Editor's Notes

This second issue of Black Camera substantiates the journal's renewal and our project to "document, encourage, and invigorate research and study of black filmmaking as an art form, cultural and political practice, and historical activity."

Featured are two provocative essays. First, Terri Francis reflects upon the "idea of a blues cinema sublime" (also known as black independent cinema) and its capacity to account for the "experiences and histories of black people in America, such as migrations, floods, and the precariousness of black life in a country where black folks' citizenship has ever been contingent or catastrophically in question." Here, Francis revisits the cultural debates about race, art, and politics among Harlem renaissance writers and Ralph Ellison's later interventions to examine black people's contemporary "experiences of cinema," suggesting that in a "blues cinema sublime" one finds the improvisational indeterminacies of black life.

The essay by Matthew Pratt Guterl looks at Josephine Baker, the celebrated yet not unproblematic personage whose antiracist ethos stands in counterpoint to the divisive racial politics of the long history of the twentieth century. Examining her first feature film, La Siréne des tropiques (1927), Guterl situates Baker in French colonial culture during the interwar period and, in doing so in this larger frame, reveals Baker's engagement with modernity and world affairs.

Next is a Black Camera interview with the Angolan filmmaker and writer Ondjaki (Nadalu Almeida), reflecting upon the impact of the anti-colonial struggle and civil war on current conditions for film production in Angola, as well as the thematic concerns and practices of Angolan filmmakers. In discussing his documentary film, Hope the Pitanga Cherries Grow (2005), Ondjaki elaborates on the daily life of youth in Luanda, the city's dynamism, creativity, and élan, and the mobilizing significance of music and sports in the Angolan imagination and revitalization of society.

In the issue, too, is the first installment of essays from Africultures—a unique cultural entity and resource for the study of African societies and cultures with whom we have formed a partnership. The director of publications and prominent film critic, Olivier Barlet, contributes four distinctive and illuminating short essays that address key concerns, such as African filmmakers' "new" survival strategies "so that they can exist without renouncing who they are," the absence of a market for African films, along with Barlet's survey and periodization of African film during the past five decades.

The Documents section comprises two programmatic statements penned nearly thirty years apart (1982 and 2009) that enunciate identical concerns and mission, which is—at the most fundamental level—to empower "the film practitioner with the right and capacity to make and exhibit films." In the Niamey statement, the consequential and enduring legacy of colonialism is acknowledged for the underdevelopment of cinema in African countries, and the call for the establishment of a "cinema market," "technical infrastructure," "training," and the financing of production are delineated, while in the FEPACI report, progress toward these objectives is assessed in the context of FEPACI's interventions, collaborations with other cinematic formations, and their mobilizing activities during 2009.

The issue concludes with sections devoted to archival news, including a lengthy statement by BFC/A senior archivist, Mary K. Huelsbeck, regarding the Robert Kya-Hill Collection, along with book and film reviews and professional and research notes.

The editor gratefully acknowledges the support of the College of Arts and Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington.