Representations of Blackness in Popular Culture: Film

1. Representations of Blackness in Popular Culture:Film • 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 companies—transnational 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 cinema—radical 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].