Everybody’s Protest Cinema

This article uses Baldwin’s 1949 essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel” to consider that literary mode’s corollary in the 1990s New Black Cinema. It argues that recent African American movies posit an alternative to the politics and aesthetics of films by a director such as Spike Lee, one that evinces a set of qualities Baldwin calls for in his essay about Black literature. Among these are what recent scholars such as Ann Anlin Cheng have called racial melancholy or what Kevin Quashie describes as Black “quiet,” as well as variations on Yogita Goyal’s diaspora romance. Films such as Barry Jenkins’s adaptation of If Beale Street Could Talk (2018) and Joe Talbot and Jimmy Fails’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019) offer a cinematic version of racial narrative at odds with the protest tradition I associate with earlier Black directors, a newly resonant cinema that we might see as both a direct and an indirect legacy of Baldwin’s views on African American culture and politics.

Black “Crime,” Public Hysteria, and the Cinema of Containment: Black Cinema Aesthetics from Willie Dynamite to The Interrupters and a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert

This essay will explore the ways in which African American visual culture has attempted to negotiate criminalization and the current situation of what Richard Iton rightfully characterizes as “hyperincarceration.” It will explore the ways in which contemporary African American visual culture is engaged in negotiating between the literal material realities and consequences of mass incarceration and aesthetic constructions of violence. While mass incarceration is increasingly becoming understood as “the New Jim Crow” for African American political organizing, Black criminality has become the key lens through which questions of masculinity, class exclusion, gender, and selfhood get negotiated in African American visual culture. This essay will argue that the “subtext of ongoing Black captivity” is the pretext for much of what drives Black action genres and African American representation in general as a key signifier of a racialized identity and as an indicator of a Black subjectivity fraught with complexities of non-belonging.

Professional and personal strategies of documentary filmmakers in Brazil: the case of the State of Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais.

Between 2012 and 2019, this qualitative sociological research was part of a documentary "boom" moment in Brazil, in terms of production and international recognition. Faced with a bottleneck in terms of their distribution, a growing number of festivals have opened up for documentaries, not counting the historical festival "É tudo Verdade" (São Paulo). This period also corresponds to a time when attempts at policies in favor of documentary films were made by the Federation and the Ministry of Culture (MinC) – public channel TV Brasil, TV Cultura, Doc.TV... These various advances have allowed the expression of a "black" cinema (Joel Zito Araujo), LGBT concerns (Karla Holanda), women’s rights (Helena Solberg and Susanna Lira) and the possibility for indigenous people to seize digital tools to reflect their own realities (Vincent Carelli, Video nas aldeias). Thus, while the Brazilian authorities were carrying out unfinished policies facing the weight of the private oligopolistic sector, it was interesting to analyze how documentary filmmakers developed their professional strategies. From this perspective, fourteen directors were the subject of semi-structured interviews in the state of Rio de Janeiro and three in Minas Gerais. In addition, producers and festival managers were also contacted. But the arrival of the Bolsonaro government caused a real rift. Against a backdrop of cultural war, fake news aimed at discrediting artistic circles, the takeover of the National Cinema Agency (ANCINE) and the abandonment of the São Paulo film library, cuts from major corporate sponsors, and beyond, Brazilian documentary filmmakers have found themselves strangers in their own country.

“O caso do homem errado” – o cinema como instrumento de denúncias do genocídio da população negra

The present paper analyzes the fallacy of racial democracy in Brazil, studying the film The Case of the Wrong Man, documentary by Camila Moraes which investigates in detail the death of Júlio César de Melo Pinto, a black young man murdered by the police on May, 14th, 1987, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. The documentary feature film was born in 2015, when the movie director was in college and taking a course on investigative journalism. Through several collected testimonies, the movie director reproduces the episodes involved in the execution of Júlio César, bringing to the film the view, the technique and the sensitivity peculiar to a black woman movie maker who reaffirms the osition of the black cinema in the space of the feminine. A documentary at the same time expository and investigative, marked by the argument that “Black lives matter”, The Case of the Wrong Man, consolidates itself as a film from within, towards from the outside. By denouncing the genocide of the Brazilian black youth, the film presents the helplessness and hopelessness of the black families in the country and reiterates the innocence of Júlio César.

Percepções do clássico Alma no Olho e o cinema negro de Zózimo Bulbul

This article purposes an observation of the sensations caused by watching the movie “Alma no Olho” (Brazil, 1974) from the writer, director, producer and actor Zózimo Bulbul. He started his career doing theater productions at the UNE (National Students Union) cultural center, was the first black man to play a lead role in the Brazilian television, having acted in more than thirty movies and directing six, including Alma no Olho, which will be discussed in this article. Through a research, done in person, we will analyse the perceptions the movie brings, whether they’re about historical, individual or social relations. It will also discuss a little about the definition of what is classic and a small biography from the master of the Brazilian black cinema, Zózimo Bubul.

Encontros, Festivais e Mostras - caminhos para construção do cinema negro brasileiro

The article seeks from the realization of the “Afro-Brazilian Cinema Moments Exhibition - Retrospective”, to analyze the process of consolidation of the concept of Black Cinema, and how the specific Encounters, Festivals and Exhibitions strengthened this process. Based on the questions about the image and the place of the black population in film production, we investigated the factors that led to the increase of production made by black filmmakers. In this way, we understand this process as a consequence of the racially defined public policies developed in recent decades, strengthened by the advance and access of new technological mechanisms and apparatuses of production; the establishment of the Association of Black Audiovisual Professionals (APAN); and also the outbreak of contemporary film festivals and shows, shaped around the racial issue in all regions of the country.

Policing Black Film: Racism, Black Resistance and the Applicational Dexterity of Race Relations in Babylon

The racial unrests permeating across Britain in the late 1970s resulted in a set of political agendas responding to racism to be brought into being though legislation, culminating in the passing of the 1976 Race Relations Act. Crucial to such agendas were strategies for the prevention of black urban uprisings against state authority and the politicisation of black youths against racism. The emergence of politicised black British film during the late 1970s offered a crucial counter-hegemonic exploration and re-enactment of an extra-filmic reality of police violence and popular racism within the British body social. However, these texts were subjected to forms of political censorship through a number of state organisations who identified radical black cinema as a political threat with the potential to incite violent responses from black youths. This article will offer a detailed analysis of Babylon (1980) and seeks to investigate the ideological processes leading to its X certification and the moral panic located in its representations of black youths within the crisis of race vis-a-vis the political, social and cultural authority of race relations, situating Babylon’s controversial X certification as an exemplar of the ‘applicational dexterity’ of the race relations discipline.

El cine negro español: del spanish noir al policiaco actual [Reseña]

The Spanish black cinema: from the Spanish noir to the present police one. It proposes a trip from the background of the Spanish black cinema - 1940s - to the present. The play, broken into 6 chapters - actually 8, although the last two are considered annexes with encyclopedic functions - goes chronologically through the evolution of the gender, making notes about his most relevant feature films and directors. The author guides us through comments and personal opinions, that are based in both critics from professionals of the time - Méndez Leite or Fernandez Santos - and declarations from the filmmakers themselves - from Rovira Beleta to Enrique Urbizu.