Editor's Notes

Along with the menu of essays, interviews, and the Africultures dossier regularly featured in Black Camera, this issue introduces readers to a new feature called Close-Up. Devoted to the study of a particular film, filmmaker, actor, or screenwriter, this section of the journal will revisit and renew critical attention to personages in black cinema and filmic texts by or about people of the African diaspora.

This first edition of Close-Up engages with Nothing But a Man (1964) by Michael Roemer and Robert M. Young. The essays, commentary, and interviews comprising the close-up are largely derived from a two-day symposium—Cinematic Representations of Racial Conflict in Real Time. Sponsored by the Black Film Center/Archive at Indiana University and supported by a New Frontiers grant, the symposium occurred on the IU Bloomington campus, March 24-25, 2010. Among the participants were filmmakers Robert Young and Denis Mueller and author Sam Greenlee, who adapted The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973) from his 1969 novel of the same title; film scholars Terri Francis, Marilyn Yaquinto, Karen Bowdre, and Devorah Heitner; historians Khalil Mohammad and Lamont Yeakey; and literary scholar Fred McElroy.

Future issues of Black Camera will include close-ups of the films The Spook Who Sat by the Door and Precious (2009), and filmmakers Haile Gerima, Euzhan Palcy, Gaston Kabore, and Jean-Marie Teno among others.

We welcome your responses to this installment of Close-Up and your suggestions for the development of the series.