Introduction

The writings gathered in this Close-Up are part of a growing body of research, scholarship, and cultural production that invests in black visual and expressive cultures as sites of inquiry, theory, and practice. ¹ These writings are also partially an accumulation of some years of research, conversations, conference presentations, and frustrations among myself and my friends and colleagues, several of whom are contributors herein. Regarding the latter, Alessandra Raengo, Michael Gillespie, Kevin Everson, Lauren Cramer, Nicole Fleetwood (who was not able to participate in this Close-Up), and I have presented papers and organized panels on visual culture and black cinema aesthetics and/or black visual culture for several years. ² We are not so much a collective or organized group as much as we are a group of theorists, thinkers, and practitioners in conversation about the visible, the visual, the phenomenal, and varying aesthetic, disciplinary, methodological, and critical approaches to artistic and cultural production. In part, query and contribution of these conservations and panels have been a teasing out that black film theory renders blackness and cinema as visible object and medium/art form of visibility, respectively. The theoretical contention is that by focusing on representation black film theory takes for granted that the visible is the visual. In doing so, the emphasis in black film theory and scholarship on representation leads to discussions of how black film represents black life, how black film inserts itself into or disrupts an economy of stereotypes, or how black film has an obligation to fidelity and faithful representation. Black film scholarship presupposes that film has a responsibility to the social and indeed that film represents the social, rendering black film as a stable category in relation to other categories or genres. Furthermore, this idea of black film renders blackness as a static, social category of race discerned in the representation made available by film.

This Close-Up, as a more focused and discursive culmination of the aforementioned panels, conversations, and frustrations, offers the opportunity to stage an encounter between black film and black visual culture. In consideration of black film scholarship, the collected writings examine black film, black, and film through the lens of visual culture. ³ Black film is given over to the discursive practices and productions of visuality and visual culture. Thus, there is a shift in the context of both film and blackness to one in which film and representation are part of a larger cinematic apparatus of the visual and blackness is a modality of the visual. As such, the emphasis is not on how or with what degree of fidelity black film provides cinematic representation that represents the social, but instead how black film engages the visual, how blackness interrupts and deploys the cinematic apparatus of the visual. In expanding the shift, the writers variously theorize blackness as performative discursivity, as disruptive, disquieting, indeed, “troubling the vision” of scopic regimes of the visual, and in doing so, the writers also theorize black film as a way of seeing, as an “emergent visibility.” ⁴ The propositions, essays, and interview consider black film, the visual, and blackness as visuality and expressivity, not so much the representation of blackness or the fidelity of black film to representation of black life or a black lifeworld.

The Close-Up begins with “ ‘Black is . . .’ and That Is the Beauty of It,” a series of propositions in consideration of black visual culture and black film as perspectives on the cinematic image. Next, Lauren McLeod Cramer considers “The Black (Universal) Archive and the Architecture of Black Cinema.” Drawing on Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “Library of Babel,” Cramer proposes blackness as an epistemology, further conceptualizing a black cinematic archive. Cramer’s essay offers a methodological approach to black film informed by visual culture, which emphasizes blackness as visuality that forces reconceptualization of the visual. Cramer is followed by Lokeilani Kaimana’s “Conscious Quiet as a Mode of Black Visual Culture,” which attends to quiet as aesthetic mode and quality of blackness in the dance film, RIP Oscar Grant (2010), Ava Duvernay’s Selma (2014), and Wangechi Mutu’s video installation, Amazing Grace (2005). The centerpiece...