Black CameraPub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.2979/blackcamera.14.2.18
C. Zimmer
{"title":"The Work of Horror after Get Out","authors":"C. Zimmer","doi":"10.2979/blackcamera.14.2.18","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/blackcamera.14.2.18","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay examines the current cycle of Black horror in the context of both cultural and material labor to consider the following questions: What is it that horror, specifically, has to offer to representations of Blackness, especially in the context of the current movements to defend Black lives that have gained broad coalitional support? What is the work that the horror genre is doing—culturally, politically, economically—now that the genre is so frequently being reframed by the lived experience of Black people and the bio-political inscriptions of Blackness onto both individual bodies and entire populations?","PeriodicalId":42749,"journal":{"name":"Black Camera","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48476471","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Black CameraPub Date : 2022-06-01DOI: 10.2979/blackcamera.14.1.05
Luke Sayers
{"title":"Containing the Wonder Doctor: Sidney Poitier, the Cold War, and Liberal Reformation","authors":"Luke Sayers","doi":"10.2979/blackcamera.14.1.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/blackcamera.14.1.05","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article examines Sidney Poitier's role as a black male cultural icon during the Cold War, arguing that his Cold War context both restricted and enabled Poitier's career as a black American actor. By analyzing four of his films, All the Young Men (dir. Hall Bartlett, 1960), Lilies of the Field (dir. Ralph Nelson, 1963), The Bedford Incident (dir. James B. Harris, 1965), and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (dir. Stanley Kramer, 1967), the article concludes that Poitier was an American cultural symbol whose films were a form of soft propaganda that simultaneously upheld a positive international image of American democracy while also challenging American domestic racial discrimination in the film industry. Poitier's role as an image-builder for American liberalism is testified to by the aesthetic choices of the films and the history of their being screened among international audiences. The article also contextualizes these films within Cold War cultural discourse by looking at their production and reception histories and by examining Poitier's own reflections on his acting career.","PeriodicalId":42749,"journal":{"name":"Black Camera","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48824744","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Black CameraPub Date : 2022-06-01DOI: 10.2979/blackcamera.14.1.12
Anastasia Valecce
{"title":"Presencias invisibles: La estética de Damián Sainz en Batería","authors":"Anastasia Valecce","doi":"10.2979/blackcamera.14.1.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/blackcamera.14.1.12","url":null,"abstract":"Resumen:Batería (2016) es un documental breve que cuenta la historia de un lugar \"secreto\"—una fortaleza militar antigua situada en las afueras de la Habana, Cuba—donde se reúnen hombres gay para encuentros sexuales clandestinos. La particularidad del documental es caracterizada por la habilidad estilística con la cual Sainz edifica el documental a través de las historias en voice-off de sus protagonistas para garantizar a los participantes su anonimato y, en esa aparente fragilidad narrativa, construye una base fílmica sólida. El resultado es Batería, un documento visual poblado de un lugar abandonado, grafiti, murales, sonidos y presencias invisibles.Esa invisibilidad es el hilo conductor de este artículo. La invisibilidad, a menudo discutida como un rasgo negativo que arrincona, margina y niega un espacio al sujeto LGBTIQ+; cuando falta, sin embargo, puede costar—y le ha costado—la vida a muches. Lo que planteo, es una revaluación de la invisibilidad—a menudo vista como negativa por parte de la producción académica cuir, o como algo que superar para llegar a una condición de vida mejor a través de la visibilidad social—para provocar conversaciones éticas que no van a ser definitivas pero que de alguna manera y desde la academia, devuelven cierta justicia crítica al asunto, ya que, muchas veces, no hay justicia legal para los casos de muerte de los miembros de la comunidad LGBTIQ+.","PeriodicalId":42749,"journal":{"name":"Black Camera","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46478276","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Black CameraPub Date : 2022-06-01DOI: 10.2979/blackcamera.14.1.06
T. T. Le
