Black film

Using a rich compendium of evidence the second edition of SLAVE CINEMA(re-released in 2011)takes an uncompromising look at African-American cinema, African-American social identity and the American film industry. The author addresses the specific artistic, business and moral challenges that face every African-American filmmaker and those that affect the audiences for their work. The book is broken into three main parts: Slave Cinema part 1: The Crisis of African-American Independent Cinema gives a provocative re-definition of independent film that reveals why it is so difficult for many African-Americans to accept independent cinema that challenges the limits and boundaries of "black" racial identity. Slave Cinema part 2: Five Assumptions of Race that Shackle African-Americans in Film discusses why many African-Americans view cinema through a narrow perceptual frame of racial inequities past and present. White and African-American filmmakers who have tried to break this narrow frame are highlighted and analyzed. Slave Cinema part 3: Five Errors that Constrict African-American Cinematic Style looks at the fallacies circulated among African-American filmmakers and potential filmmakers that impede visual, editorial and dramatic diversity in African-American cinema. This second edition features the controversial chapter RACE TRAITORS: White Filmmakers who make Black Films and discusses many of the groundbreaking films made by whites about blacks that have been overlooked or dismissed by many African-American film historians and scholars. All in all this book is a stunning attack on the blind spots of racial polemics and the dangers of conformity and stereotypes practiced within the African-American community as well as those practiced within the white controlled entertainment industry.

Many years after queer and queer-of-color theories made such a binary indefensible, art history and film studies remain committed to a distinction between criticality and pleasure. The former remains a desirable activist strategy and the atter is deemed banal, complicit, and expendable. Many have troubled these reductive categories. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, for instance, proposes reparative reading and the ongoing necessity for marginalized subjects to connect meaning- fully and perhaps unexpectedly with problematic cultural phenomena. In a similar vein, C. Namwali Serpell has suggested the numerous (and pleasurable) critical possibilities in something as debased and thrilling as the cliché.

This book is composed of essays written primarily between 1990 and 2003, including many reviews and discussions of books, films, stage productions, some music. There are sections devoted to Queer Theory, Popular Culture, Multiculturalism and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.  Published in 2004, it also features a lengthy introduction with a photo album insert containing photographs of myself, family and friends.  This is my favorite book of my own thus far.

Includes 50 essays, many of which are provided in list form below. Please see this book if you wish to see those essays. It's in a kindle edition now.

This article traces the development of Afrocentric feminist aesthetics within the LA Rebellion, a film movement made up primarily of Black film students at UCLA from 1970 to the late 1980s. It argues that these aesthetics are integral to the movement’s heterogeneous but radical politics, even as the filmmakers express them through widely different means. The article focuses primarily on three films that span the final decade in which Rebellion filmmakers were active at UCLA: Barbara McCullough’s Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification (1979), Alile Sharon Larkin’s A Different Image (1982), and Zeinabu irene Davis’s Cycles (1989). Each of these films’ renderings of Afrocentric feminist aesthetics—through attention to African oral and mythical traditions, African and Pan-African-inflected mise-en-scène, rich col-oration and film stock, and play with nonlinear, nonteleological time—register at once the sedimented condition of patriarchal anti-Blackness in the United States and Black feminists’ ongoing projects of freedom that perdure within and despite that condition. In many ways, such representations anticipate contemporary Black feminist grapplings with recent Black studies scholarship that orbit around Afro-pessimist theories of Black ontology and social death. Through their expressions of Afrocentric feminist forms of communal, caring, and creative living, the films represent a form of Black social life that expresses value systems and ways of being that are incompatible with social death, even when they are inevitably moored within its ontological structure.

To put forth a definition about any kind of a film outside of its dramatic genre might strike one as both pedantic and unnecessary, particularly the notion of defining something so visually self-evident as a Black film.  But the ideological complexity of our times, as well as, the increasingly socially acceptable cognitive dissonance that often requires us to hold on to two or more contradictory perspectives depending on the social context or the people with whom one is interacting, makes such a definition of a Black film necessary.  The ultimate goal of this particular definition of a Black film is so that critics, theorists, causal viewers and most importantly filmmakers can better discern when Black actors are merely being used as tokens to feign racial inclusiveness as opposed to when certain filmmakers are using Black actors to be critical of the status quo, encourage racial empathy, tolerance, diversity and/or attack the general power imbalance that exists along the lines of race and class within a highly stratified society.

from
Keith M. Harris. Boys, Boyz, Boies: An Ethics of Black Masculinity in Film and Popular Media (Routledge), 2006.

