Ethnicity and race in film theory

1. Ethnicity and race in film theory • Problems of definition: • The term "black" cinema, even African-American cinema, disingenuously reduces the diversity of ethnic experience and identity as well as a diversity of aesthetic choices. • The problem of the economic and aesthetic limits placed on black identity by commercial cinema. • The limits placed on identity by the character types, narrative patterns, and iconography of race and gender in commercial narrative films. • How consideration of race and ethinicity complicate questions of point of view, spectatorship, and identification.

2. Ethnicity and race in film theory • Rethinking the question of realism and the popular. • Deconstruction and “black” film theory. • Rethinking the activity of spectatorship. • Black cinema as hybrid or “Third Cinema.”

3. Ethnicity and race in film theory • 1970s. “The LA rebellion.” (Haile Gerima, Larry Clark, Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, Alile Larkin) • 1980s. Importance of Workshop movement in England. • Sankofa and the Black Audio/Film Collective. • 1985. Retrospective on New Black Cinema at Whitney Museum in New York, curated by James Snead. • 1986. Third Cinema event at Edinburgh International Film Festival. • 1988. • “Black Film/British Cinema” symposium at ICA in London. • “Celebration of Black Cinema” in Boston and Blackframes anthology. • “Sexism, Colonialism, Misrepresentation: A Corrective Film Series,” New York. • Screen’s “‘Last’ Special Issue on Race”

4. Rethinking the question of realism • Stereotypes: the problem with “positive” images. • Racial contradictions in the classic, realist text. • How the organization of racial conflict in binary terms reduces the complexity of race relations. • How narrative and visual pleasure are organized around racial as well as sexual conflict. • Dominant discourses are not closed, but rather, always contradictory. Reading Hollywood films for the ideological contradictions they produce around the questions of race and ethnicity.

5. “Black” deconstruction and film theory • The “Yale” critics: Henry Louis Gates, James Snead, Cornell West, bell hooks, Hazel Carby. • Critiquing an identity politics based on dualistic or binary thinking. • To recognize the cultural diversity occluded by dualistic thinking. • Analyzing how blackness is constructed as a political and cultural category. • Questioning the viability of a politics based on the idea of an essential identity. • Unproblematic celebration of “black” arts homogenizes black culture and identity. • The desire to correct the past omissions of history often leads to the idea the the “problem” belongs to the Other alone.

6. Rethinking the spectator • How feminist theory remains color blind to racial hierarchies informing cinema structures of point of view and identification. • Just as feminism questions the male bias of psychoanalytic theory, race theory asks if the ethnocentrism of psychoanalysis forecloses more questions than it asks. • The resistant spectator and the oppositional gaze.

7. Black cinema as “Third Cinema” • Dialogism. Emphasizing the complexity and diversity of sources comprising African-American culture. • Disjunction between sound and image. • Nonlinear and episodic narrative structure. History is represented as noncontingent, as yet undetermined, open to change. • Refusal of narrative closure. The refusal to represent problems and conflict as resolved, or even as yet adequately represented.