{"title":"Superimposing Sex-Politics in Melvin Van Peebles's Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song","authors":"T. T. Le","doi":"10.2979/blackcamera.14.1.06","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/blackcamera.14.1.06","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Literature centering on Melvin Van Peebles's influential, and controversial, independent film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971) has focused on the hermeneutics of reception, the timeliness and appropriateness of a talkback by an oppressed race, and the role of the sexual numbers within a film advertised as more of a politically charged product than of a pornographic one. None of the scholarship research incorporates the three crucial parts of the film, showcased visibly in the title itself, into the issues of reception, of critical race strategism, and of sexual politics—what is missing is precisely a productive mode of reading into being and meaning the sweet back, the bad ass, and the background songs. This essay attempts to insert the back side of sex, including the back itself and the ass, both of which I will subsume under the term \"back,\" into the matrix of sex and politics. I argue that back sex directs the audience toward an inescapable engagement between sexual politics and racial politics, that sex serves—is made to serve—within not just the consciousness formation of the individual but also the consciousness formation of the individual within the community. Back sex therefore is revolutionary and constantly in crisis because it changes instead of repeating itself: unlike penile sex characterized by frontal/confrontational penetration, the back gestures a communitarian plurality of sex that escapes classic understanding of monogamous sex within the neoliberal family structure, and the ass emphasizes constant movement, sidewise, back and forth, that oscillates between a vulnerable position that requires backing and a determined democratic demand to be allowed to move counter-progressively. I emphasize the need to read the back as an instance of sex-politics into a more immediate consciousness of the audience, who in turn will benefit not from a total abandonment of penile sexual politics but rather from a novel engagement with the politically charged sexuality of a new zone named the back.","PeriodicalId":42749,"journal":{"name":"Black Camera","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49440177","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Black CameraPub Date : 2022-06-01DOI: 10.2979/blackcamera.14.1.02
Carla Toquet
{"title":"Ava DuVernay, an Unexpected Independent Black Queen in Hollywood?","authors":"Carla Toquet","doi":"10.2979/blackcamera.14.1.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/blackcamera.14.1.02","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay analyzes the ambiguous position of Ava DuVernay in Hollywood. After a late-career change to filmmaking, DuVernay has been catapulted to a position of power and privilege at the core of the industry. I interrogate her surprising trajectory as well as her still in-between posture: How does she reconcile being from the independent world and wearing as a badge of honor having been able to craft works on her own with having become a major Hollywood powerhouse? How does she cope with her desire to tell Black people's stories and having recently reached a select position in a predominantly White and male industry?","PeriodicalId":42749,"journal":{"name":"Black Camera","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42551927","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Black CameraPub Date : 2022-06-01DOI: 10.2979/blackcamera.14.1.11
Anastasia Valecce, Aisha Z. Cort
{"title":"Invisible Presences: The Aesthetics of Damián Sainz in Batería","authors":"Anastasia Valecce, Aisha Z. Cort","doi":"10.2979/blackcamera.14.1.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/blackcamera.14.1.11","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Batería (2016) is a short documentary movie that tells the story of a \"secret\" place—an old military fort located on the outskirts of Havana—where gay men meet for clandestine sexual encounters. The nuance of the documentary is the stylistic ability of director Damián Sainz to construct through the stories told via voice-off of the protagonists to ensure the anonymity of the participants. In that apparent fragility of the narrative, Sainz builds up a solid filmic foundation. The result is Batería, a visual documentary full of an abandoned place, graffiti, murals, sounds, and invisible presences.Invisibility is a connecting thread that leads me to consider the documentary under its lens. Invisibility, often presented as a negative feature that buries, marginalizes, and negates space for the LGBTQ+ subject, as much as it lacks, nevertheless, it can cost—and has cost—the lives of many. Therefore, what I am positing, is a reevaluation of invisibility—often seen as negative by queer academic production, or as something to be overcome in order to achieve a better life through social visibility—in order to spark ethical conversations. These academic conversations won't be definitive but, in some way, and from the academy, bring some sort of critical justice to the matter, as too many times there is no legal justice for homicide cases involving members of the LGBTQ+ community.","PeriodicalId":42749,"journal":{"name":"Black Camera","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45104666","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Black CameraPub Date : 2022-06-01DOI: 10.2979/blackcamera.14.1.18
Olivier Barlet, Christian Santa Ana
