Abstract

 In this talk I explore how writer and visual artist Tisa Bryant’s The Curator exemplifies what I theorize as phantom cinema: a Black feminist mode of cinematic thought and cultural production that intervenes in film history not by recovering lost films but by speculatively inhabiting the conditions of their absence. Reading The Curator alongside Bryant’s broader literary and cinematic practice, I show how phantom cinemas operate as both historiographic method and aesthetic strategy—one that renders gaps in Black women’s film history newly perceptible while resisting the archival logics that demand verification, completeness, or visual proof. 

Bio

Samantha N. Sheppard is Associate Professor in the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University.  Prof. Sheppard's research interests include Black cultural production and production cultures, African American representation in cinema, television studies, sports films, feminist media studies, embodiment studies, and critical race theory. She writes extensively on issues of race, gender, and representation in film, television, and digital media. She teaches courses on global cinema, sports films, contemporary television, African American film history, popular culture, women filmmakers, and blackness on screen.

Prof Sheppard's lecture comes from one of two new book projects,  A Black W/hole: Phantom Cinemas and the Reimagining of Black Women’s Media Histories,  a project for which she was named a 2021 Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.  Her other current book is The Basketball Film: A Cultural and Transmedia History, under contract with Rutgers University Press.