...Lindsey Green-Simms This essay examines the aesthetic dimensions of the “occult melodramas” of West African video-films by discussing how filmmakers use the technology of video to recreate the sensuous impact of daily rumors that speak to spiritual and socioeconomic anxieties. Given...

...Lisbeth Gant-Britton Molzday’s Girls (Ngozi Onwurah, 1993) African Women and Visual Culture: A Sample Syllabus Lis beth Gant-Britton Go to any cinema in the United States-or other western country for that matter-and the odds are extremely slim that you will see any...

...Diana Adesola Mafe Twentieth-century British and US films about Africa have been predominantly racist productions that employ what Kenneth Cameron calls archetypes—the White Queen, the White Hunter, the Good African, the Dangerous African, and so on. This article explores the mise-en-scène...

...Courtney R. Baker Recent African American film scholarship has called for an attention to the structures of black representation on screen. This work echoes the calls made in the 1990s by black feminist film and cultural scholars to resist the allure of reading for racial realism and to develop...

... A Different Image (1982), and Zeinabu irene Davis’s Cycles (1989). Each of these films’ renderings of Afrocentric feminist aesthetics—through attention to African oral and mythical traditions, African and Pan-African-inflected mise-en-scène, rich col-oration and film stock, and play with nonlinear...

...Christine Cynn In Francophone West Africa, bilateral and multilateral HIV prevention focuses on combating stigma, increasing awareness, and encouraging safer sexual practices, especially through the use of mass media. This approach works in the service of neoliberal mandates to produce African...

... of these discussions and explore their interrelations, by looking at the film through a history and analysis of cinematic reflexivity. As a metacinematic work both by and about an African American lesbian director, the film has much to say about the means of its own production and, even further, about the way...

... to be shaped by this very difference. Further, through initiatives like the African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement, networks of filmmakers and film enthusiasts from communities historically mis- or underrepresented in film are beginning to shift the constitution of festival audiences and thereby...

... African American music. To unpack these connections, BREAKAWAY is analyzed in the context of two contemporary films in which Basil played significant roles: The T.A.M.I. Show (dir. Steve Binder, US, 1964), a groundbreaking concert film that signaled a new era of on-screen racial integration...

.... The next two images are individual shots of the white and African- American female co-stars. Again, neither is privileged, but the posi- tioning of the white woman’s image as the first human form we see seems to associate her with the mansion and grounds, while the African American woman’s...

...Julia Erhart Picturing What If: Julie Dash's Speculative Fiction Julia Erhart The first feature-length film by an African-American woman to gain nationwide critical recognition as well as national theatrical release, Daughters ofthe Dust was already the focus of considerable...

... with con- temporary Black woman filmmaker Cauleen Smith on the importance of avoiding stereotypical depictions of African Americans in film and other forms of visual culture. MacDonald and Smith talk of the heavy burden and responsibility placed on filmmakers by audiences to pro...

... the contemporary politics of racial, cultural, and economic representation in institutional structures for art exhibition. Lisbeth Gant-Britton is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema and Television, where she teaches African-American...

... Press 35 36 • Camera Obscura adolescent’s complicated transitional identity faced with crises of family, unemployment, and migration. The characters featured in these films come from notably marginalized populations—like the African ghettos in Lisbon, the middle- and working-class homes...

... of the promise of good pay. You have been positioned in front of the camera, and you are thinking about how cold it is: you can’t believe that you have to live here in this reconstruction of a West African village, crowded with these other West African people, some of whom don’t even speak Wolof...

...Laura Mulvey Copyright © 1993 by Indiana University Press 1993 Xala, Ousmane Sembene (1974): The Carapace That Failed Laura Mulvey The film language of Xala can be constructed on the model of an African poetic form called “sem...

... “Pictures of Their Voices,” the studio’s caption reads: “Victoria Spivey and Daniel Haynes look at a sound track of their voices in Metro- Goldwyn-Mayer’s ‘Hallelujah The photo economically figures the discursive link created—by studios, critics, and the popular press—between African American...

.... Young African-Ameri- cans, Latinos, Chicanos, and Asian Americans experience their daily 8 lives, to say nothing of the means by which they develop political strategies of resistance and survival, in decidedly ambivalent ways. For African-Americans or Latinos partial economic...

... of the American public to spend money on health and beauty aides, in general, is related to the obsessive belief that external attributes are definitive of self and identity. More specifically, the popularity of health and beauty aides within African American com- 15 munities is connected...

.... At the same time, Andy’s reference to the legal act that ended slavery in a show that features almost no African American characters — Flip Conroy (Rockne Tarkington), the first and only African American charac- ter, appears in the 1966 – 67 season — reveals the inferentially racist discourses...