Representations of Blackness in Popular Culture: Film

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Representations of Blackness in Popular Culture
Film

• AS/HUMA 1300 9.0
• Faculty of Arts
• March 18, 2009

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Bamboozled. Dir. Spike Lee. Perf. Damon Wayans,
Jada Pinkett-Smith, Michael Rapaport, Savion
Glover, Tommy Davidson, and Mos Def. Forty Acres
a Mule Filmworks, 2000.
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Viewing/Guiding Questions for Bamboozled
prepared by Mark Campbell

• 1. How is the character of Pierre Delacroix both
  complicated and conflicted by his family, and
  familial obligations?
•  
• 2. What is the role of the minstrel trinkets, in
  particular the jolly nigger bank, in the film, in
  Pierres consciousness, and within the wider
  realm of American
• consumer society?
•  
• 3. What effect does the Manray character, without
  the blackface, have on audience members,
  regardless of gender, age and race?
•  
• 4. What do you think Spike Lee is saying about
  audiences, in particular the live
• audience that views the taping of the show?
•  
• 5. What is the position of rap music within the
  film, and the entertainment
• industry as a whole, as articulated by the
  film, Bamboozled?
•  
• 6. What does Sloans character say about gender
  relations in the workplace
• and within the family unit?

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First Cinema

• 1. Hollywood movies are its model
• 2. Made for exhibition in large theatres
• 3. Film as pure spectacle/entertainment
• 4. Spectator/audience as passive consumer
• 5. Satisfies commercial interests of
• production companiestransnational
• monopoly capital
• 6. Maintains hegemony through its power
• structure.

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Second Cinema

• 1. Art cinema or new wave cinema
• 2. Often based on a European rather than a
• US aesthetic model
• 3. Elitist, middle-class, intellectual
• 4. Often nihilist, pessimist, mystifacatory.

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Third Cinema

• 1. Originating in 1960s Argentina, term refers
• to a socially committed cinema, mainly but
• not exclusively from the Third World
• 2. Political/militant cinemaradical in its
• politics and approach to cinema
• 3. Cinema of decolonisation, which expresses
• will to national liberation, and is anti-
• mythic, anti-racist, anti-bourgeois.

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bell hooks and the oppositional gaze

• Black people must create spaces of agency
• that allow them to interrogate the gaze of the
• Other and return the gaze critically.
• Interrogating black looks must be concerned
• not only with issues of race and racism, but
• also issues of gender and sexuality.