ABSTRACT: Early Hollywood film production companies systematized visual knowledge by adapting library science methods to create research departments that supported their workers. From 1913 to 1928, studio researchers, who were predominantly women, collaborated with public librarians and one another to collect, organize, and index illustrated materials to serve as guideline materials for filmmakers. These research libraries functioned as crucial but overlooked reference desks serving the film community, helping craft departments find visual sources to create believable details and settings for movies, thereby transforming cinema from pure entertainment into a conveyor of useful information for global audiences.
ABSTRACT: This essay investigates Imruh Bakari’s film The Mark of the Hand, a ground-breaking arts documentary celebrating the painter Aubrey Williams. Created in 1986 by the pioneering Black independent production company Kuumba, the documentary was the first monographic film about a Black artist in the UK context. Ranging from London to Guyana, the film provides vivid insight into Williams’s transnational career, examining how Guyana’s landscape, Indigenous peoples, and independence struggles shaped his abstraction, alongside influences like Shostakovich. Using vision and sound, Bakari activates the ‘landscape musicality’ of Williams’s paintings, cinematically illuminating their complexities against a backdrop of Caribbean modernity and decolonization.
ABSTRACT: The article explores how the Irish struggle for independence was used by the Third Reich as a narrative template for the feature films Der Fuchs von Glenarvon (The fox of Glenarvon, 1940) and Mein Leben für Irland (My life for Ireland, 1941). Intended for German and continental European audiences in the early years of war, the films show how Third Reich cinema mobilized British colonial abuses of power for their own propaganda purposes. Through analysis of a range of original archival sources, this article considers how Ireland was used as a topical example of British oppression by Goebbels’ propaganda ministry and also as an index for the reorganization of European art and culture under the Nazi regime.
ABSTRACT: The article examines three Holocaust films produced by German-Jewish independent film producer Artur Brauner and directed by Polish filmmakers: Aleksander Ford’s The Martyr ( Sie sind frei, Dr. Korczak , 1974), Jerzy Hoffman’s According to the Decrees of Providence ( Wedle wyroków Twoich , 1984), and Janusz Kijowski’s Warsaw—Year 5703 ( Der Daunenträger , 1992). The authorial agency of these films is shared by the directors and the producer, which is manifested in specific formal strategies and thematic consistencies. Furthermore, the article argues that these films convey “multidirectional memory” as defined by Michael Rothberg.
ABSTRACT: One of the most successful cinematographers of Hollywood cinema, James Wong Howe never realized his lifelong ambition of making feature films about China and Chinese America. This essay shows that the failures of the two-time Academy Award winner’s attempts at independently producing a Chinese picture were counterintuitively overdetermined by his success in the evolving Hollywood studio system. Excavating these unfinished projects reveals the collaboration between James Wong Howe and his wife, writer Sanora Babb, a hidden genealogy of independent Asian American cinema, and the palimpsestic history of transnational Chinese cinema.
