Black Camera

Historically, the study of the idea of black film has been a fraught, insightful, and generative enterprise—be it a matter of industrial capital and its delimitation of film practice in terms of profit, or the tendency to insist that the "black" of black film be only a biological determinant and never a formal proposition. In many ways, the black film as an object of study mirrors the history of America, the history of an idea of race. While the field continues to shift and change, and the study of black film becomes more common, it is often still tokenized by the industry. Discussion about black film and media is booming in academic programs (e.g., American Studies, Women and Gender Studies, English) and in Film and Media Studies, but it is doing so even more in nonacademic spaces, with blogs, podcasts, and think pieces proliferating at a rapid pace. We offer our manifesto, recognizing that film manifestos never whisper. Their messages envision political, aesthetic, and cultural possibilities. They demand and plot. They question and insist. What follows are expectations bundled as concerns for not only the renderings of black film to come but, as well, the thinking on blackness and cinema that we hope will thrive and inspire future discussions. We are devising new terms of engagement with current developments in mind.

We must remember that traditionally the field of film studies was designed around the centering of heterosexual white men. This forms the bedrock of the film industry and of film studies.

This means that the study of black film, however one defines black film, has as a practice and a product often been treated as additional or derivative rather than integral (e.g., the infamous "race week" in any Intro to Film/Media course). We must learn, acknowledge, and teach that blackness has been central to the history of film since the birth of the medium, not just starting with The Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith, 1915). We must teach Oscar Micheaux, but also the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, and the long histories of early and nonextant black film that scholars like Jacqueline Stewart, Pearl Bowser, Allyson Nadia Field, and others have endeavored to bring to light. Furthermore, greater focus on the work of black women and queer filmmakers will further the necessary decentering of film studies' [End Page 582] perspectival tendencies and ultimately dispute the narrow categorical meanings attributed to black film. The study of black film must always be a rebel act.

We must stop referring to every significant black film or media text as "first," thus erasing the labor and intellectual contributions of all who came before.

The excitement around films such as Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017), Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016), Black Panther (Ryan Coogler, 2018), and, most recently, Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley, 2018) tends to produce a discourse of exceptionalism, of "firsts" ("first film to do X"). Critical discussion around the films tends to tacitly frame them in terms of a white film landscape, suggesting that their worth rests in their ability to look and sound like standard (i.e., white) films, severing their ties to black film history and distancing them from "unexceptional" black films in the present. As a final note, the vibrant and insightful work of the New Negress Film Society, a collective of black women filmmakers (Frances Bodoni, Dyani Douze, Ja'Tovia Gary, Chanelle Aponte Pearson, and Stefani Saintonge), thrives in ways counter to the tacitly industry-minded insistence on black cinema exceptionalism.¹

We must be critical and suspicious of academic essays, panels, and other activities about black film that do not substantially engage with or cite film and media studies scholarship.

How is it possible to discuss black film without regard to the debates and inquiries that continue to provide the critical momentum that is black film and media discourse? The universal experience of watching film gives the false impression that we are all equally knowledgeable about film's histories, theories, and contexts. Moreover, this practice renders invisible the existence of cinema studies, turning film into something that anyone...