representation

The Virtual Life of Film by D.N. Rodowick

by

The Wachowski’s The Matrix

Rodowick, D. N. The Virtual Life of Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007.

Rodowick’s philosophical musings on the curious circumstances at the beginning of the 21st century which saw the physical nature of the cinematographic medium changing from real film to digital capture, processing, and projection. Full of asides that feel just as valuable as his main ideas, which follow Stanley Cavell’s notions of the automatisms of media as their defining features, the book is dense and a little difficult to navigate. Luckily, in his preface he provides a succinct overview of his argument and its progress.

In his first section, he argues that even though the physical film is changing, the concepts and ways of understanding visual media propagated by film throughout the 20th century still retain a tight grasp on the current technology such that we can still use many of the ways of understanding images derived from film theory and our narrative practices still largely spring from classical Hollywood narrative structures.

In his second section, he spends a lot of pages working through understanding what the film medium provided artists and audiences in its automatism, or those elements that were central to the operation of the medium itself. Largely agreeing with and expanding upon Cavell’s ideas, Rodowick suggests that film (and photography before it), are isomorphic in their capturing of reality. That is, a photograph captures the shape and time of the physical world as it existed in the moment of capture. A film does the same thing but over the course of time itself, an additional automatism Rodowick names as “succession.” Rodowick argues that the automatisms of automatic isomorphic capture has been largely understood via its spatial representative powers, the idea that the photograph contains evidence of a place, while Rodowick argues that the temporal element is more important, it contains evidence of a place from the past. The photograph (and film) therefore brings evidence of the past to us in the present and creates an uneasy mixture of the two, a mixture that never fully coalesces into one thing but remains separate via the screen. Up there is the past, here in the present. Because of these automatisms, the physical nature of the cinematographic medium is crucial to understanding the way film effects us as audience members. When it disappears, Rodowick argues, something of great value is lost.

Part three is focused on that loss, and its digital replacement. Rodowick essentially argues that because digital capture is non-isomorphic because the light inputs are separated from the numerical outputs (that can be infinitely manipulated), it loses that sense of pastness that film once had and brought to the culture. In its place, Rodowick argues, the digital image creates a kind of ever-presentness (and interactive past) through its automatisms of constantly-refreshing, pixel-based “montage.” Basically, if every pixel is the smallest discrete unit of a digital image, Rodowick sees the digital image as already composed of the juxtaposition of those pixels in a way that creates a montage effect even in the still image. The fact that motion (or the simulation of it) is created by changing each of those pixels individually extremely quickly rather than the succession of images means that there is no longer such a thing as a shot, at least not without some modification. Rodowick proposes this drastic reconsideration of what the digital image is and how it works to reassert the value of film theory and terms to understand what’s happening, at least right now.

He astutely argues that the conventions of film and film theory still hold sway over the digital, even if the digital is fundamentally different from the filmic. Since artists, technology developers and engineers, and audiences still crave the sense of “perceptual realism” defined by the century of filmic history which says that what we see is a real record of the past as it was, modern digital images must still follow the rules of that perceptual realism, which asserts the physical reality of the image through the single-point perspective and laws of physics. It’s no wonder that digital images recreate these elements to claim a grounding in reality when their automatisms do not assert it themselves.

It’s a fascinating book, full of dialogue with film theorists like Metz and Bazin and Barthes and, of course, Cavell. On the digital side, Lev Manovich and Bolter and Grusin get their due as well. Film philosophy isn’t strictly my thing, and it usually takes me much longer to get through, but I also find it intensely fascinating. I noticed I was watching a movie after reading Rodowick’s breakdown of the digital image and I felt like I could see the pixels shifting, fundamentally changing the way I looked at digital images. That’s powerful stuff.

Double Negative by Racquel J. Gates

by

John Landis’ (or Eddie Murphy’s) Coming to America

Gates, Racquel J. 2018. Double Negative: The Black Image & Popular Culture. Durham: Duke University Press.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

In Double Negative, Racquel J. Gates argues that the categorizing of “positive” and “negative” examples of representation in media (particularly that of Black characters, but seemingly broadly applicable to other groups and sub-groups) problematically creates a tendency in academic and popular discourses that align representation to the politics of respectability. Looking to subvert that tendency, Gates takes as her objects of study those negative representations (and their containing media) in order to reveal that, despite their reputation, they can be places where Black creators (actors, writers, directors, and even reality show stars) can insert the kinds of topics and ideas that aren’t allowed by a politics of respectability or understood by a hegemonic white Hollywood and audience. The idea is that these so called “negative” representations act exactly as photographic negatives do, revealing what isn’t there in the “positive” image by inverting it, and even bolstering that positive image by way of giving a means of expression to real feelings, ideas, and attitudes that aren’t acceptable when the goal is to become “respectable.” It is in this spirit that Gates advocates for deploying strategic essentialism to retain these positive and negative labels but to investigate what we really mean when we say that something contains or is a “negative” portrayal of a certain kind of person, and what work that image is really doing in the world, rather than just relegating it to the gutter and ignoring it except as a useful bludgeon against the media as a whole.

Gates lays all of this out in a very detailed opening chapter, which begins by running through several examples of the responses by Black celebrities (Chris Rock and Katt Williams) to the resurgent popularity of Flavor Flav at the same time as Barack Obama was trying to become president. It’s a perfect example to begin with, laying out the stakes of the project at the highest level and showing how these kinds of discourses vary depending on who the person speaking is and to whom they are speaking. She then explains herself and her conception of exactly what the words “positive” and “negative” mean in her reckoning, before at the end detailing several different kinds of negative representations, each of which she focuses on for a chapter in the remainder of the book using various exemplars as the way of working through her ideas.

Formal negativity: when a work contains formal elements, from aesthetics to narrative, that are a reversal of what is accepted in positive works. Her example chapter focuses on Coming to America, which, sandwiched between Hollywood Shuffle and Do the Right Thing as far as release dates go, contains elements of both the positive, hegemonic portrayal of Black characters within the film’s main plot, the romance, while it uses formal qualities like echoes of Eddie Murphy’s sketch comedy background in the side plots to express ideas, feelings, and jokes that were ignored by the mainstream critical reception to the film but spoke to Black audiences directly and clearly. Interestingly, she also spends some time looking at the production history of the film to suggest that it challenges traditional auteurist understandings of who is responsible for the film by showing that John Landis, the film’s director, was basically responsible for the romantic A-plot while Murphy basically had control over everything else in the film. In this way, Gates argues that we shouldn’t rely upon an easy Black writer/director = Black film equation, noting that a variety of factors might influence who should get credit for the making of a film.

Relational or comparitive negativity: when the positive representation is so dominant that its reverse is hardly visible at all. For this chapter, Gates examines a collection of what she calls “sellout films,” which were released at the same time as the respectable Boyz N the Hood and Menace II Society but were focused on Black characters who were trying to survive in white-dominated workplaces and who had to fight to retain a sense of their Black identity in the process. Gates ably argues that these sellout films were just as important as the more critically respected black male struggle films because they were able to speak to a group of people who were experiencing the same anxieties about selling out to whiteness in order to get ahead. Example by example, she shows how these films were able to both express that anxiety and show that there was a way towards both being successful and retaining a Black identity.

