Representations of Blackness in Popular Culture: Film

1
Representations of Blackness in Popular
CultureFilm

• Defining Third Cinema
• The Place of Community in Third Cinema
• bell hook and the oppositional gaze

2
First Cinema

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

3
Second Cinema

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

4
Third Cinema

• Political/militant cinemaradical in its politics
  and approach to cinema
• Film that deliberately sets out to fight the
  system
• Cinema of decolonisation, which expresses will to
  national liberation, and is anti-mythic,
  anti-racist, anti-bourgeois.

5
Place of Community

• Connectedness to communities struggling
• against oppression is an essential characteristic
  of
• Third Cinema and its symbiosis with the third
• world (Clyde Taylor, 32).
• Third cinema has been one of the places where
• an exploration of the end of black innocence has
• taken place (Walcott, 55).

6
bell hooks and the Oppositional Gaze

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