This class presents you with the opportunity to analyse culture through discussing and writing about film. We will examine film texts as cultural phenomena drawing on scholarship and criticism in order to understand how ways of seeing make meaning along with narrative and storyboard. Our driving question concerns the way in which African Americans, blackness, and race get figured in American film. Far from conducting a survey of race in film, this class will focus on films where camera work and content illuminate or address racial structures in American culture. We will pay particular attention to ideologies surrounding the recurrent and seemingly unsolvable problem in American history. Screenings include Birth of a Nation, Micheauxs Within Our Gates, Do the Right Thing, Daughters of the Dust, and Monsters Ball. Secondary materials include excerpts from Laura Mulveys Visual and Other Pleasures, Fatima Ronys The Third Eye, Manthia Diawaras Black American Cinema, and bell hooks Reel to Real.