Circumstantial negativity: in these cases, outside discourses, for example, those surrounding Halle Berry over the first ~10 years of her career impart a kind of transference of negativity onto a text that doesn’t otherwise have anything negative in it. Gates uses this opportunity to study Berry’s evolving star image, how it was damaged by her role as a “tragic mulatto” in Queen, even though the star herself tried to counter the narrative that foregrounded her biracial identity by declaring firmly and frequently that he thought of herself as a Black woman. This confusion in the press lead, Gates argues, to Berry’s swift downfall following her Oscar win for Monsters Ball. Berry became unable to control her own star image, which led to her inability to get good roles in good films, Gates claims.

Strategic negativity: when a show or other kind of media is already dismissed categorically as “trash,” like reality TV, people who make the show, including the onscreen stars, can actively use that label as a way of bypassing the respectability politics that dominates prestige tv for their own ends. Here Gates explores several shows, like The Real Housewives of Atlanta and Love & Hip Hop for the way that their stars assert their agency within the show’s production under the guise it must maintain of capturing “reality.” Throughout this chapter, Gates demonstrates how these shows, which were broadly labeled “ratchet” by cultural activist Michaela Angela Davis. Gates argues that, though limited by production realities and so on, the trashiness of these shows allows both the stars and their audiences places to express those ideas about their identity that wouldn’t fit in to a sitcom or traditional drama. Gates also views the ratchet reality star as one who has a degree more control over her image than one who acts in a more accepted manner. The agency, the ability to talk about things that are taboo elsewhere, and the ensuing increase in wealth and fame are the key points in this chapter.

Gates ends by looking at Empire, a show which pretends at negativity but still subtly pushes the tainted respectability politics of positive portrayals of Black characters. She notes that in its carefully manipulated depiction of its queer characters and the show’s acceptance by various critical bodies, including awards shows, Empire reveals that for all of its trashy aesthetics, it still engages in a large amount of respectability politics. Maybe one day we’ll be able to fully celebrate the so-called negative representation, Gates claims, but that day has not yet come.

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

Gates provides an important push back against what seems to be the dominant mode of talking about representation on film. The job, she argues, focuses on determining which representations are good and bad and for what reasons, then throwing the bad ones out to celebrate the good ones. Gates’ corrective is to argue for the value of studying the negative portrayal, and not just for how it was made and came to be, but for what it can actually do. She counters the claim seemingly inherent to academics that push for positive portrayals because they will make the society at large more accepting and understanding all on their own. This isn’t how it works, Gates writes, and closer attention must be paid to what representation actually does and what it doesn’t do.

The cultural context, the belief in a post-racial America following the election of Barack Obama and, at the time of the book’s release, the backlash to his presidency in the form of Donald Trump, is also crucial to understanding Gates’ project. Obama, she says, was an exemplar of the so-called “talented tenth” of Black Americans whose very existence and prominence would lift up the entire group of Black Americans, that is if the negative exemplars didn’t pull them back down. This kind of rhetoric is problematic in all kinds of ways, and Gates carefully unpacks the harm it does and, in opposition, the good that “negative” portrayals can bring to Black audiences.

All of this isn’t to say that Gates is claiming that we should only celebrate the negative representations of Black people in media, but that the positive should always be examined with, not against, the negative. It’s a call for a fuller scholarship, and that’s a valuable contribution as far as I’m concerned.

via GIPHY Love & Hip Hop Atlanta‘s Joseline Hernandez

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Gates moves between and through various kinds of discourses, looking at film history, auteurism, genre studies, star studies, and production environments in the process of uncovering and examining her various kinds of negative representations. As she does so, she dives into varying levels of depth with her examples. Coming to America merits nearly 40 pages of investigation, Berry’s star image gets a good amount of depth as well, while both genre chapters, the sellout and ratchet reality show examples, get less space for each example, sacrificing depth for breadth. Both modes work for Gates’ points, though, and after the extensive theoretical work of the opening chapter, she can largely focus on the specifics of each case study in as much depth as she needs to.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

By connecting the already accepted terminology of positive and negative representations to the photographic concept of a negative that creates a positive, Gates strongly connects her ideological goals to the existing discourse on the topic. It makes for an easy and fruitful transition into digging into her way of thinking on the subject at hand. She also taps into a kind of underdog narrative that Americans are primed to buy into, which works well for her.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

I want my future discussions of representation, which will form a fundamental part of my work even if I come at it somewhat obliquely, to be as nuanced as possible. Gates provides a lot of great ways of thinking about what we might otherwise write off, and a way towards discussing those texts that might not be as good on that front as we want them to be. What else might those texts be doing that we’d miss by easily dismissing them? I’ll find out!

I’ll also take anybody’s arguments against auteurism anytime they want to provide them. It’s a valuable tool, but obviously not the only one and not always applicable.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

representation, positive, negative, ratchet, star studies, star image, auteur, genre, film history, production, agency, respectability politics, Black, hegemony, strategic essentialism

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

Designations of positive versus negative with regard to representations of blackness and black people can be frustrating. Taken as a straightforward descriptors, they are limiting categories that do not allow us to access the full, complex range of images that circulate in the media, nor do they allow for the possibility of nuanced engagement with these images by the people that consume them. Conventional uses of “positive” and “negative” support politics of respectability and close off possibilities for multi-layered conceptions and performances of identity. At their worst, to invoke these categories uncritically reinforces racist ideologies that use discourses of black exceptionalism to further marginalize black behaviors and people that deviate from white, middle-class, heterosexual norms. (12)

The problem is that, try as we might, we cannot seem to shake the assumption that representations do the work by themselves. In other words, there is an unshakable belief that images do work outside of the histories and contexts in which they circulate. (13)

In the end, I am suggesting that it is not necessary to eradicate these categories as much as to deconstruct them: understand how they develop, where they are applied, how, and when. And further, by using these terms strategically, as critical race scholars have already done with strategic essentialism, we gain much in the way of developing a lens of analysis and language with which to understand and talk about what these texts are actually doing. Therefore, taking up Herman Gray’s call to analytically shift discussions of identity and media “from signification and representation to resonance and experience,” I propose that we actually embrace the designation of “negative” that has long been assigned to certain types of images. To activate the dictionary definition of “negative” as “expressing or containing negation or denial” reveals the ways that disreputable images such as those found in reality television, for instance, disrupt hegemonic norms regarding race, class, gender, and sexuality. […] I embrace the term “negative” because of its historical use in defining certain types of black texts and because it implies a direct, tangential relationship to “positive” representations. If the current post-racial, color-blind moment truly is a moment of color-muteness[, following Linda Williams], then perhaps the negative image functions as the repository for those identities, experiences, and feelings that have been discarded by respectable media. (15-6)

This book offers two, interrelated definitions of a “negative” text. The first type of negative text is a qualitative one that is defined by its distance from normative, white hegemonic standards of quality. […] The second definition of a negative text is a formal category that functions as an inversion of another media text. In the second sense of the term, the film or television show in question may not be thought of as stereotypical or demeaning, but has simply been erased from critical discourse because its salient formal and ideological components are not recognized as bearing significant meaning. […] The concept of negativity derives first from the idea of a photo negative. In fact, my approach in this book is based heavily on the metaphor of a photographic negative, in which a positive image is considered normal (or, in the case of media, normative) and a negative is the complete inversion of that image. I argue that these negative images engage in explorations of identity and a manner that is inversely proportionate to contemplations of identity and respectable media texts. Just as a negative is necessary for the production of a photograph, this book argues that the negative image is a necessary component for the production of the “positive” images that circulate throughout popular culture and scholarship. (17)

As a framework, negativity helps to elucidate how tastes, politics, and modes of performance develop and change, and it reveals the ways that time forms our perceptions. (18)

