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Film, cinema and visual culture online resources A-Z
Baha Archives: https://www.baharchives.org/
An independent digital archive of Bahamian life, centred on highlighting collective memories
and cultural traditions.
Black Film Archive: https://blackfilmarchive.com/
Based in New York, the Black Film Archive is a living register of Black films, showcasing films
from 1898 to 1989 that are currently available for streaming.
Caribbean Film Database: https://cfdb.online/who-we-are/
The Caribbean Film Database features numerous films from The Bahamas, including titles by
contemporary independent filmmakers Maria Govan, Kareem Mortimer, Clarence Rolle, and
Matthew McCoy. The Database centres on feature films made in and about the Caribbean.
It was conceived by the trinidad+tobago film festival in association with the Fundación
Global Democracia y Dessarollo, the Association for the Development of Art Cinema and
Practice in Guadeloupe, the Foundation of New Latin American Cinema in Cuba and
the Festival Régional et International du Cinéma de Guadeloupe.
Cinema Histories: https://www.cinemahistories.org/
An online hub that federates historical cinema data from multiple projects. It offers the
opportunity to search and compare datasets on film exhibition and programming in order to
investigate cinema cultures across the world. By bringing together data from various
projects, the site creates a critical mass of fair data for the research community to benefit
from, allowing new research in cinema studies and cultural history. Each project
participating in Cinema Histories has a dedicated microsite, housing more information on
the types of data included and facilities to search the project’s data.
Colonial Film Database: http://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/
The Colonial Film Database: Moving Images of the British Empire is a historical resource
holding detailed information on 6000 films showing images of life in the former British
colonies, including The Bahamas. The database project was led by Professors Colin McCabe
(University of Pittsburgh) and Lee Grieveson (University College London); partners included
the British Film Institute National Archive, the Imperial War Museum and the (subsequently
closed) British Empire and Commonwealth Museum.
Digital Library of the Caribbean: https://www.dloc.com/
dLOC is a cooperative of Partners within the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean that provides
users with access to Caribbean cultural, historical and research materials held in archives,
libraries, and private collections. Types of collections include but are not limited to:
newspapers, archives of Caribbean leaders and governments, official documents,
documentation and numeric data for ecosystems, scientific scholarship, historic and
contemporary maps, oral and popular histories, travel accounts, literature and poetry,
musical expressions, and artifacts.
Media History Digital Library: https://mediahistoryproject.org/
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A free online resource, featuring millions of pages of books and magazines from the
histories of film, broadcasting, and recorded sound. Led by the Wisconsin Center for Film
and Theater Research, the MHDL digitizes, organizes, and distributes historic books and
magazines about film, broadcasting, and recorded sound.
Travel Film Archive: https://www.travelfilmarchive.com/results.php?
Spanning seven decades of analogue filmmaking from 1900 to 1970, the archive contains
some 30 titles shot in the Bahamas since the early 1930s. Holdings include travelogues,
educational and industrial films, many of them shot in colour.
Vintage Bahamas: https://vintagebahamas.com/
A small Bahamian-based company focused on preserving the pictorial history of the Bahama
Islands. Photographs and postcards are available to purchase for private use via the website.
Women Film Pioneers Project: https://wfpp.columbia.edu/
A digital publication and resource that advances research on the hundreds of women who
worked behind the scenes during the silent film era. Always expanding, WFPP publishes
original scholarship on women who worked all around the world as directors, producers,
screenwriters, editors, and more.
Bibliography
Key titles on Bahamian and Caribbean cinema, alongside core references from posts on
Bahamian film and cinema across this website. The bibliography is a work in progress and
will be added to at intervals.
Caribbean Cinema
Jane Bryce, ‘Close-Up: Caribbean Cinema as Cross-Border Dialogue: Introduction,’ Black
Camera vol. 11, no. 1 (Fall, 2019), pp. 123-129
Mbye Cham, Ex-Isles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema. Africa World Press, 1992
Jean Antoine-Dunne, ‘Sound and Vision in the Caribbean Imaginary,’ Journal of West Indian
Literature vol. 18, no. 2 (April2010), pp.95-114
Dunja Fehimovic, 'Connected in ‘Another Way’. Repetition, difference and identity in
Caribbean Cinema', in Paul Cooke, Stephanie Dennison, Alex Marlow-Mann and Rob Stone
eds., The Routledge Companion to World Cinema. Routledge, 2017, pp. 111-121.
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Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation,’ Framework, no 36 (1989), pp
68-81
Doris Hambuch, ed., ‘Caribbean Cinema Now’. Special issue of Imaginations. Journal of
Cross-Cultural Image Studies, vol.6, no.2, 2015
Rosamond S. King, Island Bodies Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination
Project Muse EBooks, 2014.
