New York Filmmakers

Black Camera invites submissions for a Close-Up devoted to black independent filmmakers based in and around New York. In 2015 the Film Society of Lincoln Center premiered the groundbreaking series Tell It Like It Is: Black Independents in New York, 1968–1986, programmed by Michelle Materre and Jake Perlin. This series recontextualized the all too rarely seen film and television works of artists including Jessie Maple, William Miles, Kathleen Collins, Bill Gunn, St. Clair Bourne, Madeline Anderson, Kent Garrett, and William Greaves, among many others. Whether in documentaries, experimental shorts, or feature length narratives, these artists recharted black life onscreen. Falling between the twin poles of production that were the Blaxploitation cycle and what Paula Massood describes as the Black City Cinema of the 1990s, these artists were part of a New York “scene.” Whether as colleagues or friends, a network of black artists emerged. Within this network artists exchanged ideas and challenged typical modes of production and representation.

While many of these filmmakers had close relationships with New York’s prominent public television station WNET, some worked across media. Expanding the scope beyond New York City, these artists represented an East Coast analog to the West Coast work of the LA Rebellion filmmakers. Where UCLA represented a nexus point of education, the networks created on the East Coast were entangled across and against institutions. This Close-Up section endeavors to reframe how scholars think of “black cinema” and the ways in which black filmmakers on the East Coast honed specific aesthetic and narrative strategies, cultivated often in opposition to those emerging in other artistic spheres. Figures like Gunn and Collins, who were once pejoratively characterized as belonging to the “Hudson River school of cinematography” turned to both the stage and the page as writers, sculpting worlds of middle-class black life that cut across time and prescribed notions of legible blackness.

From Kathleen Collins’s recently rereleased Losing Ground and Bill Gunn’s still shelved studio feature Stop, to Woodie King’s neorealist The Long Night, and William Miles’s magisterial I Remember Harlem, the New York Scene presents a challenging collective of films that defy typical cinematic histories. This Close-Up will feature works rarely discussed, not to incorporate them into already existing histories but to pose new questions.

The guest editors welcome submissions on black independent filmmakers within this New York “scene” from a variety of disciplinary and analytical perspectives. Essays, interviews, and experimental works will be considered for publication. Essays should be 3,000–6,000 words.

Suggested topics include studies of an artist within the New York “scene,” collaboration among artists, innovative and experimental aesthetics, the role of public funding, the political and social impact of television, the filmic cartographies of New York, the role of the black press, the role of curators and scholars, and the importance of workshops and collectives.

Other topics could include, but are not limited to:

• • Marketing and audience response

• • The importance of new technology and media in production and distribution

• • How music and performance exist on screen

• • Black sexuality and black love

• • The archive and its many (after)lives

• • Questions of black film history and historiography

• • The politics of representation

• • Explorations of the interior lives of black characters

• • Discussions of blackness, black embodiment and “black cinema” in relationship to art cinema—is there a black art cinema?

• • Black intellectual life onscreen

• • The black avant-garde in cinema

• • Modes of experimental and documentary production

• • Impact and legacy: how did an early wave impact future filmmakers such as Julie Dash, Ayoka Chenzira, Stanley Nelson et al.

• • The impact of CUNY and its development of black filmmakers

Please submit completed essays, a 150-word abstract, and a 50–100 word biography by June 1, 2018. Submissions should conform to The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition. Please see journal guidelines for more submission policy details:

http://www.indiana.edu/~blackcam/call/#guidelines.

Direct all questions, correspondence, and submissions to guest editors Nicholas Forster (nicholas.forster@yale.edu) and Michele Prettyman Beverly (beverly_m@mercer.edu).