I argue that reclaiming these overlooked images from black popular culture and offering an alternative history of their meanings and possibilities also provides a strong intervention and present-day debates about proper black behavior and the role of popular culture in the current sociopolitical moment. Moreover, as the veritable gutter of black media, negative representations serve as the repository for all of the feelings that positive images cast aside. (21)

Negative spaces can exist as havens for topics deemed outside of the boundaries of respectable texts, particularly when those topics have to do with matters of identity. […] Similarly, reality television functions as the metaphorical gutter for the rejects of respectable black media representation. Interestingly enough, these individuals, groups, and topics that I refer to here as rejects happen to intersect and overlap with the same individuals, groups, and topics that are typically marginalized by mainstream and black uplift narratives in society. […] Many of these negative texts open up possibilities for non-normative feelings, experiences, and allegiances that, I argue, are simply not possible in the image-policed spaces of positive texts. (25-6)

For, if this book aims to highlight the way that whiteness functions invisibly and media, it must also point out that whiteness occupies a similar default position in scholarship on the media. In other words, we should productively trouble these existing discussions of taste and culture by first acknowledging that whether we use adjectives such as high, low, mass, or trash in front of the word “culture,” all of these descriptors are still referring to white culture, in that the producers, texts, and fan communities that constitute the foundations of this scholarship do not typically include people of color. (27)

While I acknowledge that negative representations sometimes fall prey to the same limiting constructions of race as their positive counterparts, I believe that the power of the negative image rests in its ability to shift the dynamics and popular culture. We see negative texts actively influencing mainstream popular culture and pulling it into the gutter in certain ways […] And, unlike the Bakhtinian carnivalesque, these are not shifts that simply bubble up temporarily only to be ultimately reabsorbed by dominant culture and robbed of their subversiveness. Nor are these subcultures that exist as a sort of parallel, underground universe to that of mainstream culture. Rather, the reverberations of negative texts function as tremors that irrevocably weaken the foundation on which their positive counterparts are constructed. Those are, in fact, performances that matter in spite of the fact that they have traditionally been understood as inconsequential as far as I articulating ideas about black identity. To this end, I examine the ways that they privileged disreputable behavior, characters, genres, and media as the means to negotiate the dynamics of culture, race, and power. (29-30)

Formal negativity involves a text that becomes a negative because one or more of its formal qualities – aesthetics, mise-en-scène, narrative, and so on – can function as an inversion of those typical positive texts. Although this type of negative text may not have a direct corollary in the positive realm, it gestures toward practices and genres either in mainstream media representation or in black media. (32)

In relational or comparative negativity, the positive counterpart directly overshadows the negative text. (32)

In circumstantial negativity, a media text is categorized due to the issues and debates surrounding it, rather than because of a direct relation to its positive counterpart. (33)

[Strategic negativity refers to] media texts that make full use of their location in the metaphorical “gutter” of media that is negativity, taking advantage of their distance from the politics of respectability to explore topics that their positive counterparts do not typically address. […] I argue that, as a genre, reality television escapes critical attention because of its negative status and because the genre itself masks the real labor of the cast and crew as “reality.” (34)

Further, [Eddie] Murphy’s immense and unmistakable influence on the film [Coming to America] runs contrary to auteurist theories that would place John Landis, the director, as the main creative force behind the film. Not simply a challenge to director-centric theories in film studies, this reimagining of Murphy as the visionary behind the film rather than Landis likewise complicates our understanding of how we define a film as “black.” Is it possible for a white director to make a “black” film, where “black” is understood not just by the race of the cast but also by its cast, themes, politics, and popularity with black audiences? Coming to America would suggest so and, therefore, troubles the commonly held assumption that Hollywood-produced films are only capable of promoting films ideologically aligned with whiteness. (38)

For it is one thing to acknowledge the structural and industrial pressures that lock black women into certain mediated tropes, but it is another thing altogether to grapple with the notion that these women actively choose to represent them themselves in these ways. Moreover, when the show creator is herself an African American woman, and the bulk of viewers are also African American women, we must contend with matters of choice and agency on every level, from production to performance to reception. Let me be clear here: I am not suggesting that we ignore the ways that larger social, historical, and industrial factors constrain the kinds of options that these women have available to them. I am, however, proposing that we look at the various ways in which the women associated with these shows negotiate these limited choices within the system of reality television, and how they use the very behaviors labeled as “ratchet” to achieve a degree of autonomy regarding the representational and economic aspects of their lives. (144)

Therefore, while some may view reality television’s conventions as tools to mask its regressive politics, I am interested in exploring how reality television actually lends itself to contemplations of racial (and gender) identity that are specific to its genre conventions. In other words, I argue that, in contrast to critically attended-to genres such as the sitcom or the hour-long drama, reality television involves deeper considerations of race, gender, class, and sexuality precisely because it is perceived as frivolous, fun, and trashy. It is reality television’s distance from respectability, its location in the gutter of television programming and critical regard, which allows it to delve into topics and issues that its respectable counterparts shy away from. (147)

Concepts in Film Theory by Dudley Andrew

by

Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr

Andrew, Dudley. 1984. Concepts in Film Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

In his follow up to Major Film Theories, which looked at the world of pre-1960s film theory through investigations, theorist by theorist, into the big ideas of film theory of the era, Dudley Andrew inverts his methods to instead follow the broader range of film theories roughly between the mid 60s and early 80s. Here he’ll ping-pong back and forth between theorists as he works through a progression of central ideas, categorized by different focuses. Since many theorists are interested in, say, both “identification” and “figuration,” you’re likely to see the same names pop up throughout the text (Mitry, Metz, Barthes, Lacan, all the hits). Writing in the mid 80s, Andrew is enamored with the semiotic and figural theories that dominated the discourse of high theory at the time.

And make no mistake, this is the highest of high film theory. It isn’t an introductory text, either, as Andrew doesn’t do enough to introduce the ideas, terms, or their relationships he’s writing about here so the novice (or not-so-novice) reader can fully follow along. Indeed, as focused as he is on the brainiest of the brainy, he largely ignores the rumblings of other kinds of theory that have since come into fashion (thankfully!). These include feminist film theory (I noticed 3 total women cited in this text, and one of those was a throwaway reference to Susan Sontag), most of cultural theory (which gets passing nods here and there), and any mention of anybody who isn’t heavily invested in the overly jargon-laden high theoretical discussions Andrew loves diving into here. I tend to lean towards that kind of writing as being not just obscure and obtuse but also just not super useful to me as the authors (and Andrew is no exception here) tend to be more invested in showing off their theoretical muscles rather than doing any real heavy lifting.

Anyways, here’s the breakdown of the chapters, which I’m going to keep to basically just a table of contents because, though the ideas feed into each other, each idea is difficult enough to understand in Andrew’s attempt at summary and even more difficult to understand in conjunction with each other. Suffice to say that Andrew’s project is to build up to the area of theory that he feels is most useful in the final chapter by way of showing how each chapter generally leads to the next, which takes what was in the previous chapter(s) and adds another layer on top.

The State of Film Theory

Perception

Representation

Signification

Narrative Structure

Adaptation

Valuation (of Genres and Auteurs)

Identification

Figuration

Interpretation

He concludes by writing that interpretation of figures in film theory is the most valuable current (again, published in ’84) way of dealing with film texts. He’s big into hermeneutics, which is great for him.