Reprinted in
Keith M. Harris. “’Stand up, boy!’: Sidney Poitier,  ‘boy’ and Filmic Black Masculinity,” in Gender and Sexuality in African Literatures and Film, edited by Ada Azodo (Africa World Press), 2007.

Diese Arbeit widmet sich dem Black Independent Cinema, unter dessen Sparte das New Black Cinema mit Fokus auf Spike Lee verhandelt wird. Ausgehend von der Annahme, dass die Thematisierung von alltäglichem und systematischem Rassismus sowie die Dekonstruktion von Stereotypen über Schwarze zur Emanzipation der black community und zur Aufklärung von white people massgebend ist, soll eruiert werden, wie das Thema Rassismus im zeitgenössischen Black Independent Cinema filmisch repräsentiert wird. Wie stellt Spike Lee die Schwierigkeiten von Schwarzen narrativ und ästhetisch dar und wie geht er produktionstechnisch dabei vor?

The advent of the internet and the availability of social media and digital downloads have expanded the creation, distribution, and consumption of Black cultural production as never before. At the same time, a new generation of Black public intellectuals who speak to the relationship between race, politics, and popular culture has come into national prominence. The contributors to Are You Entertained? address these trends to consider what culture and Blackness mean in the twenty-first century's digital consumer economy. In this collection of essays, interviews, visual art, and artist statement the contributors examine a range of topics and issues, from music, white consumerism, cartoons, and the rise of Black Twitter to the NBA's dress code, dance, and Moonlight. Analyzing the myriad ways in which people perform, avow, politicize, own, and love Blackness, this volume charts the shifting debates in Black popular culture scholarship over the past quarter century while offering new avenues for future scholarship.

Contributors. Takiyah Nur Amin, Patricia Hill Collins, Kelly Jo Fulkerson-Dikuua, Simone C. Drake, Imani Johnson, Ralina L. Joseph, David J. Leonard, Emily Lordi, Nina Angela Mercer, Mark Anthony Neal, Ike Okafor-Newsum, Kinohi Nishikawa, Eric Pritchard, Richard Schur, Vincent Stephens, Lisa B. Thompson, Sheneese Thompson, Tracy Whiting-Sharpley

This article offers introductory remarks on the position of the Dalit in Indian cinema. It starts with the observation that the Indian film industry is an inherently caste-based, biased, mechanised product of technological industrialisation in which Dalit inclusion is not a moral concern. The mainstream film industry in India delivers the desires and principles of market and society by excluding a Dalit framework outright—a problem now being addressed by the entry of an explicitly Dalit cinema. By briefly looking at two films, Fandry (2013) and Sairat (2016), both written and directed by Dalit film- maker Nagraj Manjule, I offer a critical reading of ‘Dalit Cinema’. Taking the work of Manjule, a maverick film-maker who is establishing a new discourse of Dalit-centred socio-culturism, I demonstrate the extent to which caste narratives are absent in the Indian film industry.

Resumo: O presente artigo pretende fazer algumas reflexões sobre o emergente cenário do Cinema Negro brasileiro. Uma discussão que iniciou ainda nos anos 1960, com crítico e cineasta David Neves, no florescer do Cinema Novo, parece ganhar uma nova configuração e percepção na contemporaneidade diante de novos contextos e a ação dos agentes neste campo. No entanto, a pertinência deste debate revela outros assuntos como: as questões de identidade e a pluralidade destas identidades; como a manifestações desta negritude no campo cinematográfico; como a reflexão sobre a questão da representação do negro no cinema brasileiro. Para tanto, alguns autores são fundamentais para a presente proposta: Abstract: This article aims to make some reflections on the emerging scenario of the Brazilian Black Cinema. A discussion that also started in the 1960s, with critic and filmmaker David Neves, the flowering of New Cinema, seems to gain a new configuration and perception in the contemporary face of new contexts and the action of the agents in this field. However, the relevance of this debate reveals other issues such as identity issues and plurality of the identities; as manifestations of blackness in the film field; as the reflection on the issue of black representation in Brazilian cinema. Therefore, some authors are fundamental to this proposal:

