...films flourished during the technological transitions of the late 1920s and early 1930s as technicians and artists experimented with new creative methods like synchronized sound and two-strip ...Technicolor, and I wondered how these innovations related to the social situation of African Americans. In his published remarks, Jafa theorizes that the hand-cranked camera, which gives the flicker to silent film, was more appropriate to capturing the expressive form or "plasticity (much like a talking drum)" of human motion-of black motion. The line "What happens to a dream deferred?" provides a central metaphor in my narrative, linking rotting combustible film to deferred dreams, suppressed black expression, and negative cinematic depictions, which can lead ultimately to cultural destruction.5 The Lincoln Film Conspiracy was originally planned as both a thirtyminute film and a six-minute multiscreen installation that would use an imaginary narrative to address the potential loss of orphaned and minority artifacts from film history, film preservation, and from the archive. ...my unfinished project from 1991, La Tete Sans Corps / The Head without a Body, about the discovery, reanimation and exploitation of a young black woman's disembodied head, is a sci-fi story that has been revived as a Lincoln Film Conspiracy horror/romance and for which I crafted a series of lobby cards modeled on those of the Reol Film company (fig. 2).6 The project archives my emotional world as well; consequently the production has ebbed, flowed, gone on tangents, hesitated, and restarted.
In this year's festival, modernity versus tradition, African identity, immigration and exile, effects of war, and women's empowerment were explored through forty-seven features, spanning sub- Saharan ...Africa, Northern Africa and the Diaspora. 2007 commemorates the 50th anniversary of Ghana's independence (the 1st sub-Saharan nation to gain sovereignty) by "reflecting back" on liberation struggles and the painful legacy of colonialism. Documentaries included Death of Two Sons (US/GN, 2006) by American director Micah Schaffer, paralleling the life of Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo, gunned down by New York City police in 1999, and Jessie Thyne, a Peace Corps volunteer who lived and worked with Diallo's family and was killed in a car accident months later.
The Labor Behind the Looney A nitty-gritty look at process fleshes out a venerable moving-image medium Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons By Hannah Frank, University of ...California Press, $34.95 TAKING ON THE SISYPHEAN TASK OF ANALYZING THOUSANDS of individual frames from animated cartoons, Hannah Frank's intricately argued book suggests an imaginative, alternative chronicle of labor in commercial studio animation. The materialist study maintains the layered "photographic origins of cel animation": a single pictorial frame of a cartoon is assembled from sheets of discrete acetate cels, each hand-drawn, inked, painted, and then stacked over painted or collaged backgrounds, making up a singular "document" that is then photographed. The process results in an animated film narrative, and that cartoon in turn becomes a record preserving each of these documents because of the industrial practice of washing or reusing sheets after the photography is complete.
