Academic Writing

This is a catalogue that was produced by the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1993 to accompany an exhibition of David Rimmer’s work in the same year. My essay was commisioned as a critical overview of Rimmer’s career up until 1993.

The 1963 film adaptation of William Golding’s 1954 novel of Lord of the Flies has become a classic of US Independent Cinema. By comparing the situation of the film shoot on the Caribbean island of Vieques (part of Puerto Rico) with Golding’s parable about human violence, this article explores the ironic failure of the filmmakers to recognise the historical violence that continued to plague this particular island as a contested site. Peter Brook’s approach to the novel demanded an attitude of innocence on the part of his novice actors and crew members to capture the authenticity that he sought. His so-called documentary approach to an island narrative was only achieved through the fiction of obfuscating the real violence taking place on and around Vieques.

The fifth title in the Docalogue series, this book examines Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s 2021 documentary, Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised).

This book will be of interest to students and scholars in multiple areas including but not limited to archival studies, Black studies, cultural studies, documentary studies, historiography, and music studies.

The file on Black actor Theresa Harris includes 103 Hollywood films and TV shows for which she has screen credit, along with many that she does not, from 1929 to 1958. She was cast as an extra, a bit player, or a character actor with lines, most of the time as a maid. In this speculative history of her career, I examine a selection of her roles in films such as Baby Face (1933), Jezebel (1938), I Married a Zombie (1943), Out of the Past (1947), and Lady from Shanghai (1947) as if they were racial events. The act of critical viewing, of actually noticing Harris’s contribution to these and other films, can arguably alter the reading of the films in important ways. My reparative readings are inspired by the theoretical work of Eve Sedgwick and Christine Goding-Doty, and the historiographical work of Saidiya Hartman and Daphne Brooks.

The articles, video essays, and short pieces collected in this issue of Frames Cinema Journal are not only about archival materials, but offer valuable insight into the media archive itself. I am pleased to see that my open-ended neologism of archiveology has been adapted and bent into so many creative and critical shapes.1Media archives emerge from this dossier as fluid and shape-shifting media in themselves that not only collect store, catalogue and save, but have the capacity for time-travel, regeneration, and renewal–sometimes within the very context of ruin, degeneration, and loss.The various essays, artists’ statements and discussions, along with video essays and discussions of single films in this dossier, tease out the complex historiographies embedded in archiveological media.

Originally published in Found Footage

Catherine Russell picks up a thread from her groundbreaking Experimental Ethnography to return to her favorite avant-garde mode of filmmaking to learn how to navigate Amazonia in sounds and images by offering a reading of Lothar Baumgartner’s film Origin of the Night (Amazon Cosmos) (1978) and Ciro Guerra’s Embrace of the Serpent (2015). Russell investigates how Amazon cinema is not only a primal scene of first contact narratives but also a visual spectacle, a physical and technical challenge, and a spatially disorienting experience for filmmakers and spectators alike.