Editor's Notes

This issue of Black Camera marks the second installment of Close-Up. Devoted to a critical assessment of and about the film Precious and the novel Push by Sapphire (upon which Precious is based), the Close-Up is guest edited by Suzette Spencer. It is useful here to quote her original call for papers:

Almost fifteen years ago, a reviewer described Sapphire's Push as "a fascinating novel that may well find its place in the African American literary canon." It has taken years for Push—disturbing, demanding, irrepressibly compelling— to edge appreciably into the canon and to begin to get the attention it deserves. But it has never been more center stage than it is now with the making of the award-winning motion picture Precious, itself an undeniably captivating work. Precious has garnered several accolades, notably Oscars [2010] for acting and screenwriting and numerous distinctions for directing.

Spencer requested "essays that pivot between and extend beyond the formal frames of both the film and the novel and that stage intertextual and comparative dialogues with related works of film, literature, visual culture, photography, or theory."

After a year of submissions, Spencer's call has yielded provocative essays and commentary. Readers will get to consider Erica R. Edwards's analysis of the "conversion scene" and its import and limitation for black women's empowerment and "collective survival" as well as Mia Mask's and Katie M. Kanagawa's readings that foreground Precious's complexity and ambivalence. In addition, Regine Michelle Jean-Charles studies the conundrum of filmic representations of rape and audience affect, and Riché Richardson deploys the slave narrative and neoslave narrative as analog and feature of both the film and novel. Regarding Precious's pedagogic utility, Honey Crawford's piece engages with audience responses to the film through a critical analytical framework, and Margo Natalie Crawford provides a nuanced reading of the "depiction of freedom and fantasy" as cathartic and, arguably, emancipatory elements in both the film and novel. Commentaries by Carol E. Henderson and Rebecca Morgan Frank are equally provocative. Together, the essays and commentaries take up what we might characterize as an assemblage of distinctively theorized formations and gendered subjectivities at once historical and contemporary.

Four other articles comprise the issue. Abigail Horne's study examines masculinity in John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and makes a compelling case for the "integral role" of the largely ignored yet courageous black character, Pompey. Benjamin Wiggins's no less intriguing essay revisits Melvin Van Peebles's Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, inviting readers to consider the "potential of 'revolutionary' cinema." Drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, as well as proponents of Third Cinema, Wiggins contends that, despite the shortcomings of Sweetback, Peebles arguably "constructs a new ground on which blackness is signified." And with customary insightful analysis, Olivier Barlet's essay in the Africultures Dossier, translated from French by film scholar Melissa Thackway for anglophone readers, discusses the origin of the term it-sembabwoko in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide and films we associate with the subgenre—trauma cinema. Finally, in the Archival News section, Paul Heyde's short essay examines images of black women in film advertising that he mined from the BFC/A's Hatch-Billops Collection.

I am pleased to inform our readers that the Black Film Center/Archive in partnership with Indiana University Press has launched a book series— Studies in the Cinema of the Black Diaspora. Devoted to the study of black filmmaking in the global diaspora, the series will address the filmmaking careers of directors and canonical and distinctive films of enduring historical, cultural, political, and aesthetic importance. Books for consideration will include monographs and edited volumes comprising critical essays, interviews, film scripts, press kits, and related materials. The series will contribute to and significantly enhance the black diasporic cinematic archive, its traditions, evolution, and development over time and space and will advantage, by in-depth analytical accounts, research scholars, cineastes, teachers, students, and the public about the black presence in and contribution to world cinema. Together with Black Camera, the book series constitutes the most significant publication...