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Garrett Bradley works across narrative, documentary, and experimental modes of filmmaking to address themes such as race, class, familial relationships, social justice, and cultural histories in the United States. Her collaborative and research-based approach to filmmaking is often inspired by the real-life stories of her protagonists. This book explores Bradley's work through the lens of devotion and features conversations with the artist and contributions from the likes of Ashley Clark, Arthur Jafa, Joy James, Tyler Mitchell, Kevin Quashie, and Claudia Rankine. This is the first volume in a new series of readers copublished with Lisson Gallery entitled Re:, which will respond to a number of its artists and themes past and present. Adopting archival material alongside newly shot footage, Bradley's films exist simultaneously in the past, present, and future, not only disrupting our perception of time, but also breaking down our preconceived ideas about objectivity, perspective, and truth-telling. These narratives unfold naturally in both feature-length and short form, revealing a multitude of individual and collective stories. The social, economic, and racial politics of everyday life--its joys, pleasures, and pains--are lyrically and intimately rendered on screen.

Christina N. Baker's Contemporary Black Women Filmmakers and the Art of Resistance is the first book-length analysis of representations of Black femaleness in the feature films of Black women filmmakers. These filmmakers resist dominant ideologies about Black womanhood, deliberately and creatively reconstructing meanings of Blackness that draw from their personal experiences and create new symbolic meaning of Black femaleness within mainstream culture. Addressing social issues such as the exploitation of Black women in the entertainment industry, the impact of mass incarceration on Black women, political activism, and violence, these films also engage with personal issues as complex as love, motherhood, and sexual identity. Baker argues that their counter-hegemonic representations have the potential to transform the narratives surrounding Black femaleness. At the intersection of Black feminism and womanism, Baker develops a \"womanist artistic standpoint\" theory, drawing from the work of Alice Walker, Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Kimberlé Crenshaw. Analyzing the cultural texts of filmmakers such as Ava DuVernay, Tanya Hamilton, Kasi Lemmons, Gina Prince-Bythewood, and Dee Rees-and including interviews she conducted with three of the filmmakers-Baker emphasizes the importance of applying an intersectional perspective that centers on the shared experiences of Black women and the role of film as a form of artistic expression and a tool of social resistance.

Black women filmmakers not only deserve an audience, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster asserts, but it is also imperative that their voices be heard as they struggle against Hollywood's constructions of spectatorship, ownership, and the creative and distribution aspects of filmmaking.

In 2022, New Negress Film Society’s Third Annual Conference highlighted the collective’s commitment to Black women and non-binary film cultures and community. The New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture served as gathering space for Black feminist film culture, consciousness-raising, and shared purpose and conviviality. During the conference, Melissa Lyde, founder of Alfreda’s Cinema, moderated the conversation, “Love is at the Center: Remedying Cinema Linguistics,” which included scholars and critics Terri Francis, Samantha N. Sheppard, and Salamishah Tillet. Over the course of an hour, the panelists offered a rich and expansive discussion of Black feminist film criticism. This is an edited transcript of that conversation.

[...]perhaps purposefully overlooking how the NFL treated Colin Kaepernick after he took a stand against police brutality and kneeled during the national anthem, when Jim Brown passed, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell called Brown, \"a cultural figure who helped promote change,\" later stating, \"During his nine-year NFL career, which coincided with the civil rights movement here at home, he became a forerunner and role model for athletes . . . involved in social initiatives outside their sport. \"4 And as sportswriter Dave Zirin writes, \"lts a remarkable stretch that cannot be written off as just an endless series of law-and-order conspiracies, coincidences, or bad luck. The summit set out to understand Ali's protest against the Vietnam War and whether other Black athletes would take a more active stance against the Vietnam War as assertions of their humanity, which risked potentially further dehumanization and violence against Black Americans.7 Jim Brown was at the top of his game when he retired as a professional football player.8 When working on The Dirty Dozen (dir. Robert Aldrich, 1967), which cut into his playing time at training camp, Art Modell said if he couldn't make training camp, then they would have to fine him. In an interview with Phyllis R. Klotman, who was at the time Dean of Women's Affairs, and Director of the Black Film Center Archive at Indiana University, on November 16, 1990, we get a sense of what acting meant for Brown and how he and other Black actors and actresses could use it as a tooi of empowerment and inspiration for young Black men and women.10 During the interview, Brown emphasized the power of cinema and the nature of exploitation of Black representation by white film producers, asserting, \"[I] see the cinema as a place to make any kind of film that you want to make, and I find that we were tricked because mainly white producers were able to get the money to make the films and what they did is-they did not want to make a big star that they would have to pay, they didn't want to make high budget movies, they wanted to exploit the black need into seeing black people on the screen and they did that.

The 1991 landmark meeting of African women film professionals held at the 12th edition of FESPACO in Ouagadougou and organized under the title \"Women, Cinema, Television and Video in Africa,\" while welcomed as a historic juncture embodying a vision of continental coalescing and discourse, at the same time revealed a fragile moment in Africa-Diaspora relations among women of the moving image. As the meeting convened, at one point a call came forth, that all non-African women leave the room-all men, all other women, and as it turned out, African diasporan women- including Sarah Maldoror. It was an emotionally charged experience for many, which has yet to be, well, dealt with. That is to say, that up to the present there has not been an attempt to address the breach that this meeting so apparently divulged nor has there been since, an official gathering between women makers of Africa and the diaspora. And now, more than thirty years and a generation later, the concept of diaspora itself has transformed, redefined even. Using this happening as a means to interrogate the very idea of Africa/diaspora in the third decade of the new millennium and beyond provides as well, a context to hypothesize the vexed issues around identity-and all of the caveats and polemics that it engenders. Perhaps more significantly, this inquiry is a reminder that the Africa-diaspora flow/exchange of knowledge, creativity and ideas has, in fact, existed for more than a century.

