Representations of Blackness Representations of Blackness in Popular Culture: in Popular Culture:

Film Film AS/HUMA 1300 9.0

Faculty of ArtsMarch 18, 2009

Bamboozled. Bamboozled. Dir. Dir. Spike Lee. Perf. Damon Wayans, Jada Spike Lee. Perf. Damon Wayans, Jada Pinkett-Smith, Michael Rapaport, Savion Glover, Tommy Pinkett-Smith, Michael Rapaport, Savion Glover, Tommy Davidson, and Mos Def. Forty Acres & a Mule Filmworks, Davidson, and Mos Def. Forty Acres & a Mule Filmworks, 2000. 2000.

Viewing/Guiding Questions for Viewing/Guiding Questions for BamboozledBamboozled prepared by Mark Campbellprepared 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 Pierre’s 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 Sloan’s character say about gender relations in the workplace and within the family unit?

First CinemaFirst 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 companies—transnational monopoly capital;6. Maintains hegemony through its power structure.

Second CinemaSecond 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.

Third CinemaThird Cinema

1. Originating in 1960s Argentina, term refers to a socially committed cinema, mainly but not exclusively from the “Third World”;

2. Political/militant cinema—radical 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.

bell hooks and the oppositional bell hooks and the oppositional gazegaze

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].