"All Those Little Spools and Lights": The Moving Image at Angola Prison

ABSTRACT:This article provides a cultural history of film and television at Louisiana's Angola Prison in the 1950s to show that moving images coexisted with the brutalities for which the prison is known, including stark labor conditions, corporal violence, and punitive racism. Despite their promotion as improvements during an era of reform, the technologies of film and television accommodated the prison's repressive hierarchies of race, gender, and labor. By analyzing the penitentiary's newspaper, the Angolite, alongside its peer publications at other prisons, I show that prison newspapers played a significant role in promoting film exhibition in carceral spaces.