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

Andrew doesn’t do a whole ton of debating himself, he mostly lets summaries of film theories duke it out among themselves. As I wrote about above, this book is definitely a product of its time, that time being an era when film theory with a capital F and T was at a premium, and when the text was seemingly less important (given the absence of films almost throughout this book). As a tract which is apparently written to both give an overview of the, well, concepts in film theory as well as advocate for the author’s choice in the vague hierarchy he sets up here, it fails almost entirely. I could pick out nuggets of useful/decipherable writing here and there, but for the large part I was floundering around for a handhold to grasp onto. It seems that Andrew is trying to be at the center of the field, pulling everything together into one relatively small book. But instead he mostly feels like he’s positioning himself above the field, subtly and not-so-subtly suggesting what is important and what is a waste of time. Fine if you agree with him, kind of terrible if you don’t.

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Like Feminist Film Studies by Janet McCabe, the idea here is to create an overview of the field via short summaries of the major theoretical areas of interest at the time of the book’s writing. There is some sense of a development over time, though this happens under the top level of the book’s discourse, popping its head up here and there rather than coming at its forefront as it does in McCabe’s text. Importantly, it also lacks any real engagement with films themselves, instead Andrew suffices with an overly generalized conception of the cinema and the film without attending to any meaningful examples. The few times he did use an example to illustrate a point were also, not coincidentally, the few times where I was able to follow along for paragraphs at a time.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

Andrew’s most obvious and important bit of rhetoric is the structure of the text, which presents the concepts of film theory as a kind of twirling vine wrapping itself around a pole. As the book progresses, the vine grows and new ideas are added to the old all the while reaching towards the zenith that is hermeneutic interpretation. Great. We did it.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

I don’t engage with this text. It is a text written to engage only those who are already true believers in the gospel of high theory, and I am decidedly not that.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

perception, representation, signification, narrative structure, adaptation, valuation, genres, auteurs, identification, figuration, interpretation, sign, signifier, signified, figure, hermeneutics,perception, representation, signification, narrative structure, adaptation, valuation, genres, auteurs, identification, figuration, interpretation, sign, signifier, signified, figure, hermeneutics,

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

For this is the state of film theory as it has come to be, an accumulation of concepts, or, rather, of ideas and attitudes clustered around concepts. Film theory is, in short, a verbal representation of the film complex. (3)

In sum, film theory today consists primarily in thinking through, elaborating, and critiquing the key metaphors by which we seek to understand (and control) the cinema complex. This can be done only in public, discursive events, in classrooms, journals, and conferences. It can be done only collectively. (12)

The questions named by the terms perception, representation, signification, narration, adaptation, valuation, identification, figuration, and interpretation have always been with film theory. Yet these new names are not merely the product of pretension and fad. They are a response to the social reconstruction of the terrain of the humanities. Film theory has not only profited from that reconstruction, but has actively contributed to it by recognizing itself as a social practice and picturing and repicturing our understanding of film, of society, and of art. This is the basis of its growth and its pride. (17-8)

In other words, realism in the cinema is driven by a desire to make the audience ignore the process of signification and to grasp directly the film’s plot or intrigue; for most film viewers, the plot is precisely and fully what a film represents. In this way realism stabilizes the temporal dimension of film, turning the flow of pictures into a single large picture whose process of coming into being has been hidden behind the effect of its plot. (48)

This, I would say, has been the mark of the 1970s, to contaminate a limpid structuralism with the living processes of interpretation and to thwart the egalitarian ideal that made all texts equal as versions of the same structure (the same myth). instead, post structuralism has upheld the priority of texts that question themselves and thereby seem to rewrite themselves for every epoch. (95)

In sum, the category of figuration is paramount because it involves structure and process simultaneously, and because by its very nature it insists on the primacy of interpretation. In this, it helps write the topsy-turvy world of film studies by restoring to the text themselves an integrity worthy of discussion, and by fostering an interplay of theory and interpretation rather than a dominance of the former. (159)

Interpretation invokes the context for meaning and establishes whatever is pertinent about such meaning. History is one of its most common guises as it brings the “otherness” of texts into the life of individuals and cultures. (172)

White by Richard Dyer

by

Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner

Dyer, Richard. 2017. White. 20th Anniversary Edition. New York City: Routledge.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

Richard Dyer’s purpose in White is to examine what had previously gone relatively unexamined in the realm of cultural criticism and identity-based investigations into the meanings and constructions of race, specifically whiteness. He conceives of whiteness as a cultural void, a non-identity which allows other aspects of identity (sexuality, gender, religion, (dis)ability, etc.) to come to the fore. Whiteness is seen as the norm, but a norm which has no real form such that anybody who falls outside of it is automatically and unrecoverably marked by their inability to meet its basic criteria. Whites are the basic humans, at least in the realm of visual representation that Dyer focuses on (and which he argues forms much of the basis for how we think about the world). That is, to be white is to be afforded a basic humanity while every other skin color must argue, fight, and try to retain their humanity via strategies that often depend upon them changing themselves to seem more white (either in skin tone or action).

Dyer doesn’t leave it at that, though, as he works in theories of embodiment, which allow him to show how whiteness is connected to religion (via Christianity’s concept of a body/spirit connection that transfers to whiteness), science (via biological and genealogical conceptions of race that have been used to create hierarchies of bodies), and enterprise/imperialism (via ideas about what kinds of bodies can perform the actions of empire because they are perceived as being more able to work and persevere). Dyer also notably describes whiteness as instable, because it must contain paradoxes of “a need to always be everything and nothing, literally overwhelmingly present and yet apparently absent, both alive and dead,” an instability which allows it to have great strength as an enticement (you too can be white if you conform to these ideals) and a promise of flexibility (if you’re on the lower levels of whiteness you can move up just by making these changes) (39).

Dyer next turns to three senses of the word “white” to examine how white as a hue, skin color, and symbol form three distinct meanings and ways of thinking about whiteness but between which slippages occur such that white, which is conceived of as the lack of color (the hue meaning) melds with the symbolic meaning of purity and transcendence to imbue white skin, and particularly the unblemished white woman’s skin, as the ultimate symbol of purity and goodness (and which must be used to reproduce, which brings heterosexuality into the picture as well). In the next section he looks at technologies of visual representation, from print (white blankness marked with black spots that create meaning) to painting, to photochemical technologies like film. Here whiteness is linked to translucency, especially from the magic lantern on, and that translucency is linked with the un/realness of the visual image. Whiteness is then both very real but also nothing much at all, as Dyer previously posited. This section contains the part of this book that I’ve read before, which looks at the way that film and lighting techniques for the cinema were developed to represent the white face first and foremost, with any deviance from that posing a “problem.”

In the next two chapters (which I admittedly skimmed), Dyer puts the ideas he developed in the first three chapters of his book to work in analyzing first the set of films which feature heavily muscled white men (usually in foreign locations as agents (stated or implied) of empire), then a tv show which looks at the concepts of whiteness and empire through a more woman-oriented lens. In both cases, Dyer goes deep into analysis to show the multifaceted, sometimes surprising ways that whiteness operates in these kinds of visual representations.

Finally, Dyer concludes with a look at whiteness and death, two concepts which are linked in the figures of androids (Blade Runner and Alien), vampires, and zombies. He notes that horror and sci-fi are the places where white filmmakers can reckon with the problems and fears associated with whiteness, primarily the connection between paleness and death. He wraps up the book by positing the concepts of “ordinary” and “extreme” whiteness, the latter of which only exists in these horror spaces and a few real-world instances (he points to the midcentury fascists who operated on explicit white supremacy) and to which “ordinary” whiteness can point and say, see, I’m not that, that’s extreme, I’m just regular me. Extreme whiteness, then, becomes the enabling symbol for the insidious normalcy implied by whiteness as a whole.

