Editor's Notes

This issue, and the third installment of Close-Up, introduces readers to the Ethiopian American "accented" filmmaker Haile Gerima. As with the preceding Close-Up on Precious and the novel Push by Sapphire, it is useful here to revisit the original call for submissions by guest editor Greg Thomas:

This special issue of Black Camera shall focus on the cinematic cultural-political work of Haile Gerima—a global African filmmaker who writes, produces, directs, and distributes films. Areas of inquiry may include Gerima and auteur cinema; Gerima's "Triangular Cinema"; the Los Angeles school; individual and comparative analyses of films; Gerima's ideological influences—Fanon, Malcolm X, Che, George Jackson, Cabral; Gerima in Europe and continental Africa; and Gerima and the Black Radical Tradition.

The call yielded a variety of scholarly, informational, and creative interventions that engage with Gerima's latest award-winning film Teza (2008), the focus of this Close-Up, which includes Thomas's introduction to Gerima's oeuvre, Gerima's statement, a press kit, a study guide, an annotated bibliography, and a lengthy and critical essay on and interview with Gerima by Thomas. Included in the Close-Up is a gallery featuring poetry that references images and calls attention to themes in Gerima's films. Together and independently the poems and images work compellingly to frame and foreground the filmmaker's concerns and practice. The gallery marks Black Camera's continuing efforts to convene a scholarly as well as creative conversation with our readers.

The issue also features two articles. The first is by Lars Lierow who, in "The 'Black Man's Vision of the World': Rediscovering Black Arts Filmmaking and the Struggle for a Black Cinematic Aesthetic," takes up the filmic interventions of members of the Black Arts Movement, circa the late 1960s and 1970s. Four little-known films by Larry Neal, in collaboration with Amiri Baraka (once referred to as Leroi Jones), Edward Spriggs, and James Hinton, are examined as texts and in the context of their production histories. Lierow here makes an essential contribution to, as he puts it, "write the Black Arts Movement into the history of black cinema."

The second article, Gabriel Sealey-Morris's "Black Glamour and the Hip-Hop Renaissance: Idlewild's Debt to Cabin in the Sky," revisits the black arts tradition of the 1930s and its influence on hip-hop culture manifest in the 2006 musical Idlewild. The author foregrounds the evolution and presence of a historically distinctive black artistic form in the contemporary period. The issue also contains, in the Africultures dossier, Olivier Barlet's always insightful film reviews, including, appropriately in this case, a review of Teza that complements our Close-Up on the film. The issue concludes with Archival News and Professional Notes and Research Resources.

With the departure of former associate editor, Mary Huelsbeck, I am very pleased to introduce our new assistant editor, Natasha C. Vaubel. Her editorial competence is impressive and her intellectual interests and scholarship engage with African and African diaspora film and literature. Her current research project, also the topic of her dissertation, investigates representations of the transition to a "new" South Africa in film and literature. Her other research interests are atomic bomb survivor literature and Aleut/Unangan native Alaskans. Equally impressive is Natasha's record of teaching at Indiana University, University of Maryland, and Aichi University in Japan. She was a Fulbright scholar at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa and prior to coming to Black Camera, worked as an administrator for the IU Project on African Expressive Traditions (POAET), the New Orleans Afrikan Film and Arts Festival (NOAFEST), and the West African Research Center (WARC) in Dakar, Senegal.

Finally, we remind readers of our newly launched book series, Studies in the Cinema of the Black Diaspora. The series addresses the filmmaking careers of directors and canonical and distinctive films of enduring historical, cultural, political, and aesthetic importance. Books we publish in partnership with Indiana University Press 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...