In this interview, professor Ellen Scott interviews professor Shola Lynch, the latter a key figure of contemporary documentary, whose work centers the lives and impact of Black women public figures. Lynch’s nuanced, archivally-saturated approach to her work creates films with the depth of academic history and the accessibility and visual and stylistic interest to bring a much wider audience to the table, no mean feat. Over the course of her career, Lynch has also developed an archivally driven image-based historiographic approach in her work that is singular and worthy of greater note within Media Studies, a discipline increasingly turning to images, rather than text, to explain images. In this discussion, Lynch and Scott focus on Lynch’s pathbreaking documentary Chisholm ‘72 (2004), a project in which she, out of nowhere, announced herself to the world as a filmmaker and storyteller to be reckoned with by treating an all-but ignored history Chisholm’s bid for the presidency. Lynch has consistently used her background in archival history as a launchpad for media production that is at once soulfully intimate and announces the importance of Black women to the foundations of American History.

The audience research of Jacqueline Bobo, the urgent assessment of the popular conducted by Wahneema Lubiano, the fierce advocacy and programming work of the late Jacquie Jones, the engagement with representational politics of Valerie Smith, and the work of many others including bell hooks and Bambara have unalterably shaped the project of Black film analysis.10 This issue aims to both return to these figures’ insights and to cultivate new models of investigation in the spirit of collectivity and collaboration that these scholars demonstrated. The approach is not simply an experiment; it is envisioned as a form of redress to correct mistaken and misguided fantasies about the film industry and popular culture that have circulated in the wake of the previous Black film studies high water mark of the 1990s when scholarship was necessarily addressed to independent and (if not versus) mainstream, Hollywood fare. Jacqueline Bobo’s key initial volume, Black Women Film and Video Artists still reads like a bolt of lightning out of the dark, bringing into the visual field the vital work of Black women filmmakers and beginning the key act of theorizing and historicizing their contributions.11 Producing the very first essays on key visionaries like Jacqueline Shearer, Bobo’s book, as well as her earlier theorizing of Black women’s readership of media in Black Women as Cultural Readers, provided an exceedingly important groundwork for this volume. [...]Michele Wallace’s Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman did underrecognized work of foundational critique and articulation of a Black feminist film optic in a time and place where this critique was not only ill-received by mainstream cinema studies but very often mischaracterized and misunderstood.12 In bell hooks’s important contribution to the discourse on the cinematic “gaze,” one stimulated by Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” and that Manthia Diawara, with recourse to Christian Metz, challenged in his essay “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance,” hooks crucially not only highlighted the intersectional lack the theoretical apparatus on spectatorship and identification and insisted on the visibility of Black women’s spectatorial positioning but began theorizing Black women’s viewing positions.13 Then there are those whose primary contributions to intellectual history were viewed to be outside of Film Studies: e.g. Toni Cade Bambara’s work theorizing and reading cinema is often overshadowed by her literary accomplishments, though she made signal contributions in both realms.

Director Tracy Heather Strain speaks about her development as a filmmaker, and the recent challenge of editing extensive research into a single documentary, Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming A Life (2023). Her responses also reflect the importance of Black women’s film work in (re)covering Black female subjects such as Hurston, where histories out of context have long shaped their stories.

In 2011, cultural critic Nelson George asserted, “Pariah is important, not simply as a promising directorial debut, but also as the most visible example of the minimovement of young black filmmakers telling stories that complicate assumptions about what ‘black film’ can be by embracing thorny issues of identity, alienation and sexuality.” However, filmgoers, myself included, were offended at the New York Times comparison of Pariah to Lee Daniel’s Precious (2008), another “Black” movie, but with such radically different content that one wonders if the reviewers actually watched Dee Rees’s Black lesbian coming-out story. Much like Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman, another film written, directed, and produced by a Black lesbian, Pariah was marketed as a “Black” film, effectively ignoring its queerness. And while both movies received favorable reviews, neither film did very well at the box office, suggesting that Black moviegoers had little interest in Black lesbian film. Hence, this essay will address the ways in which two Black lesbian filmmakers, Cheryl Dunye and Dee Rees, wrote, produced, and directed films that sought to counter common stereotypes regarding queer Black subjectivities, specifically those of Black lesbians, and how their struggles to produce, market, and distribute these films are indicative of the challenges that Black lesbians in the United States still face due to racism, sexism, and homophobia. To be sure, Black lesbian filmmakers are “contest [ing] the dominant gendered and sexual definitions of racial difference by working on black sexuality” (Hall 1993, 274), in this case, Black queer subjectivities in the form of Black lesbians. Stuart Hall also reminds us that the struggle over cultural hegemony “is never about pure victory or pure domination …it is always about shifting the balance of power in the relations of culture, it is always about changing the dispositions and the configurations of cultural power, not getting out of it” (107). Thus, late-twentieth-and early-twentyfirst-century Black lesbian filmmakers were engaged in challenging contemporary discourses that ignore the particularities of race and gender when it comes to representing LGBT experiences in film, thus hoping to exert agency over their representations in popular culture. I assert that both Pariah and The Watermelon Woman work to expand the archive of Black lesbian filmic representations by focusing on the ways in which Black lesbian identities are validated, embraced, and complicated by Black women in the United States. At the same time, these films reveal the unique challenges that Black lesbian filmmakers face from the film industry, as well as from their own communities.