{"title":"Les salles de cinéma en Afrique sud saharienne francophone (1926–1980) / Movie Theaters in French-Speaking Africa South of the Sahara (1926–1980), by Claude Forest: A Welcomed and Essential Historical Work","authors":"Olivier Barlet, Christian Santa Ana","doi":"10.2979/blackcamera.14.1.18","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/blackcamera.14.1.18","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Following extensive research and at a time when French operators are making a strong comeback on the African scene, Claude Forest fills a void and publishes a history of movie theaters in French-speaking Africa that covers the colonial period and the first twenty years of independence, until the French disengagement. While the importation and distribution of films was profitable and developed within the framework of a duopoly, he shows how the flaws of public policies as well as the narrowness of the market prevented the preservation of existing cinemas and the development of African autonomy in this area, not without highlighting the contradictions of cooperation policies and African demands.","PeriodicalId":42749,"journal":{"name":"Black Camera","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43889037","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Black CameraPub Date : 2022-06-01DOI: 10.2979/blackcamera.14.1.19
Olivier Barlet, Christian Santa Ana
{"title":"FESPACO 2021: Feature Films, a Return to the Future","authors":"Olivier Barlet, Christian Santa Ana","doi":"10.2979/blackcamera.14.1.19","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/blackcamera.14.1.19","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:What thematic and aesthetic trends can be discerned in the feature-length fiction films presented in competition and in some of the other selections of FESPACO 2021? As always, the films take a close interest in social realities, but the marked documentary dimension of most of them responds to current African emergencies: both alerting people to these realities and helping those who are confronted with them to live through them, which also means assuming them by accepting uncertainty. The films are therefore inscribed in the present rather than tending towards a utopia. But in order not to despair, they try to document the courage to write the possible. This implies thinking of oneself as one's own center, without having to justify oneself anymore. To feel the strength of the resistance in everyday life is the real stake of the memory. It is the History of brown bodies, where one relies only on oneself, whose stake is emancipation. Faced with fundamentalism, the filmmakers are wary of beliefs. They dethrone the heroes and prefer the fantastic, the farce, or the poetry. It is to say how much they believe in the cinema to imagine the ways of the revival.","PeriodicalId":42749,"journal":{"name":"Black Camera","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41828944","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Black CameraPub Date : 2022-06-01DOI: 10.2979/blackcamera.14.1.03
Kelli D. Moore
{"title":"Hieroglyphics of the Film: Stuplimity and Static in the Films of Ja'Tovia Gary","authors":"Kelli D. Moore","doi":"10.2979/blackcamera.14.1.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/blackcamera.14.1.03","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay discusses film and video works of artist, Ja'Tovia Gary, focusing on the strategies she employs to address blackness as both sociopolitical narrative and a material quality of film. Gary's interaction with the staging of her experimental films and film as matter are historical and technical. Looking at the Giverny Suite films, I recount how the filmmaker encouraged her audience to move about the screening space during the opening night at Paula Cooper Gallery, February 2019. These films were projected onto the gallery walls giving them a monumental effect that I argue left the audience in a state of stuplimity, Sianne Ngai's term for the experience of the hybrid affective condition of stupor and the sublime that is common to the gallery and museum setting. The experience of stuplimity and the artist's response raise questions about blackness as narrative and a quality of the material substrate we call film. I then turn to Gary's earlier film, An Ecstatic Experience (2015) for a different example of the filmmaker's involvement in the sublime aspects found in archival footage of black theatrical performance and decaying film celluloid. In the film, Gary uses direct animation to draw onto archival footage of the television series, History of the Negro People, while also suturing Black Lives Matter street uprising television footage. These historical, social, and technical strategies mark film as a space and substance of care and caring, allowing us to consider the noise and signals of black lifeworlds in a way that accords with Michael Gillespie's account of \"film blackness.\"","PeriodicalId":42749,"journal":{"name":"Black Camera","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48353648","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Black CameraPub Date : 2022-06-01DOI: 10.2979/blackcamera.14.1.17
A. Mccluskey
{"title":"Barry Jenkins and Moonlight in Miami: Home Girls Respond","authors":"A. Mccluskey","doi":"10.2979/blackcamera.14.1.17","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/blackcamera.14.1.17","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The genesis of this essay is the coincidence of geography. Director Barry Jenkins, co-screenwriter Tarell Alvin McCraney, and the author grew up, in different time periods, in the same segregated neighborhood in Miami, Florida. Moonlight, winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2016, is set mostly in this neighborhood. The author provides background—historical, personal, and social—that contextualizes characters and motivations, Jenkins's personal stake in the neighborhood and its citizens, and his ascendency in Hollywood.","PeriodicalId":42749,"journal":{"name":"Black Camera","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48721671","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}