Pawnbroker

1. Pawnbroker

2. “Blindness should be understood here as the purest mode of looking, the only way not to turn away from a reality that is literally blinding: clairvoyance itself. To direct a frontal look at horror requires that one renounce distractions and escape-hatches, first the primary among them, the most falsely central, the question why, with the indefinite retinue of academic frivolities and dirty dracks that it ceaselessly induces.” (Claude Lanzmann, “Here There is No Why”)

3. A film devoted to the Holocaust can only be a counter-myth, that is, an investigation into the presentness of the Holocaust, an investigation into a past whose wounds are so fresh and so keenly inscribed in consciousness that they are present in a haunting timelessness.” –Claude Lanzmann“Here There is No Why”

4. Mise-en-scene • Aspects of Mise-en-scene: • Setting • Lighting • Costume and Make-up • Framing

5. Montage • Editing—coordination of one shot with the next. • Continuity editing—A style of editing marked by its effort to maintain a continuous and seemingly uninterrupted flow of action. • Parallel Editing (or Cross-Cutting)—Altneration between two shots of two or more locations inviting us to find a relationship bewteen two or more events. Splicing together of two points of action occurring at roughly the same time but at a distance from one another. Creates a conceptual relationship between the two events or builds suspense. • Graphic Match—when a filmmaker joins two shots with some visual similarity. • Shot-Reverse Shot—when two positions on opposite sides of the axis of vision are joined, usually through editing. • Jump cut-A cut that jumps forward with a single action, thus creating a sense of discontinuity. An ellipsi in time without the bridging effect of a cut-away.

6. Common sense” definition of “white” • “invisible, • “Natural” • the absence of color, • pure, • the standard, • truth, • the norm, • the right way, • the real, • “inevitable,” • Everyday • domestic, • white people are “the regular people,” • “the true Americans,” “vanilla” “Death”, “otherworldliness” ghostliness -“order rationality rigidity, qualities brought out by the contrast with black disorder, irrationality, and looseness. -white people as materially dependent on black people”—Is this true of white representation in general?

7. Critical Definition: The Principles of Whiteness • “The color around which power, mobility and capital have arranged themselves” • A highly exclusive Class category arranged around color and birth. • “The unmarked category against which difference is constructed” (George Lipsitz); Whiteness is what is and that against which everything else has to prove itself.

8. Debunking whiteness • If, as Dyer suggests, whiteness is the norm, how do we begin to see it? Look for the strange in white representations—look for moments of ethnicity. • Dyer suggests that some films, particularly those made in third world or diasporic cinemas, can debunk whiteness’s normalcy. • Does Romero’s film do this? What are the limits of its critique of whiteness? • Who is the ideal spectator in Romero’s film? How might white and black people derive pleasure from the film?