Michael Martin, Cinemas of the Black Diaspora: Diversity, Dependence, and Oppositionality.
Wayne State University Press, 1995.
Christopher Meir, ‘Building Film Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean: Film Education at the
University of the West Indies,’ in Mette Hjort, ed., The Education of the Filmmaker in Africa,
the Middle East, and the Americas. Palgrave, 2013, pp.203-219.
H. Adlai Murdoch, Creolizing the Metropole. Migrant Caribbean Identities in Literature and
Film, Indiana University Press, 2012.
Bruce Paddington and Keith Q. Warner, ‘The Emergence of Caribbean Feature Films.’ Black
Camera: An International Film Journal (The New Series) vol. 1, no. 1 (2009), pp. 91-108
Clare Andrade-Watkins, Blackframes. Critical Perspectives on Black Independent Cinema.
MIT Press, 1988
Cinema History (Bahamas/West Indies)
James Burns, ‘Comparing Historical Cinema Cultures: The Case of the British West Indies,
1900-1945,’ TMG Journal for Media History vol.23, nos.1-2, 2020, pp.1-27.
James Burns, Cinema and Society in the British Empire, 1895-1940. Palgrave Macmillan,
2013.
Erica Carter, ‘White Bodies in Motion. Mapping Cinema and Whiteness in the Postwar
Bahamas,’ in Erica Carter, Bettina Malcomess and Eileen Rositzka, Mapping the Sensible.
Distribution, Inscription, Cinematic Thinking. De Gruyter, 2022
Howard Sidney Pactor, Communication in an Island Setting: A History of the Mass Media of
the Bahama Islands, 1784-1956. University of Tennessee Press, 1985.
Krista A. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the
Caribbean Picturesque. Duke University Press, 2006.
Monique Toppin, Cinema and Cultural Memory in The Bahamas in the 1950s. University of
Stirling PhD.Diss, 2019
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Monique Toppin, ‘Memories of Cinemagoing in Little Nassau.’ Participations. Journal of
Audience and Reception Studies vol. 19, no.1 (2022), pp.150-166:
https://www.participations.org/19-01-10-toppin.pdf
Underwater Film
Q.David Bowers, Terrors of the Deep, Thirty Leagues under the Sea, in Thanhouser Company
Film Preservation, Inc., Thanhouser Films: An Encyclopedia and History. Version 2.1: Volume
II: Filmography.
Jon Crylen, ‘Aquariums, Diving Equipment, and the Undersea Films of John Ernest
Williamson,’ in James Leo Cahill & Luca Caminati, eds., Cinema of Exploration. Essays on an
Adventurous Film Practice. London & New York: Routledge, 2020, Ch.9.
Jonathan Christopher Crylen, The cinematic aquarium: a history of undersea film, PhD
(Doctor of Philosophy) thesis, University of Iowa, 2015. Available at
https://iro.uiowa.edu/esploro/
Ann Elias, Coral Empire. Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity. Durham
and London: Duke University Press, 2019
Nicole Starosielski, ‘Beyond fluidity: A cultural history of cinema under water’, in Stephen
Rust, Salma Monani & Sean Cubitt, eds., Ecocinema Theory and Practice. Taylor and
Francis, pp. 149-168.
Brain Taves, ‘A Pioneer Beneath the Sea. Library restores rare film footage,’ Library of
Congress Information Bulletin, September 16. 1996:
https://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9615/sea.html
Brian Taves, “With Williamson Beneath the Sea”, Journal of Film Preservation vol.25, no. 52
(April 1996): 54–61:
https://web.archive.org/web/20020622113609/http:/www.cinema.ucla.edu/fiaf/journal/ht
ml52/withwill.html
Krista A. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics. Tourism, Photography and Framing the
Caribbean Picturesque. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2006. Chapter 3, ‘Through
the Looking Glass. Visualizing the Sea as Icon of the Bahamas,’ pp.156 – 203.
J.E.Williamson, Twenty Years under the Sea. Boston & New York: Hale, Cushman & Flint,
1936.
Stars
Etta Cameron
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Helma Kaldewey, A People’s Music: Jazz in East Germany, 1945–1990.
Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Awa Konaté, Anti-Blackness and Nordic Exceptionalism. The Funambulist Podcast, Episode
140, July 30, 2020: https://thefunambulist.net/podcast/the-funambulist-podcast/awa-
konate-anti-blackness-and-nordic-exceptionalism
Bo Østlund, Etta Cameron. Hun gav smarten vinger (She gave the pain wings). People’s
Press, 2007.