Ridley Scott’s Alien

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

Dyer doesn’t seem to be calling out any particular scholars but rather a way of thinking that inform(s)(ed) much of the writings on race and whiteness before this. He notes in his introduction that whiteness is not often discussed precisely because it is perceived as the norm, and so his attention to it is in part a call for others to pay attention to what might have been ignored in their own writing. Dyer pulls from a large pool of scholarly discussions, including sociology, history,  and film, art, and literary theory to make intriguing and wide-ranging points throughout his book. Dyer’s conclusions ask us to be more aware of the role that culture has to play in our conceptions of ourselves and the world around us, including things like the way that our culture influences our ideas about technology (as in the example of what became normal and what was therefore conceived of as a deviation from that norm in lighting for photography). As (sections of) this book is/are taught in college courses, it must remain highly influential, and therefore central to how we continue to think about whiteness and race 20+ years after its initial publication.

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Dyer explicitly draws attention to the representative strategies developed by humans to picture (literally) themselves for much of their history. Dyer pays special attention to film as the dominant media of the 20th century, but he doesn’t hesitate to look elsewhere as well. To drive his analysis, Dyer largely operates by making a large claim before breaking it down into several subclaims, each of which he backs up by analyzing at least one textual example or common daily life example (looking at, for example, clichés and idioms that use white to mean good and clean). As I said above, the first three chapters explain how whiteness works, while the next two look at specific instances of that work happening, before a coda that investigates the concept of death as linked to whiteness.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

In his introduction, Dyer explains his personal history with the concept of whiteness to explain why he feels he has a somewhat special attunement towards observing and understanding how it works. He links it to his homosexuality, a category which sets him off as an outsider (albeit not as much of an outsider as a person with a different skin color) to whiteness’ ideal. Throughout the text, Dyer takes great pains to explain his terminology and walk readers through his thought process as he decided upon which words to use in which situation. This deliberativeness endows Dyer’s work with an extra sense of completeness, a belief develops that Dyer has put in the work to really consider every aspect of his work here.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

Dyer’s concept of whiteness as the default will be crucial to my work, as many of the movies I want to study are continuations of franchises that fall into this idea of whiteness. I didn’t really see any big problems with Dyer’s work here. It’s a well-developed and intriguing book.

Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

whiteness, white, non-white, representation, visual culture, cultural studies, normal, norms, paradox, transparent, translucent, instability, power, symbol, technology

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

Moreover, the position of speaking as a white person is one that white people now almost never acknowledge and this is part of the condition and power of whiteness: white people claim and achieve authority for what they say not by admitting, indeed not realizing, that for much of the time they speak only for whiteness. The impulse behind this book is to come to see that position of white authority in order to help undermine it. (xxxiv)

The point of seeing the racing of whites is to dislodge them/us from the position of power, with all the iniquities, oppression, privileges and sufferings in its train, dislodging them/us by undercutting the authority with which they/we speak and act in and on the world. (2)

White people have power and believe that they think, feel and act like and for all people; white people, unable to see their particularity, cannot take account of other people’s; white people create the dominant images of the world and don’t quite see that they thus construct the world in their own image; white people set standards of humanity by which they are bound to succeed and others bound to fail. (9)

To be able to think at all of bodies containing different spiritual qualities, or of some having such qualities and others not having them (a trope of white racism), of bodies containing that which controls them and then extends beyond them to the control of others and the environment (a trope of enterprise and imperialism), all this requires the first conceptual leap represented by the bodies of Christ and Mary, the sacraments, observances and theologies that rework them and the distinctive European culture founded upon all of this. (18)

White identity is founded on compelling paradoxes: a vividly corporeal cosmology that most values transcendence of the body; a notion of being at once a sort of race and the human race, an individual and a universal subject; a commitment to heterosexuality that, for whiteness to be affirmed, entails men fighting against sexual desires and women having none; a stress on the display of spirit while maintaining a position of invisibility; in short, a need always to be everything and nothing, literally overwhelmingly present and yet apparently absent, both alive and dead. Paradoxes are fascinating, endlessly drawing us back to them, either in awe at their unfathomability or else out of a wish to fathom them. Paradoxes provide the instabilities that generate stories, millions of engrossing attempts to find resolution. The dynamism of white instability, especially in its claims to universality, is also what entices those outside to seek to cross its borders and those inside to aspire ever upwards within it. Thus it is that the paradoxes and instabilities of whiteness also constitute its flexibility and productivity, in short, its representational power. (39-40)

Thus, white as a hue is, like all others, not as determinate as we tend to think, and we are not always sure that it is a hue anyways. This way of conceptualizing white as a hue, apparently the most objective aspect of color, provides a habit of perception that informs how we think and feel about its other aspects. The slippage between white as a color and white as colorlessness forms part of a system of thought and affect whereby white people are both particular and nothing in particular, are both something and non-existent. (47)

In sum, white as a skin color is just as unstable, unbounded a category as white as a hue, and therein lies its strength. It enables whiteness to be presented as an apparently attainable, flexible, varied category, while setting up an always movable criterion of inclusion, the ascribed whiteness of your skin. (57)

Any simple mapping of hue, skin and symbol onto one another is clearly not accurate. White people are far from being always represented as good, for instance. Yet I am now persuaded that the slippage between the three is more pervasive than I thought at first, to the extent that it does probably underlie all representation of white people. For a white person who is bad is failing to be ‘white’, whereas a black person who is good is a surprise, and one who is bad merely fulfills expectations. (63)

The extreme image of whiteness acts as a distraction. An image of what whites are like is set up, but can also be held at a distance. Extreme whiteness is, precisely, extreme. If in certain periods of derangement – the empires at their height, the Fascist eras – white people have seen themselves in these images, they can take comfort from the fact that for most of the time they haven’t. Whites can thus believe that they are nothing in particular, because the white particularities on offer are so obviously not them. Extreme whiteness thus leaves a residue, a way of being that is not marked as white, in which white people can see themselves. This residue is non-particularity, the space of ordinariness. The combination of extreme whiteness with plain, unwhite whiteness means that white people can both lay claim to the spirit that aspires to the heights of humanity and yet supposedly speak and act disinterestedly as humanities most average and unremarkable representatives. (223)

Framing Blackness by Ed Guerrero

by

Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing

Guerrero, Ed. 1993. Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film. Culture and the Moving Image. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

Ed Guerrero makes it his priority in his book to trace the history of representation of black characters on film, and, here and there, television. He does so by contextualizing the struggle for non-harmful representation on screen within the struggle for equality that black people were fighting for throughout the 20th century. He also contextualizes the struggle in the book within the overdetermining system of film production, particularly in Hollywood but eventually expanding into the independent boom of the late 80s and early 90s (when the book was written and published). He notes that Hollywood tended to ignore the demands of black folx until it becomes desperate for their audiences to bolster flagging profits at the box office. There is then, in the 70s with Blaxploitation and then in the indie boom mentioned above, a brief period of pandering to the black audience (which also attracts a white audience looking for something new) until the black films become less novel and Hollywood turns to the next fad. Writing as Guerrero does in the middle of the second boom of black filmmaking makes the last chapter of this book, focused on the output of that generation of filmmakers (Julie Dash, Spike Lee, and John Singleton getting the most play here), gives the book an extra sense of urgency. In the end of the last chapter, Guerrero looks ahead with cautious optimism, hoping for his moment to be a portent of a real change in the way Hollywood treats its black members (in front of and behind the camera), but also knowing that it is very possible, based on Hollywood’s profit motive, that it will soon turn away from the people who are currently making it money.

