TV to tell us almost nothing’, Guardian (15 March 2013 ), www.theguardian.com/tvandradioblog/2013/mar/15/our-queen . 2 For example, Ann Gray and Erin Bell, History on Television (Routledge: London, 2013 ), pp. 100–29. 3 See Joe Moran, Armchair Nation (Profile
The origins of ethnographic film sponsorship by British television Prior to its sponsorship by television, ethnographic film-making in Britain was almost non-existent. Since the pioneering work of Haddon and Spencer at the turn of the twentieth century, the number of British anthropologists who had taken moving image cameras with them to the field had been very few, and even those that had done so, had generally used them not to make documentaries as such, but rather for documentation purposes. Facilities and support for
television in the ‘golden era’ and explore the ways in which the authorial praxes that their makers developed for making films in that environment could enrich their own repertoires. Notes 1 In 1989, the Royal Anthropological Institute carried out a survey among first-year students of anthropology, receiving 256 responses. Of these, 25 per cent said that they had first come across anthropology through ‘seeing films or TV
Philadelphia Story . In this response, I will make a qualified case for the opposite view and suggest that films and even television shows can be texts that encourage reflexivity about moral paradox, political obligation and community. I will do this through a reading of a more recent work in the genre of “the tragedy of remarriage”: the television show The Americans . The
This article provides an introduction to this special section of James Baldwin Review 7 devoted to Baldwin and film. Jackson considers Baldwin’s distinct approach to film criticism by pairing him with James Agee, another writer who wrote fiction as well as nonfiction in several genres, and who produced a large body of film criticism, especially during the 1940s. While Agee, a white southerner born almost a generation before Baldwin, might seem an unlikely figure to place alongside Baldwin, the two shared a great deal in terms of temperament and vision, and their film writings reveal a great deal of consensus in their diagnoses of American pathologies. Another important context for Baldwin’s complex relationship to film is television, which became a dominant media form during the 1950s and exerted a great influence upon both the mainstream reception of the civil rights movement and Baldwin’s reception as a public intellectual from the early 1960s to the end of his life. Finally, the introduction briefly discusses the articles that constitute this special section.
The author reviews Barry Jenkins’s 2018 film adaptation of Baldwin’s novel, If Beale Street Could Talk, finding that Jenkins’s lush, painterly, and dreamlike visual style successfully translates Baldwin’s cadenced prose into cinematic language. But in interpreting the novel as the “perfect fusion” of the anger of Baldwin’s essays and the sensuality of his fiction, Jenkins overlooks the novel’s most significant aspect, its gender politics. Baldwin began working on If Beale Street Could Talk shortly after being interviewed by Black Arts poet Nikki Giovanni for the PBS television show, Soul!. Giovanni’s rejection of Baldwin’s claims that for black men to overcome the injuries of white supremacy they needed to fulfill the breadwinner role prompted him to rethink his understanding of African American manhood and deeply influenced his representation of the novel’s black male characters. The novel aims to disarticulate black masculinity from patriarchy. Jenkins’s misunderstanding of this aspect of the novel surfaces in his treatment of the character of Frank, who in the novel serves as an example of the destructiveness of patriarchal masculinity, and in his rewriting of the novel’s ending.
but has a wider mission that has grown over time. SK: Let us talk about the specific visual mediality of the museum. How can museums compete with television documentaries or the newest history short film put out on YouTube? RS: I think one of the strongpoints of a museum is that it allows a direct, aesthetic encounter with the visual material object itself. That’s something that digital media, photography, or television cannot make up for. When I see on display an original letter written and sent by Henry Dunant, then I know that this concrete material letter
situation and audience, determining how much to publicise ongoing and past cases and always keeping in mind the interests of current and potential hostages. Notes 1 Radio Télévision Belge Francophone (2014) ; Médecins sans frontiéres (2013) . 2 In the words of Jeff Green, directeur of Griffin
on television that a possible COVID-19 treatment should first be tested on Africans, where ‘there are no masks, no treatment or intensive care … we know that they are highly exposed and don’t protect themselves.’ The football player Didier Drogba summarised the widespread public criticism in a tweet: ‘Africa isn’t a testing lab’ ( BBC, 2020 ). This debate began in the DRC when Professor Muyembe – the head of INRB and the
, 2016 ). By 1979, the agency had partnered with educational television to produce a thirteen-part series on development, and with the NFB to sponsor six films for the general public; it also published comics for children and a teachers’ guide, as well as multimedia kits (CIDA, Development Directions , May 1978: 26, 33; Marchand, 1990 ). In 1987, it hosted its own International Development Photo Library (IDPL) which became ‘the go-to resource for international development photography’ for NGOs and agencies devoted to the production and dissemination of development