Michael Rauhut, ‘Etta Cameron – Die Stimme des anderen Amerika’. Radio feature, MDR
Kultur, first broadcast December 26, 2017.
Michael Rauhut, One Sound, Two Worlds: the Blues in a Divided Germany, 1945 – 1990.
Berghahn Books, 2019.
Ethelene Whitmire, ‘Travelling while Black across the Atlantic Ocean,’ Longreads, January
2019: https://longreads.com/2019/01/22/traveling-while-black-across-the-atlantic-ocean/
Sidney Poitier
Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks. An Interpretive History of Blacks
in American Films, Updated and Expanded 5th Edition, Bloomsbury, 2016
Christian Campbell, ‘"Island Boy". An Interview with Sir Sidney Poitier,’ Callaloo vol.30, no 2,
pp. 483 - 486.
Stanley Crouch, ‘Comes a Hero. The Fundamental Principles of Sidney Poitier,’ Film
Comment Vol. 47, no. 2 (March 2011), pp. 34-37.
C.W. Eneas, C. W.,’ Editorial,’ The Citizen's Torch, February 1951, pp. 1-4.
Arthur Foulkes, ‘Defining Censorship and Decency,’ The New Black Magazine. n.d.
http://www.thenewblackmagazine.com/view.aspx?index=95
Aram Goudsouzian, Sidney Poitier: Man, Actor, Icon. University of North Carolina Press, 2004
Lester J. Keys & André H. Ruszkowski, The Cinema of Sidney Poitier. Barnes, 1980.
Ellen C. Scot, Cinema Civil Rights: Regulation, Repression, and Race in the Classical
Hollywood Era. Rutgers University Press, 2015
Ian G. Strachan, Poitier Revisited Reconsidering a Black Icon in the Obama Age. Bloomsbury
Academic, 2015
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Sharon Willis, The Poitier Effect: Racial Melodrama and Fantasies of Reconciliation.
University of Minnesota Press, 2015
Bert Williams
Louis Chude-Sokei, ‘The Last 'Darky': Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the
African Diaspora. Duke University Press, 2006.
Ashley Clarke, ‘Back to Black: the 101-year making of the oldest black American-starring
feature,’ Sight and Sound, 26 May 2015: https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-
sound-magazine/features/back-black-101-year-making-oldest-black-american-starring-
feature
Camille F.Forbes, ‘Dancing with "Racial Feet": Bert Williams and the Performance of
Blackness.’ Theatre Journal, vol. 56, No. 4, ‘Theorizing the Performer’ (December 2004), pp.
603-625.
Camille F. Forbes, Introducing Bert Williams: Burnt Cork, Broadway, and the story of
America’s First Black Star. Ingram Publisher Services, 2007.
David Krasner, Resistance, Parody and Double Consciousness in African-American Theatre,
1895-1910. St.Martin’s Press, 1997.
Elizabeth Muther, ‘Bert Williams and the Shadow Art of Racial Mimicry.’ Revue française
d’études américaines, No. 165, 2020, pp. 40-55.
Caryl Phillips, Dancing in the Dark. Secker & Warburg, 2005.
Michelle Ann Stephens, ‘The Comic Side of Gender Trouble and Bert Williams’ Signature
Act.’ Feminist Review vol. 90, no.1, 2008, pp.128-146.
Bert Williams, ‘The Comic Side of Trouble.’ The American Magazine 85.1
(Jan-June, 1918), pp. 33-34 & 58-60. Reprinted in Island Scene Magazine, November –
December 2010, pp.37 – 44 & 52:
https://issuu.com/benchmarkpublishingco./docs/island_scene_web_mag
Film Festivals
Christine Acham, ‘Trinidad+Tobago film festival: Nurturing a Developing Film Industry,’ Film
Quarterly, vol.69, no.3 (2016), pp.79–83.
Carole Horst, ‘Fall Festival Preview: Caribbean Fests Share Resources to Promote
Biz,’ Variety, Aug 20, 2013, p.58
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Dina Iordanova, ed., The Film Festival Reader. St Andrews UP, 2013.
Emiel Martens, ‘Towards a New Caribbean Cinema? an interview with Jamaican filmmaker
Storm Saulter.” Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies, vol. 6, no. 2 (February
2, 2015), pp. 18–25.
Dan Mervish and Emilie Upczak, ‘A Guide to Caribbean Film Festivals,’ Filmmaker, March 4,
2019
Marijke de Valck, ed., Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia. Amsterdam
University Press, 2007.
Marijke de Valck and Antoine Damiens, eds., Rethinking Film Festivals in the Pandemic Era and
After, Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.
