Hannah Durkin

Remembering Slavery on Screen: Paul Robeson in The Song of Freedom (1936)

This article examines cinematic remembrances of the Atlantic slave trade through the lens of Paul Robeson-starring British film The Song of Freedom (1936). An exceptional visualization of the horrors of the Middle Passage in transatlantic interwar cinema, the production nevertheless recapitulates an abolitionist visual paradigm characterized by lacunae and distortion. Yet, it also serves as an exploration of African independence driven by Robesons self-reflexive performance, demand for script approval and stardom. Robesons measure of authorial influence over the film represents a unique instance in British cinema in which a black performer was able to reframe dehumanizing representations of historical black experiences into a hopeful vision of an independent black future.

Zora Neale Hurston's visual and textual portrait of Middle Passage survivor Oluale Kossola/Cudjo Lewis

ABSTRACT This article examines African American folklorist Zora Neale Hurston’s book-length biography and film of the last known Middle Passage survivor, Oluale Kossola/Cudjo Lewis, to explore her cinematic and literary engagement with slavery and to recover Lewis as a co-author of both documents. Hurston’s literary project, ‘Barracoon’, in which she situated herself merely as Kossola’s amanuensis and foregrounded the ‘inexpressible violence’ and ‘horror’ of his experience, represented an unusually frank twentieth-century record of enslavement and post-slavery life. Such work pre-dated and lacked the patronising tone of much of the WPA Slave Narrative Collection (1936–1938), whose investigators were mainly white and whose subjects’ accounts were often reconstructed loosely from field notes. Moreover, Hurston’s footage of Lewis circumvented literary mediation altogether to provide an Atlantic slavery survivor with an unprecedented visual outlet for self-expression.

Cinematic “Pas de Deux”: The Dialogue between Maya Deren's Experimental Filmmaking and Talley Beatty's Black Ballet Dancer in A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945)

A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945) is a collaborative enterprise between avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren and African American ballet dancer Talley Beatty. Study is significant in experimental film history – it was one of three films by Deren that shaped the emergence of the postwar avant-garde cinema movement in the US. The film represents a pioneering cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary dialogue between Beattys ballet dancing and Derens experimental cinematic technique. The film explores complex emotional experiences through a cinematic re-creation of Derens understanding of ritual (which she borrowed from Katherine Dunhams Haitian experiences after spending many years documenting vodou) while allowing a leading black male dancer to display his artistry on-screen. I show that cultures and artistic forms widely dismissed as incompatible are rendered equivocal. Study adopts a stylized and rhythmic technique borrowed from dance in its attempt to establish cinema as “art,” and I foreground Beattys contribution to the film, arguing that his technically complex movements situate him as joint author of its artistic vision. The essay also explores tensions between the artistic intentions of Deren, who sought to deprivilege the individual performer in favour of the filmic “ritual,” and Beatty, who sought to display his individual skills as a technically accomplished dancer.