The history Guerrero traces from Birth of a Nation to Malcolm X is a familiar one to film scholars. It is similar to how Hollywood treats marginalized groups of most varieties. First, there’s actively harmful depictions wrapped up in narratives that perpetuate white supremacy, then as it faces backlash, Hollywood cedes as little ground as it possibly can to appease what Guerrero calls a conservative mass audience. Guerrero does point out how Hollywood’s history with blackness is different from other marginalized communities given the way chattel slavery has shaped the nation and has never really been dealt with. He notes that race, and specifically the tension between the U.S.’s black and white population, has become a central part of Hollywood’s storytelling, first in the open during the first half of the 20th century, then subsumed into allegory and metaphor in genre movies like Blade Runner, then back in the open again in fits and spurts as Hollywood cycles through right-ward and left-ward turns which influence the depiction of black characters on screen in either recuperative or (mildly) liberatory directions. He notes, for example, in the post-Blaxploitation moment, influenced by Reaganism and the turn towards blockbuster production, how Hollywood would allow one black character in a film, who would be surrounded by white characters and striving to protect or restore order to a white world. He notes in this period the revival of the black-white buddy film and how this type of film rarely gave much attention to the inner lives or even outer lives of the black characters. He notes, also, that the black star would often have to be comedic in nature (Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, and Whoopi Goldberg, for example) to make them palatable for a white audience who was ok with seeing an updated minstrel performance but not serious black characters in their giant blockbuster films.

In the final chapter of the book, Guerrero traces the two(!) modes of production available to black filmmakers in the early 90s. There’s the independent route where filmmakers might have to wrangle their own financing and are therefore freer to experiment with style and substance (Dash’s Daughters of the Dust being the primary example here, but with early Lee joints also in the mix), and then there’s the mainstream route where filmmakers follow the (white) Hollywood style playbook and must cater to mass audiences in ways that might compromise the filmmaker’s vision or desire to put non-harmful representation on screen, though with the considerable tradeoff of people actually seeing your film in great numbers (later Lee, from Do the Right Thing on, and John Singleton are the exemplars here, demonstrating once again Hollywood’s hesitancy to give women (and particularly women of color) the reins on big budget films). He is sure to point out that these are not the only two possibilities offered to black filmmakers, that they are more ends of a spectrum upon which there are many points and shades of gray to accommodate the realities of filmmaking in such an expansive moment. Though you can also sense Guerrero’s fondness for the former, more underground category of films/filmmakers, he saves his last analysis for Lee’s Malcolm X, a big budget epic that Guerrero sees as a triumph of both glossy filmmaking and a strong black voice behind (and in front of) the camera.

Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

Guerrero specifically calls out Althusser, from whom he takes the concept of overdetermination with its potential for subversion and liberation hidden amongst a knot of constraining influences, and Freud, from whom he takes Robin Wood’s variation on repression that leads to horror monsters and the concept of societal recuperation after periods of liberation. He also specifically mentions Houston Baker’s concepts of the “deformation of mastery” and the “mastery of form” to explain the indie vs. mainstream black filmmaking impulses in the final chapter.

I’m most interested, however, in the cultural moment Guerrero writes from. It’s clear that the book is driven by the enthusiasm he feels from the boom from within which he is writing, but that also leaves open grounds for further exploration and a more retrospective understanding that Guerrero can’t have. Noticeable in his final two chapters on the 80s and 90s respectively is a sense of excitement for films that have not stood the test of time, though he does hit on most of the movies that have lasted in the cultural lexicon. I don’t view this as a problem, just something to be aware of. I’m going to look up Guerrero’s later work to see if he ever revisits this era or writes about the same ideas in the following 30 years of films.

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Guerrero takes a historical materialist perspective, which analyzes the history of black representation on screen through the cultural and economic influences while choosing certain exemplar films to analyze in depth. This allows him to chart trends as well as perform some good, old-fashioned film analysis. This is the kind of writing I prefer to read because it doesn’t overlook the specificity of the individual film while providing a broader understanding of what’s going on and how the film in question fits in with what else was happening at the time.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

Guerrero definitely takes on a more argumentative angle than some other similar books I’ve read. He is not precious about sacred cows, and is happy to rip into, say, Do the Right Thing for its acquiescence to the dominant ideology both in style (which I don’t really agree with, but understand) and theme/message (which is persuasive to say the least) as he notes that the film discards the actual revolutionary politics of collective struggle for the white dominant norm of individual responsibility. I often latch on to the kind of aggressive re-writing of history that this project attempts to do because it makes for more compelling reading and usually opens a new perspective for me. This book is an excellent example of that clear-eyed revisionism.

Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

Guerrero’s book has been influential, and I’ve read his name in the bibliographies of other books/essays I’ve read throughout my graduate career. That makes this book slightly less revolutionary that it might have felt upon publication. However, I still really enjoyed reading it, and I think it will intersect with my own areas of interest in some really interesting ways. The process he writes about of Hollywood’s slow acquiescence to cultural pressures is one that will be at the core of my study of the legacyquel, and he even writes about Rocky and Star Wars at some length, so I can definitely cite him for an understanding of what the original films of those series were engaged in culturally. I’m excited to explore what I can make of his ideas.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

“Overdetermined,” representation, cultural studies, recuperation, liberation, independent, mainstream, Blaxploitation, repression

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

Unfortunately, relations of power, greed, and racism being more stubborn than the visionary hopes of genius, the idealistic projections of these two cinema giants [Sergei Eisenstein and Charles Chaplin] were never to fully develop in proportion to the vast commercial and cultural domination of the film industry. Instead of efforts to construct a truly universal system of communication that builds egalitarian understandings between diverse groups and cultures, what we have seen arise in commercial cinema is a monopolistic, capital-intensive film business. And in spite of some narrative innovation, dissenting artistic exploration, and political countercurrents, the industry has been formula bound and conservative in its vision in order to deliver commodified visual entertainments to the broadest possible consumer market. Instead of inspiring aesthetic, cultural, and political masterworks aimed at liberating the human potential, Hollywood, for the most part, has tended to focus narrowly it’s increasingly shallow product on escapism, sentiment, glamor, romance, and, more recently, spectacular orgies of violence and sexplotation, all in the service of feeding the dulled cravings and fantasies of the dominant social order. What all this means, specifically, for African Americans (and extrapolated to a wide range of other minorities) is that in almost every instance, the representation of black people on the commercial screen has amounted to one grand, multifaceted illusion. For blacks have been subordinated, marginalized, positioned, and devalued in every possible manner to glorify and relentlessly hold in place the white dominated symbolic order and racial hierarchy of American society. (2)

Fortunately, though, for African Americans and this discussion of the way Hollywood has gone about framing blackness, the ideology of racial domination and difference can never be permanently fixed in place as a complete or static “thing.” Instead, it is a dynamic, shifting “relation” defined and conditioned by social struggle, the demands of the historical moment, and the material imperative of an industry that privileges economics and short-term profit before all other human, aesthetic, or philosophic possibilities or concerns. Because the cinematic representation of blackness is the site of perpetual contestation, struggle, and consequently change, Hollywood’s unceasing efforts to frame blackness are constantly challenged by the cultural and political self-definitions of African Americans, who as a people have been determined since the inception of commercial cinema to militate against this limiting system of representation. So this book is concerned with African Americans not as mere victims of Hollywood’s conjurings. That is, I examine the dialectical push of Hollywood’s cultural construction and domination of the black image and the pull of an insistent black social consciousness and political activism that has recently generated waves of black focused and independent films into commercial cinemas trajectory. (2-3)

