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  • Introduction:Black Representations
  • Charles Musser

Why are films and filmmakers so often demonized - or at least belittled - by critics and scholars?

Debates and disagreements about the artistic, cultural, social and political value of films are often inevitable, perhaps necessary and even healthy; however, the confident disdain that has been heaped on such figures as Oscar Micheaux, Germaine Dulac, or Edwin S. Porter - at least until recently - has shut down understanding rather than opening up exploration. Perhaps it is because so much is at stake when it comes to cinematic representations. Charlie Chaplin and Paul Robeson were thoroughly hated by Cold War anti-communists, but they were also loved to death - praised even as they were belittled - by their supporters. Left-leaning commentators, who often pride themselves on understanding the relationship between the social and the cultural, found virtually all of Robeson's roles to be terrible mistakes - without being able to acknowledge that these very roles crucially contributed to making Robeson the towering figure whom they adored. The trend has too often continued into the present day, as contemporary filmmakers such as Spike Lee and Errol Morris are slammed by oh-so-self-confident (and self-appointed) cognoscenti. As much as in the past, film and cultural historians need to grapple with the complex imaginative achievements of work that has been judged too quickly and too harshly.

Films, filmmakers, critics, journalists and archivists need to be approached with a certain humility and generosity of spirit. (This is one reason why Andre Bazin was such a great critic as well as a compelling film theorist.) Critical assessment is certainly crucial to ensure rigor and insight, and we should not ignore the shortfalls and failings of culture workers. Celebratory indulgences are just as problematic as caustic dismissal. Rather, we should try to understand them on their own terms and within the freedoms and limitations of their times. The articles in this special issue are generally united by this shared approach.

Terri Francis and Ikechukwu Obiaya present a pair of articles that speak to each other as they look at government sponsored filmmaking in Jamaica and Nigeria under British colonial rule. In "Sounding the Nation: Martin Rennalls and the Jamaica Film Unit's First Decade, 1951-1961", Francis focuses on Jamaican educator turned filmmaker Martin Rennalls, who was particularly active during the 1950s. Francis explores the ways in which he and the Jamaican Film Unit, which he led, became a space where Jamaicans could construct representations of Jamaica which would address and be meaningful to its citizens: instructional and news films as well as documentaries. Moreover, while Rennalls was making films for the local population, he was also building international ties with both Europe and North America.

In "A Break with the Past: The Nigerian Video-Film Industry in the Context of Colonial Filmmaking", Obiaya looks at filmmaking - both government sponsored and commercial feature fiction films - in Nigeria during a somewhat longer time period. Africans were clearly not afforded the same opportunities that Rennalls and the Jamaican Film Unit enjoyed during the same period, even though the colonial regime there possessed a comparable organization. British filmmaker and administrator William Sellers, who was a factor in both countries, had a long-standing involvement in Nigeria and seems to have retained a more prominent and problematic influence there. Obiaya also looks at the structure of film distribution in Nigeria and the way the nation's colonial legacy generated a narrow conception of what constituted desirable cinema, which inhibited local productions long after independence. Ironically, it may have been [End Page 107] the pervasiveness of such shortcomings that finally led to a new, radically disjunctive moving image culture built around video.

In "Discovering Black Film History: Tracing the Tyler, Texas Black Film Collection", Jacqueline Stewart explores the narratives of loss and recovery that have surrounded the highly publicized "discovery" of a large stash of films by Prof G. William Jones of Southern Methodist University (SMU) in 1983. Celebrated as a treasure-trove of lost black-focused films, almost all of the films were eventually found to be extant in other collections. After examining the ways in which the collection was promoted and the controversy that has...

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