This article conceptualizes “diasporic communion” as emerging from texts as sites in which intimate connections among historically scattered people are animated toward resistance through an examination of Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade (2016) and its conversation with Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991). The works’ intertextual exchange, I argue, activate transnational and transgenerational connections through layered citation of shared affective histories with the colonial encounter and slavery, and contemporary forms of anti-Black violence. Highlighting the ways in which place functions as a metaphoric marker of diasporic communion in each of the texts, the paper argues that landscape functions to both produce and extend geographic specificity through chains of referentiality. These chains of referentiality draw a complex map of African diasporic relations that do not rely on proximity, either temporal or spatial, in the creation of diasporic community, allowing for an inclusive and fluid theorization of the African diaspora, even while it is attentive to specificity of experience. Such works invite or encourage audiences to link their own diasporic experiences through them, the article concludes, which both cultivates discursive relationships and participates in the creation of living Black archives that are otherwise historically marked by absence.

Originally published on January 2nd, 2013 by the on-line Black film journal, Shadow and Act, this article was an attempt to discuss what I saw as the general decline in the dramatic quality and commercial impact of African-American filmmaker, Spike Lee.  Written after screening Lee's film, RED HOOK SUMMER, this article caused a powerful and divisive reaction within readers, critics, and fans of the director's work.  And while I was vilified in public through on-line chat rooms and open forum responses to the article, I was also hailed in private by just as many for saying things that could not be said in public about one of our greatest Black filmmakers.  While Lee's most recent theatrical work since the release of this article, OLD BOY, CHIRAQ, and BLACKKKLANSMEN have not made the criticisms in this piece irrelevant, I still hold out hope that the legend of Spike Lee will not overtake the actual work of Spike Lee.
This article is being placed here because the original on-line publication location is missing

Stemming from my curatorial process for the retrospective “Black Brazilian Cinema: Episodes of a Fragmented History, held in 2018 at the Belo Horizonte International Short Film Festival, this paper aims to critically map the Black men and women who have directed short movies in Brazil, as well as to stablish a dialogue with efforts as early as 1960’s to define (or point to the lack of) a Black Cinema in Brazil.

The structuring absence of Afro-Brazilians in Audio-Visual Culture
Challenging the Myth of Racial Democracy
Beyond City of God
Documenting Blackness
Afro-Brazilians Doing it For Themselves: Black Audio-visual organisations and the Debate Around “Place of Speech”

The films of the L.A. Rebellion, a body of work that in many accounts spans three decades, are incredibly diverse. The films utilize radically different narrative and visual strategies, but like the most interesting black art, all of the films are invested in the ways we encounter black bodies on screen. This article discusses one of the films from the collection curated by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, Jamaa Fanaka's "Emma Mae" (1976). Although Fanaka's interest in theatrical distribution meant his filmmaking choices differed from other L.A. Rebellion filmmakers, the film still considers the ways black bodies move through space, pushing the limits of anti-blackness and the film frame.

This is a full-dress article about Spike Lee’s film, Mo’ Better Blues, that I never published formally. The penultimate paragraph: “In attempting to construct the image of jazz, and its musicians, in the stylizations of a black mythology, Spike Lee committed himself to working against the received conventions. By insisting on one simple truth about jazz, that it is disciplined stylization, Lee began to undermine those Hollywood conventions. But he was unable completely to free himself from the Romantic conventions which determine our vision of the artist and his place in society. Lee's displacements don't alter the fact that, at the core, his protagonist is a self-destructive descendent of the Romantic Artist.”

Shelton Jackson “Spike” Lee has leveraged his “40 acres and a mule,” which is not only the name of his company, but also a reference to the promise made to African Americans at the end of the Civil War. As a filmmaker and an entrepreneur, Lee has surpassed the efforts of a number of his peers and predecessors in just two decades. For better or worse, he has left an indelible mark on the cultural, socio-political, and economic landscape. While Lee’s persona and filmmaking abilities have been critiqued extensively, scholarly research on his role as an entrepreneur is limited. Lee is not only considered a success on a number of fronts by supporters and detractors alike, but he has also contributed to the success of other filmmakers and artists.

In this edited text, authors examined the meteoric rise of actor, writer, producer, director, Tyler Perry and his body of work. Amid raves from his niche audience and panned by cultural critics, Perry is both lauded and criticized for his characters and storylines. What will be his long term impact upon popular culture? The essays here seek to answer this question.

