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  • Editor’s Notes
  • Michael T. Martin

Indiana University Press, in partnership with the Indiana University Black Film Center/Archive, is now the publisher of Black Camera: An International Film Journal.

This inaugural issue marks a defining moment in the evolution of Black Camera, as will the relocation of the Black Film Center/Archive to a 5,000-square-foot new home on the IU campus in the winter (2010). The new site will house state-of-the art seminar and screening rooms to support the Archive’s research and instructional programs, offices for visiting filmmakers and scholars, a large reading room for researchers to peruse rare documents and films, exhibit space for unique film memorabilia, and a temperature-controlled, large storage space to maintain our extensive collections, including the largest and most diverse African cinema poster collection in the United States.

From an eight-page newsletter launched in 1985 to a hundred-plus page microjournal, and now to an international scholarly film journal, Black Camera constitutes a new platform for the study and documentation of the black cinematic experience in the world. It is intended to privilege neglected and/or understudied sites of black filmmaking and the concerns and experiences they obtained from shared histories. In doing so, Black Camera will feature essays that engage film in social as well as political contexts and in relation to historical and globalizing processes that are consequential to the reception, distribution, and production of film in local, regional, national, and transnational settings and environments.

The journal will also include interviews with emerging and prominent filmmakers, archival notes and research reports, editorials, and book and film reviews, and it will address a wide range of genres—including documentary, experimental film and video, animation, musicals, comedy, etc. The journal will devote issues or sections of issues to national cinemas as well as independent, marginal, and oppositional films and other cinematic formations.

Our project is to document, encourage, and invigorate research and [End Page 1] study of black filmmaking as an art form, cultural and political practice, and historical activity; engage in conversation with other cinematic traditions, movements, and practices in world cinema; stimulate new, and refresh traditional, theoretical and analytical perspectives; privilege the study of “new forms of cinematic practice”; disseminate research to enhance the teaching of black film; and serve as a repository and showcase for black artistic and intellectual achievement.

Black Camera will also constitute a forum to debate and challenge received and ensconced views and assumptions about filmmaking practices in the African diaspora, where new, evolving, and long-standing cinematic formations and traditions are in play.

Our readership is you: scholar/researchers, media professionals and cinéastes, and the public interested generally in cultural production and visual forms of representation.

The contents of the inaugural issue embody the stated project and geographical scope of Black Camera and engage with the above thematic concerns. The essays and interviews are organized into three distinctive sections followed by film and book reviews, archival news, and professional notes.

The first section is devoted to the study of African cinema and comprises three essays, beginning with the distinguished film scholar Roy Armes’s survey of the long history of filmmaking in the Maghreb in “Cinemas of the Maghreb.” Armes addresses the evolution of film production in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia during the postindependence period, emphasizing the role of the state in the formation and development of these national cinemas. Moreover, he discusses the necessity of Maghrebian filmmakers “to be independent auteurs” and examines the realist style that predominates in the region to address the Arab world’s social problems. Kenneth W. Harrow’s theorized and vexing essay on “Trash and a New Approach to Cinema Engagé” follows. In it, Harrow elaborates and extends arguments he developed in Postcolonial African Cinema and deploys the concept of “trash” as a means to revisit and dispense with prevailing assumptions about African film criticism with its legitimization of filmmaking practices that he asserts “have not substantially changed in forty years.” Harrow’s project is no less the call for a new African “cinematic order.” The focus on African cinema concludes with the essay by Martin Mhando and Keyan G. Tomaselli on...

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