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  • Editor’s Notes

It is with great pleasure that with this issue we close out seven fecund years of publishing Black Camera and start work on volume eight with renewed commitment to this project of historical documentation in the cinematic. This issue, like those that precede it, is unique for its transnational scope, organization, and thematic address, all qualities that help make BC unlike any other scholarly film journal of its kind in the United States or, arguably, world.

Consider the contents of this issue, beginning with calls for papers on hip-hop cinema, Selma, the fall of cinema in Senegal, and Beyoncé as a media and cultural icon, followed by an extended conversation with the celebrated filmmaker Nelson Pereira dos Santos, whose seminal and decisive contributions to Brazilian cinema and formation of Cinema Novo are as legendary as his realist approach to the representation of racial and class inequalities in Brazilian society.

What follows dos Santos are two distinct Close-Ups. With the renewal of interest in slavery and the plethora of literary and cinematic productions about slavery currently on screens and in development, the first Close-Up, edited by Joi Carr, illumines the context for and rereading of Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012), the genre-bending and bizarre fusion of the spaghetti western, blaxploitation, and action hero film. Four essays and an interview with the producer Reginald Hudlin comprise this Close-Up and merit your attention.

The second Close-Up, edited by Noah Tsika, takes up the ever more pressing issue and conundrum of African media’s peripheral status in the academy and corresponding alternative approaches of study from the South. Along with a lengthy and informative introduction by Tsika, the Close-Up includes four critical essays and an interview with Chris Eneaji on recent iterations of Nollywood in contemporary Nigerian cinema. You would do well to read this collection in its entirety.

The issue also features the second installment of “Teaching African Women in Cinema,” by Beti Ellerson, and Olivier Barlet’s informative take on Africa’s presence at Cannes 2015 in the Africultures dossier. [End Page 1]

Concluding the issue, you can always profit from our film and book reviews; archival spotlight, which focuses on the centennial of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915); and news and professional notes and research resources. Moving on!

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