cinemas of the other

racist sterotypes about blakc women in american film — mammy

  • “… black female spectators have had to develop looking relations within a cinematic context that constructs our presence as absence that denies the ‘body’ of the black female so as to perpetuate white supremacy and with it a phallocentric spectatorship where the woman to be look at and desired is white” — (Hooks 2014, 118)

    • racist because the black actress is the maid of the white family and doesn’t really have much of personality

    • the camera mainly focuses on scarlet by having her in the middle of the frame

  • “black woman have been mothers without children (mammies — who can ever forget the sickening spectacle of Hattie MacDaniels waiting on the simpering Vivien Leigh hand and foot and enquiring like a ninny)” — (Burchill quoted in Hooks 2014, 119)

racist sterotypes about black women in american film — sapphire

  • “she was even then backdrop foil. she was bitch-nag. she was there to soften images of black men, to make them seem vulnerable, easy going, funny and unthreatening to a white audience. she was there as a man in drag, a castrating bitch, as someone to be lied to, someone to be tricked, someone the white and black audience could hate. scapegoated on all sides. she was not us” (hooks 2014, 120)

racism as an ideology

  • “racism (…) has historically been both an ally and as a product of the colonization process” (Stam and Spence 1983, 4)

    • colonializm goes “hand-in-hand” with racism being an ally and a process

    • racism is a “natural” product of colonialization

  • “we will define racism (…) as ‘the generalized and final assigning of values to real or imaginary differences, to the accuser’s benefits and at his victim’s expense, in order to justify the former’s own privilage or aggression” (memmi quoted in Stam and Spence 2983, 4)

  • colonialism: “the process by which the european powers (including US) reached a position of economic military, political and cultural domination in much of asia, africa and latin america (Stam and Spence 1983, 3)

in filmmaking

  • colonial representation

    • cinema as inscribing european colonializm

    • subject positioning: armchair conquistadores, affirming a sense of power and superiority for white people, making Third World Others a spectacle for First World Gaze

  • Third World filmmaking and anti-colonial or post-colonial filmmaking

    • taking control of its own cinematic images, speak its own voice

how have racism and colonializm in films often been examined?

  • “marred by ‘methodological naiveté’” — Stam and Spence, 1983, 2

  • posing legitimate questions about plausibility and accuracy, negative and postitive images (eg in the representation of characters in film)

  • focuses on positive or negative portrayal of characters ‘obscures the fact that “nice” images might at times be as pernicious as overtly degrading ones, providing a bourgeois façade for paternalism, a more pervasive racism’ (ibid)

  • reducing a film through analysis to either positive or negative images of minorities is flawed

The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecovro, 1966)

  • based on historical algerian war of independence (1954-1962) against french government

  • associated with italian neorealism

  • exploits and inverts identificatory mechanisms on behalf of the colonized rather than the colonizers

    • using narrative and cinematic strategies — mechanisms of identification — to make the spectator feel with these women

    • examining the film as a whole is needed to show how it is an anti-colonialist film

queer film theory

  • queer: 

    • “originally a whord meaning strange or peculiar, in the mid-20th century, queer became a negative term designating homosecuality. however in recent times, the word has been re-appropriated as a positive one to embrace a wide coss-section of non-heterosexual identities, such as gay, lesbian, bisecual or transgender identities” (Rushton and Bettison 2010, 111)

  • “where postcolonial film thteory questions relations of power in colonial and postcolonial settings, and approaches to race in the cinema ask questions of power in relation to race, queer film theory interrogrates the cinematic expression of power’s relation to sexuality” (rushton and bettinson 2010, 105)

  • labelled “queer theory” in late 1980s/early 90s when one “begna to associate gender and sexuality critique with other identity markers, such as race, class and ethnicity. the concentration of the intersections of gender and sexuality with other aspects of personhood remains a key trait of queer theory” (Bergen-Aurand 2014, 384)