Blackframes: Critical Perspectives on Independent Black Cinema

The emergence in recent years of a significant corpus of highly-acclaimed films by people of African descent in different parts of the world heralds a new era in the history of film. This collection of eight original essays by noted scholars, critics, and practitioners of independent Black cinema offers a rare global and systematic examination of what is unique and what is common to the making of films in English-speaking ("Anglophone") Africa, in the United States, and in Britain.

Jim Pines examines the history and contemporary dynamics of production, distribution, and screening in Britain. James Snead looks at images of Blacks conveyed by independent Black filmmakers in America, and Manthia Diawara surveys Black filmmaking in Anglophone Africa.

Three essays provide a particularly informed, provocative, and creative reflection on the aesthetics of Black film and in doing so present a formidable challenge to modernist and Western notions of aesthetics: Kobena Mercer's identification of "interruption," "creolization,"and "carnival aesthetics" as key aspects of the dialogic imagination of independent Black film in Britain; Teshome Gabriel's creative presentation of what he describes as the "traveling" or "nomadic" character of Black independent film practice; and Clyde Taylor's iconoclastic assault on the very notion of aesthetics itself.

Distributed for Celebration of Black Cinema.