Valerie Smith's chapter, "The Documentary Impulse in Contemporary African-American Film," discusses the disparity in cultural and racial representations as seen in black fictional films and documentaries. Namely, Smith notes how the fictional films created by and depicting African-American community life rely on verisimilitude, the appearance of truth and factuality, when the documentaries, a nonfictional genre by convention, reveal instead the slipperiness of reality. As hooks argues in her response to the absurd fears and institutional interventions surrounding the theatrical release of Boyz N the Hood, fictional films depicting urban black life, regardless of their attempted verisimilitude, potray sanitized and watered-down versions of our unjust and prejudicial world. It is for this fact, I suppose, that African-American documentarians were inspired to question and challenge rhetoric, generic conventions, and media representation. Independent filmmaking, for its lack of financial sponsorship strings, had the freedom to do so.
While I agree with Chris that media and its markets have changed dramatically in the twenty years since Smith's chapter was published, I think Billips and Hatch's documentary style and design can still teach today's filmmakers how to construct and contribute alternative voices and depictions of themselves and their unique communities. As Smith details, Billips and Hatch et al. "trouble the boundary between fact and fiction" (60) when they "interweave dramatic re-enactments, pantomime, and fantasy sequences with archival footage and interviews o question ideologies […] and the adequacy of realist techniques of representation" (61). This lesson can return to inform fictional dramas as well, seeing that TV and film realties not bent solely on ratings and gross profit stand to learn from it, too.
I teach Introduction to Screenwriting at a community college in northern Illinois. Although our campus is only 40 minutes outside of Chicago, too many students assume that the news and TV and film representations of our local urban life adequately inform and represent this diverse and rich and too-segregated city and its citizens. I see how important it is to ask these emerging writers to challenge and change the media they script, whether for TV or film, fiction or documentary, in socially aware and conscientious ways. After all, a zombie film (as most of my students want to write, for some reason) is never just about zombies...
We, the creators of new media (art, essay, film, whathaveyou) need to stop replicating and perpetuating stereotypes and prejudice, censorship and the status quo. Now is the time, seeing as that the production and dissemination of our art is now democratized and in our hands.
I will share this chapter with my incoming class, and hope, at the very least, that each one of these writers contemplates the power they wield.
The idea of truth is complex even outside the world of theatre and cinematic arts. It has been and continues to be a great philosophical debate. However, in the aforementioned art forms, the willing participation of the audience and their ability to suspend belief to partake in the experience, adds another variable into the equation, one that truly warrants Elizabeth’s charge to future creators and artists. This is a reminder of the responsibility that comes along with the position of power that we, the creator, has over the audience.
ReplyDeleteDr. Tony Kashani (2009) in his book, Deconstructing the Mystique: An Interdisciplinary Introduction to Cinema, talks about two very important elements of the cinematic experience, projection – identification, and public pedagogy.
Projection – identification is the process where the audience projects their “desires, obsessions, fears, and anxieties onto ideas and people. Moreover, our projections determine our perceptions.” (Kashani, 2009, p. xi) In other words, as the spectator identifies themselves with the characters or a particular circumstance, in turn, they project their own lived experience onto what is playing out before them.
The theoretical perspective of public pedagogy expands the concept of projection – identification and adds to it the ability of cinema to become a vehicle of instruction. Kashani writes,
“Cinema is uniquely able to convey a world of information and various perspectives. Cinema can – and often does – compel important cognitive and affective responses. We learn from cinema not only because it offers “realistic” representations of individuals via its characters, promoting feelings for those individuals, but also because it encourages identification… Cinema is a teaching machine – plain and simple.” (p. xi)
So, in light of this, I would like to add to Elizabeth’s charge. The creative artists of the world must see themselves as not only the conveyors of their own thoughts and ideas about the world, but as an instructor of the world. As our art is intended to affect, we must be cautious as to what might be its effect. Do we wish to perpetuate a reality rather then offer a solution?