This article analyzes the representation of male same-sex desire in recent films by black Caribbean filmmakers, focusing on the narrative feature-length film Children of God (2009), written and directed by Kareem Mortimer, in contrast to the short film Riding
Boundaries (2012), directed by Kerry Bovell, produced by Sekou Charles, and featuring poetry by Colin Robinson. I examine the difficulties in representing same-sex eroticism in the Caribbean because of larger societal concerns—from grappling with homophobic violence and internalized self-hate and shame to the dominant place of religion in Caribbean societies, which dramatically affects any engagement with sexuality. I focus on male same-sex desire in this article to situate roots of homophobia located at the intersections of misogyny, fear of the erotic and the feminine, and heterosexist patriarchy. Hence, I search for the erotic in these cinematic representations and
ask when it is (ever) possible to imagine and thereby represent the expansiveness of the erotic, of desire, of love outside the bounds of religion, patriarchy, and colonial violence.

Where do works of performance art begin and end? How do they or the traces they left behind live on in the context of exhibitions? What do performances in socialist Eastern Europe reveal about artistic expres­ sion, political critique or nonconformist social be­ haviour? The exhibition Left Performance Histories features action art in Eastern Europe from the 1970s on in a way that also reflects on its continued relevance in the present. The show includes works of over 25 artists, some well­known to those familiar with the alternative culture of the former Eastern Bloc, others possibly a new discovery even to the insider. Rather than a comprehensive retrospective, the ex­ hibition zooms in on a handful of selected topics that have been often left out of critical debates. Where the unofficial art of socialist Eastern Europe is convention­ ally framed as a reservoir of subversive gestures against an oppressive social, cultural and political environment, the present selection prefers instead to approach performance art as a site of jouissance where conventional self­presentation or socially approved forms of gendered identity, sexu ality and standards of beauty may be bypassed. The exhibition also revisits the question of politicized artistic attitudes to suggest that the socialist state apparatus was not only chal­ lenged by anti­communist positions but also by critical voices insisting on democratic socialist principles or remonstrating the bitter ideological competition of the Cold War. Through a diversity of curatorial approaches (including documentary display, discursive events and re­ per for mance), the exhibition also interrogates how per formance art can be presented in the context of later exhibitions. It considers the relics, documentation and memory of events as part of these works expan­ ded materiality to propose a possible understanding of performance pieces as unfixed and continuously generated archives that need to be configured anew every time these works appear in public. With this approach, the exhibition explores how the histories of performance art are generated, controlled and under­ stood over time. Left Performance Histories poses questions of what constitutes the artwork and who are the archivists.

A southern plantation house half-hidden by trees; an empty pool semi-obscured by the bars of a gate; children leaning against yellowing stucco walls papered with posters advertising 40-ounce bottles of beer; these are among the images that mobilize affecting geographies of Blackness in RaMell Ross’s Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018) and Sophia Nahli Allison’s A Love Song for Latasha (2019). Affecting geography in film, as conceived in this article, refers to the manufacture and circulation of affect through evocation of associative relations between images of space, place, and time. Non-representational, associative strategies in Hale County This Morning, This Evening and A Love Song for Latasha produce an aesthetic of affect that works on and around the edges of racial and gender traumas — traumas that are attached to histories and memories held in the landscapes of South Central, Los Angeles and Hale County, Alabama. The films’ distinctive imagery and soundscapes depart from dominant media representations of these Black spaces, I conclude, disclosing geographies marked and demarcated by anti-Black structural conditions while also refusing to reduce Black life to them.

The early 1970s saw the emergence of low-budget black action movies exposing the sordid underbelly of the African American city while empowering black men and women. By introducing African American lead actors outside the usual Hollywood white mainstream setting, these motion pictures created easily recognizable points of reference for, primarily young and urban, black moviegoers, favouring instant identification with plot and characters. The Blaxploitation film cycle, inspired by the self-worth promoting Black Power movement, knocked down race and gender barriers and provided a liberating catharsis for many African Americans confronted with the humiliating decades-long segregation in the United States.

Killer of Sheep (1977) opens on a black screen with the a capella voices of a mother and child singing a lullaby. The song fades into a disorienting close-up of an angry black man yelling at his teenaged son, “Boy, I’ll beat you to death.” Sweaty and sick in his undershirt, the father coughs his way out of the frame and then returns to say, “You are not a child any more. You soon will be a goddamn man. Now start learning what life is about now, son.” The boy’s mother silently watches this scene, walks over, and slaps her son hard in the face without a word. Fade to black and the great Paul Robeson sings his baritone version of the same lullaby. Here, in this two-minute introduction, Burnett prepares his viewers for his slice-of-life portrait of a black family living in Watts, California, in the early 1970s.