61.2
CONTENTS
Drake Stutesman
Editorial
DOSSIER: Ousmane Sembene: The Rebel with a Camera
Guest editor: Samba Gadjigo
Samba Gadjigo and Jason Silverman
Introduction
Tahar Cheriaa
Issues in African Film: The Artist and the Revolution:
“Interview with Ousmane Sembene”
Translator: Moustapha Diop
Tahar Cheriaa
Issues in African Film: The Artist and the Revolution:
“Interview with Ousmane Sembene” in French
Sembene Ousmane
Freedom
Translator: Moustapha Diop
Sembène Ousmane
“Liberté” in French
Moustapha Diop
Postcolonial Amnesia: The “Vanishing Present” of the Past in
Le Cercle de noyés
Samba Gadjigo
Ousmane Sembene’s Moolaadé: People’s Rights vs. Human Rights
Samba Gadjigo and Jason Silverman
Sembene Across Africa Project: Bringing African Stories to Africans
ESSAY
Patrícia Mourão de Andrade
Schneemann’s Doubt
ESSAY
J. English Cook
Red Films, Blue Prints: Early Soviet Cinema’s Architectural Imaginary
DOSSIER: Responses during COVID-19 Spring/Summer 2020
Susan Potter
Did the Tree Call Chantal to It?
MM Serra
MM Serra Presents Notes from the Lower East Side: Redux
Rebekah Rutkoff
Other Galaxies: The Temenos Beyond the Screen
Melissa Lyde
The renegades who rescue Black Cinema Classics and the post-COVID future for these reflections of the Black imagination
Teresa Castro
Cinema as Oracle
Patrícia Mourão de Andrade
In Limbo
Dennis Broe
Post Corona Film and Television: Stream It, Skip It, or Revolutionize It?
EDITORIAL
In this issue, Framework 61-2, the dossier Ousmane Sembene: The Rebel with a Camera features never before published work. Guest edited by Samba Gadjigo, Sembene’s executor and the co-director, with Jason Silverman, of the documentary Sembene! (US/SN 2016), the dossier includes the unpublished “Liberté,” a 1956 poem by Sembene, and the unpublished 1974 interview with him by Tahar Cheriaa, as well as essays by Moustapha Diop and Gadjigo. There is also a detailed outline of Samba Gadjigo’s and Jason Silverman’s current project, “Sembene Across Africa Project: Bringing African Stories to Africans,” which aims to distribute African films throughout Africa. J. English Cook’s “Red Film, Blue Prints: Early Soviet Cinema’s Architectural Imaginary” examines, in great depth, silent-era Soviet film through the relationship between fantastical imaginary landscapes and early Soviet ideology. In “Schneemann’s Doubt,” Patrícia Mourão de Andrade looks at Carolee Schneemann’s work, in particular her painting of Jane Brakhage, and argues that this portrait and its process is a crucial link “between Schneemann’s artistic practice, her feminism, and the films that she made from 1967 onwards.”
The dossier Responses during COVID-19 Spring/Summer 2020 was conceived in early May, when I asked a number of people if they would like to contribute to a dossier:
I’d like to invite you to write a personal piece on a film, or the nature of film, or the future of film, and any of its offshoots (video art, streaming, distribution, etc.) given how we are all very dependent on and engrossed in the virtual world while we are all sequestered and/or profoundly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic. Or you can write on any topic that touches on visual/virtual media or a topic around this subject. How will our future change, as we have had to tap into the virtual world in the way that we have? How is your own present or your memories of the past been affected? What is coming up for you now as you watch a film or something like it? This is personal piece, and it can be very short, for example 500 words, or it can be long, for example 6000 words. Framework has a unique opportunity in this issue to address something that will not appear in print or online until Fall 2020, yet, even with a six-month gap, the subject will still be crucial, if not more crucial than ever. Please consider contributing to the Framework dossier on this unprecedented, life-changing topic that is both fleeting and permanent. Your work will be much appreciated.
Some agreed right away or declined right away, some were very enthusiastic, some were reluctant, some dropped out, some joined late, some wrote a few words, some wrote long pieces. In this dossier, the pieces, written by Susan Potter, Melissa Lyde, Rebekah Rutkoff, Teresa Castro, Dennis Broe, Patrícia Mourão de Andrade, and MM Serra, make a fascinating and eclectic narrative response. The world is changing not every day but every minute, and streamings/screens/zooms and similar methods of communication are suddenly central. Their assets and liabilities, their anachronism or futurism, are another part of COVID-19’s constant impact, an impact made even more powerful after the murder of George Floyd on May 25 when new rising consciousness about racism began worldwide, led by Black Lives Matter and the protest movements. The dossier’s interaction of the short pieces and the long pieces, with the personal decisions each writer took in choosing their focus, is an engagement with an experience many of us have found difficult to put into words.
I want especially to thank all the contributors to this issue, the authors as well as Julie Warheit, Susan Swartwout, and Charlie Sharp at Wayne State University Press, as they have contributed heartfelt work during this very difficult, unusual, and electrifying change. —Drake Stutesman
