African-American filmmakers discussed here draw on legendary and historical accounts of women in African diasporic oral, literary and spiritual traditions for their cinematic storytelling to construct an affirmative and paradigmatic model of black female heroism based on empowering African spiritual beliefs and arcane knowledge.