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  • Editor’s Notes

With this issue, Black Camera wraps up its sixth year of publication, opening with an homage by Noelle Griffis to William Greaves, that extraordinary and compelling filmmaker whose artistry best exemplifies the black documentary tradition. In the wake of Greaves’s death in August 2014, it is high time to devote greater attention to and facilitate further study of this distinctive and pioneering filmmaker and raconteur whose vision and contributions to a second black cinematic renaissance are remarkable—indeed legendary. It is fair to say that Greaves’s documentary oeuvre constitutes a compelling account and chronicle of history in real time. Subscribing to an ethos that art serves a social purpose, his practice was honed by the vagaries of circumstance and the determinations of race, and endeavored to debunk demeaning and normative assumptions about African Americans by cinematically depicting black humanity in all manner of complexity. As such, Greaves uniquely modeled filmmaking as a form of social advocacy on behalf of black self-empowerment in the long struggle for black representation.

Similar concerns with empowerment and representation shape this issue’s two Close-Ups, continuing Black Camera’s commitment to exploring themes and issues of African and diaspora moving image cultures in depth. The first Close-Up, guest edited by Stéphane Symons and Matthias De Groof, is devoted to the Black Audio Film Collective, a collaborative filmmaking and multimedia arts group that emerged in the early 1980s in the United Kingdom in reaction to the politically turbulent early years of Margaret Thatcher’s reign and the disillusionment and betrayal of the revolutionary claims and aspirations of the 1960s and ’70s. According to Symons and De Groof, work by the collective, its subsequent iteration Smoking Dogs Films, and John Akomfrah, the director of most of the collective’s films, often juxtaposes beautiful visuals and archival images with unconventional sound design “to both criticize the power of narrative conventions and deconstruct the supposed certainty of the ‘factual.’”

The articles collected for this Close-Up by De Groof and Symons elaborate on this assertion, analyzing the interchange of form and content in the collective’s work. Focusing on their first feature, Handsworth Songs (1986), [End Page 1] Stoffel Debuysere examines its politics of melancholia. Kobena Mercer’s interview with Akomfrah and fellow member Trevor Mathison provides further insight into the political, intellectual, and aesthetic impetuses and back-story behind the collective’s formation and practice. Consider, too, Manuela Ribeira Sanches’s comparison of the collective’s film Testament (1988) with the films of Werner Herzog, and the methods of each for confronting matters of colonialism, memory, and identity. In a lively discussion of the collective’s The Last Angel of History (1996), Laura U. Marks draws upon Afrofuturism to explore the artists’ process of “unfolding” history. The two mutually complementary articles on Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses (2010) underscore the richness and complexity of the film, with Kass Banning investigating its depiction of the past as a way toward stimulating imaginaries for a postcolonial future, and Symons and De Groof delving into the politics of memory, reading the film in connection with Homer’s Odyssey. Finally, Jeroen Verbeeck curates a fascinating gallery of images from the collective’s work and their symbolic use of figures turned with backs to the lens.

The second Close-Up continues an important conversation introduced in volume two, number two (Spring 2011) of this journal on issues of sexuality, eroticism, and gender in black films and new media. Guest editor L. H. Stallings pays careful critical attention to how, in her words, “black people have moved beyond simply wanting to see themselves and their sexual desire represented on screen in Hollywood: they have moved on to creating what they would like to see.” To this end, Angelique V. Nixon engages with representations of black gay men in Caribbean cinema, comparing Children of God (the Bahamas, 2009) with the art film short Riding Boundaries (Trinidad and Tobago, 2012). Referencing his own filmmaking practice, Kai M. Green applies a transfeminist perspective to documenting the experiences of black and Asian transgender men. This Close-Up concludes with Marlon Moore’s investigation into the web series Between Women...

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