What would be desirable in future cinematic inscriptions of slavery would be the production of black and other independent features that artfully historicize and politicize the issue in a way that not only reveals slavery’s past but at the same time, by allegory, illusion, or otherwise, communicates its relevance to all Americans today. (35)

Given the ample evidence of its varied expressions, we must expect the sedimented thematics of slavery to continue to surface in commercial cinema. Whether slavery is constructed as a unified subtext in the form of allegory or sustained parody or is displaced into other historical periods, fantastical worlds, and different genres, or whether it surfaces in fleeting images or moments, the dynamic of slavery’s repression and return is too much a part of popular cinema and its codes and images to disappear completely from American cinema. Insofar as popular cinema is an integral part of the commodity system itself, vulnerable to economic ups and downs and the twists of right and left cycles, we should also expect the intermittent recuperation of some of the cruder hegemonic manipulations and stereotypes depicted in the older films of the plantation genre. (56)

In the beginning of the 1980s and under the political impulse of Reaganism, blacks on the screen, in front of and behind the camera, found themselves confronted with the “recuperation” of many of the subordinations and inequalities they had struggled so hard to eradicate during the years of the civil rights movement and the emergence of black power consciousness that followed it. Thus the caricatures and stereotypes of Hollywood’s openly racist past proved to be resilient demons as they were subtly refashioned and resurfaced in a broad range of films. Concurrently, the 1980s saw a steady reduction of films with black narratives and leading roles as black actors found themselves increasingly pushed into the margins or background of the cinematic frame. (113-114)

Despite the shrinking of a broad political base of support, protests centered on specific films and issues continue to challenge Hollywood on its blatantly racist, sexist, and homophobic practices. And, if it did nothing else, the Blaxploitation bloom, so to speak, let the black audience out of the bag, by helping shape a politically self-conscious, critical black audience aware of its commercial power and hungry for new cinematic representations of a diverse range of African American subjects and issues on the big screen. Moreover, the “black independent cinema movement” inspired by the films of university-trained black filmmakers of the 1970s made a clear political, philosophical, and aesthetic foundation for an ongoing cinematic practice that challenges Hollywood’s hegemony over the black image. (137)

Following trends set in the 1980s, the commercial cinema system has continued to stock its productions with themes and formulas dealing with black issues and characters that are reassuring to the sensibilities and expectations of an uneasy white audience. These filmic images tend to mediate the dysfunctions and delusions of a society unable to deal honestly with its inequalities and racial conflicts, a society that operates in a profound state of racial denial on a daily basis. Thus images are polarized into celebrations of “Buppie” success and consumer-driven individualism that are consonant with a sense of black political quietism, tokenism, and accommodation, or condemnations of violent ghetto criminals, gangsters, and drug lords. (162)

If black independent filmmakers tend directly to resist or oppose cultural and political domination through their avant-garde languages, forms, socially urgent narratives, and insider depictions of the black world, then those black directors who work within the “mainstream” tend to be more concerned with learning and perfecting the conventions of dominant cinema language and addressing their projects to the colonized desires of the vast consumer audience encompassing blacks, other non-white minorities, and extend à la crossover marketing to whites. Most of the black directors who have had commercial successes argue that they work within the studio system in order to expand the definitions and possibilities of being black and to subvert the dominant norm by marketing a “black sensibility” to as broad an audience as possible. (180-181)

Only by weighing the many possible answers that arise in the riddle-like social transactions of “race” can black filmmakers create authentic humanized images and narratives of black life. Inevitably this decade will bring new spectacles and entertainments that celebrate black life and culture. The new insurgent cinema languages, films, and possibilities of the black movie boom are the primary means African Americans have to challenge the compromised, niggardly images designed to keep them in their media-constructed place. African Americans must continue to expand their influence over the production, distribution, and exhibition systems that make up the dominant cinema apparatus, while insisting that the emergent narratives of the black world’s be rendered from an honest, unco-oped, liberated perspective. (208)

New Queer Cinema by B. Ruby Rich

by

Derek Jarman’s Edward II

Rich, B. Ruby. 2013. New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut. Durham: Duke UP.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

This one is different from most of the other texts on my reading list as it isn’t strictly a work of theory. Rather, it is a hybrid which mixes theory with reportage and mainstream (relatively) criticism. B. Ruby Rich is the person who invented the term New Queer Cinema, which describes the corpus of films from the late 80s through the mid 90s that worked to bring queer voices to audiences through independent cinema. Rich traces this era’s predecessors in one chapter, then spends much of the back half of the book exploring some new avenues that opened up outside of the relatively localized (in time and space) phenomenon of NQC, including sections on “Queering Latin American Cinema” and the mainstreaming of gay and lesbian stories in films like Brokeback Mountain and Milk. Rich’s primary contention is that NQC was a vibrant and exciting movement/moment, even if it was always somewhat compromised by audience and (therefore) capitalist desires.

Rich is keen to point out, from the beginning and throughout, the privilege given to white gay male voices in this movement, with people like Gus Van Sant and Todd Haynes able to launch successful mainstream careers off of their NQC beginnings while creators of color and lesbians were less likely to break through in that way. She mostly also speaks of the filmic incarnation of the NQC, only deigning to write about television and the effects it had on the aims and financial viability of NQC via figures like Ellen Degeneres. She also mentions, briefly, what she calls a New Trans Cinema that she saw just beginning as she was compiling and adding to this text. It seems to me that the NQC and NTC are related if different movements/moments, and I’m curious as to what current and future scholarship will have to say on that front.

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

Rich doesn’t do much debating here, her aim is more historiographic/photographic, reporting her perspective on the films and filmmakers (and distribution venues like queer film festivals and museums) in the moment, and occasionally in retrospect, as in the opening and closing essays. The things Rich is most often in conversation with is the film itself, and sometimes the other popular press critics who perform the same kind of work that she does here. As such, there isn’t the rigorous thought that one expects from the theory-based monograph. What it lacks in that area is made up for in enthusiasm, advocacy (I added like 5 movies to my watchlist based on reading the sections I did alone), and a fascinating sense of a developing canon in process. Many of the essays contained herein feel of the moment and aware of that specificity, much to Rich’s benefit.

The essay on Brokeback Mountain is a bit different, as it takes as one of its main interests the reaction to the film’s success. Here Rich compiles and juxtaposes the way that mainstream media treated the film with “ambivalent snickering” while queer audiences tried to decide if the film was gay enough and audiences outside of the more accepting areas of the US sometimes were able to see themselves on screen for the first time given the film’s wide theatrical distribution (185). This essay was of the most interest to me, as it articulated the kind of event where an element of independent cinema (here queer representation as popularized by NQC) becomes coopted by mainstream filmmaking and creates a cultural moment out of it. I also appreciated Rich’s ability to both advocate for the film’s admirable qualities while giving its critics a proper hearing. Something to keep in mind.

Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Depends on the essay. As I said, some are historical in nature, reaching back for antecedents and forbearers, while others operate as film reviews written concurrently with major releases of the NQC (Mysterious Skin, The Watermelon Woman). Still others are opinion pieces on where the movement is currently and where it might go, while others stake claims out for similar movements in other locations.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

Rich lays out in the introduction a four-ingredient recipe for the historical context which gave birth to the NQC: “the arrival of AIDS, Reagan, camcorders, and cheap rent” to which she adds the mixing device of the newly-articulated conception of a queer community and label (xvi). She returns over and over again to these five elements, tracing their meaning and impact on the creators and audiences of the NQC as well as their development (for instance, the movement from 16mm film to video for cheapness and ease-of-use, which later changes again (for some) back to film as they are able to lure studios into financing their films).

