@article{cason_2019, title={Beyond Category: Black Souls On-Screen}, volume={11}, ISSN={["1947-4237"]}, DOI={10.2979/blackcamera.11.1.04}, abstractNote={Abstract:How does one recognize blackness or soul expressed on-screen? Even when addressing the fascination with black skin, common in pre-classical cinema, we inevitably find ourselves face to face with "black presence," that ineffable, limited conception of blackness. This essay shows how black images in silent and early sound films exposit soul, pleasure, and excess. With Duke Ellington's first film role in Dudley Murphy's film, Black and Tan (1929), as a test case, I shift attention from black skin to black soul. Confronting the limits of traditional iconic image analysis—the seemingly clear criteria for recognizing blackness—I show how the aesthetics of photogénie, one of cinema's earliest theories, shares the overdetermined tendencies of the folk concept "soul" as problematized during the Harlem Renaissance and early black film era. Soul seems to direct black image analysis to an impasse: aesthetics leading in one direction (haunted by the specter of photogénie), while politics veer off in the other. Yet this needn't be an either/or dilemma. The essay shows that a renewed emphasis on aesthetic cinematic effects, not reducible to meaning in the sense of conventional interpretation, complements established political approaches to African American Cinema.}, number={1}, journal={BLACK CAMERA}, author={Cason, Franklin, Jr.}, year={2019}, pages={62–88} }
 @article{cason_jaji_2014, title={Symbiopsychotaxiplasticity}, volume={28}, ISSN={0950-2386 1466-4348}, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2014.888926}, DOI={10.1080/09502386.2014.888926}, abstractNote={This paper puts African-American film-maker William Greaves's two films Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1971) and Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2½ (2003) in conversation with each other to consider the possibilities for self-reflexive improvization at two distinct moments, influenced by historical context, medium and generation. Using film footage shot in 1968 (with additional video footage shot with a new crew and returning cast members in Take 2½), Greaves allows the social ecology of a film in production to generate its own order to the consternation of his crew. In Take 2½, many aspects of Greaves' instigative process are no longer as mysterious, nor is the politics of production in a post-9/11 world open in the ways it seemed in 1968. Just as the screen-test dialogues in both Takes explore (hetereonormative) reproduction, we consider how the films taken together play with ‘improvisation’ – can it be revisited, reproduced, represented and under what conditions? Our discussion's theoretical archive draws on the influences Greaves names in his production notes for the original film.}, number={4}, journal={Cultural Studies}, publisher={Informa UK Limited}, author={Cason, Franklin, Jr. and Jaji, Tsitsi}, year={2014}, month={Mar}, pages={574–593} }