She also argues that NQC enjoyed a brief time in the spotlight as the excitement of audiences to see either themselves or something new on screen led to a boom in money and attention, at least for the white men making these kinds of movies. But when that became less exciting and new, the money also quickly disappeared. However, she notes that the briefness of the NQC’s time in the sun did create lasting changes, with mainstream movies more likely to take on (versions of) the kind of stories and representation that drove the films of the NQC. Late 90s examples like Boys Don’t Cry and The Talented Mr. Ripley are decidedly not as vibrant or interested in advocacy as the films of the NQC proper are, but they also feel deeply indebted to those earlier films and filmmakers.

Finally, Rich argues in the closing lines of her conclusion that we are not living in a post-queer (or post-NQC) world, even though both concepts have gained mainstream acceptance, at least to a point. Instead, she puts the current (in 2013) moment as optimistically “pre-” something. Unsure exactly as to what that thing will be, Rich still powerfully posits not an end of queerness but a continuation in line with the kind of work she does throughout the text to show that NQC/queerness are not codified and ossified categories but fluid and expansive movements/moments.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

I’ve already mentioned most of this here, I think the text works best as exactly what it is, a report/retrospective look at a cinematic movement and moment in time and place. Its greatest strengths are as history and advocacy, not theory, though Rich does offer some useful explanations for what NQC is and why/how it works.

It intersects with one of my major interests, the mainstreaming of independent aesthetics and topics, while also interacting with feminist and race-based theories of film and filmmaking politics.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

New Queer Cinema, queer, mainstream, independent, representation, aesthetics, cultural studies

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

Emanating from a (mostly) new generation, the NQC embodied an evolution in thinking. It reinterpreted the link between the personal and the political envisioned by feminism, restaged the defiant activism pioneered at Stonewall, and recoded aesthetics to link the independent feature movement with the avant-garde and start afresh. (xv)

Newly invented camcorders enabled the easy production of electronic media at the personal level for the first time in history. A new generation emerging from art school seized the new tools to reimagine cinema with a video eye, revising the medium thrillingly from the bottom up. In the streets, the camcorder enabled the reversal of surveillance: police could now be recorded by the crowds. (xvii)

As urgency and rage began to collapse into despair and frustration for the ACT UP generation, the New Queer Cinema created a space of reflection, nourishment, and renewed engagement. The NQC quickly grew – embryonically at first, with its first steps in the years 1985-91, then bursting into full view in 1992-97 with formidable force. Its arrival was accompanied by the thrill of having enough queer videos and films to reach critical mass and tip over into visibility. An invention. A brand. A niche market. (xix)

That synergy of creative and critical impulses is one of the lessons of the NQC, or so I hope: the power that comes with inhabiting historical time, writing in sync with a moment of palpable importance, a synchrony that endows anyone lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time with powers of prescience that might otherwise fall by the wayside. (xx)

Of course, the new queer films and videos aren’t all the same and don’t share a single aesthetic vocabulary, strategy, or concern. Nonetheless they are united by a common style: call it “Homo Pomo.” In all of them, there are traces of appropriation, pastiche, and irony, as well as a reworking of history with social constructionism very much in mind. Definitively breaking with older humanist approaches and the films and tapes that accompanied identity politics, these works are irreverent, energetic, alternately minimalist, and excessive. Above all, they are full of pleasure. They’re here, they’re queer, get hip to them. (18)

Moments of origin always cast a long shadow. Today’s queer film and video still bear a birthright linked to the umbilical cord of post-Stonewall gestation. There’s a generation of elders that expect film and video to toe an eternally prescribed line of righteousness and legitimacy, while ever new and needy generations recycle the old and add their own requirements. These queer publics want films of validation and a culture of affirmation: work that can reinforce identity, visualize respectability, combat injustice, and bolster social status. They want a little something new, but not too new; sexy, sure, but with the emphasis on romance; stylish, but reliably realistic and not too demanding; nothing downbeat or too revelatory; and happy endings, of course. It’s an audience that wants, not difference or challenge, but rather a reflection up there on the screen of its collective best foot forward. Part of the audience also wants higher production values than the independence can deliver: a queer Hollywood, popcorn movies for a fun Saturday night out. (41)

If we limit ourselves to what we see in the mirror, we’re lost. If we’re scared of anything new or different, or made uneasy by films and videos that challenge our notions of the homonatural universe, we’ll be stuck with the status quo. If queer audiences stay away from controversial groundbreaking work, then the distributors and studios, those who watch the box office like a seismologist watches the Richter needle, will pull out completely. And the queer community will be abandoned, condemned to a static universe, comforted only by the sure knowledge that the earth, alas, won’t move under our feet. (45)

Such films could have signaled a moment of triumphant consolidation for the NQC, yet the opposite would seem to suggest itself: The NQC has become so successful that it has dispersed itself in any number of elsewheres. Lacking the concentrated creative presence and focused community responsiveness of its origin moment, NQC has become just another product line pitched at one particular type of discerning customer. At a time when casting has become essential to getting independent films financed and produced, it’s clear why actors have to be involved. On the other hand, it’s the runaway success of the NQC films that has turned them into such welcome vehicles for actors, reversing the trend that in the past saw actors turn away from films that in any way pushed sexual identity into a zone of ambiguity – a move, in other words, from career poison to career honeypot. (134)

I decided that it wasn’t trying to invent a new style exactly. It was trying to mobilize the most classic and accepted of styles in support of a grand love story, the scope of which we hadn’t seen before with a homosexual theme. In this reliance on familiar forms and mainstream affect, of course, Brokeback was virtually the opposite of the NQC that had come before it, and yet it was impossible to imagine Lee’s film ever being made, or even imagined, without that precedent. (190-1)

Brokeback Mountain was an event movie, one that sought with old-fashioned ambition to straddle marketplaces and move beyond self-identified audiences. That strategy is unlikely to appeal to all members of the LGBT community prepared to cast judgment on any such gesture. Universalism, for good reason, is suspect by now. But what takes its place, then? Limited releases? Mutually exclusive niches in our increasingly niche-fueled society? No-budget digital stories distributed by download? Brokeback Mountain was a mainstream release inspired by a widely read story by an established author, written by highly regarded screenwriters, directed by a name-brand heterosexual director. A post-identity politics epic. And a hit. Whether that’s a good or a bad development will have to be decided, as usual, in hindsight. (199)

Most important for this volume, new queer cinema changed: first it expanded into something, then nothing, and then everything – a relatively rapid transformation from the fringe to the center at the level of subjects and themes. Once taboo or titillating, queers were now the stuff of art films, crossover movies, and television series. Thank you, HBO. Thank you, Focus Features. Or, some might argue, No thanks. As decisively as the outlaw seemed to disappear from LGBT culture, so did the radical import of NQC disappear from the films that it had made possible. Yes, I’m happy to have more rights, but oh how I missed the outlawry of the old days. (262)

When I am asked yet again whether today’s films are postqueer, the kind of term usually intended to signal defeat or compromise or at best stasis, I opt for a different formulation altogether. Far from bereft, I remain optimistic, sure that we aren’t after the fact at all, not post-anything. We are surely and absolutely . . . pre-. (282-3)