Everybody’s Protest Cinema

This article uses Baldwin’s 1949 essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel” to consider that literary mode’s corollary in the 1990s New Black Cinema. It argues that recent African American movies posit an alternative to the politics and aesthetics of films by a director such as Spike Lee, one that evinces a set of qualities Baldwin calls for in his essay about Black literature. Among these are what recent scholars such as Ann Anlin Cheng have called racial melancholy or what Kevin Quashie describes as Black “quiet,” as well as variations on Yogita Goyal’s diaspora romance. Films such as Barry Jenkins’s adaptation of If Beale Street Could Talk (2018) and Joe Talbot and Jimmy Fails’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019) offer a cinematic version of racial narrative at odds with the protest tradition I associate with earlier Black directors, a newly resonant cinema that we might see as both a direct and an indirect legacy of Baldwin’s views on African American culture and politics.

Introduction

The introduction defines “media ventriloquism” and explains its value in an era wherein interactions are increasingly mediated. The political stakes of the project are high, particularly when the world is witnessing technological manipulation on a grand scale, yet the theoretical lens used in this volume allows the authors to approach ventriloquism from a number of disciplines and apply it to texts from nineteenth-century spiritualism to early Hollywood talkies to Korean video games. The introduction explains how the chapters are organized into sections and coins two new terms that unify their focus: the “technovocalic body,” which builds on Steven Connor’s idea of the vocalic body, and the “screen voice,” which is rooted in Sigmund Freud’s discussion of the screen memory. To explain these terms, the chapter turns to recent films by Spike Lee and Boots Riley and also references classics such as Singin’ in the Rain and Julie Dash’s Illusions.

It’s gotta be the shoes: Nike in the Spike-o-sphere

This chapter traces the history and significance of Nike shoes within the auteurist mediascape that Spike Lee has cultivated for over three decades. Lee has steadily created his own dynamic, paracinematic universe that both parallels the logic of Hollywood’s dominant mode of production and resists some of its core tenets by retaining at its centre the distinct idea of the auteur—precisely what transmedial storytelling and postmodern textuality are often viewed to have obliterated. The chapter focuses on the beginning of Lee’s professional career in the 1980s and its current moment, noting the strong affinities between these moments both in American culture and in Lee’s work, which are intimately bound up with one another. Examining Lee’s career in this way provides insight into Lee’s engagement with the problem of police brutality and the enduring injustices faced by the black community in the US.

Unexpected Heroes of Feminist Cinema

This chapter challenges critics' readings of films as ‘sexist’, looking at two illustrative examples: Paul Verhoeven and Spike Lee. Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct (1992) was widely regarded as misogynistic and ‘lesbophobic’. Basic Instinct is a neo-noir film that scandalously refuses to conform to the patriarchal rule of ‘compensating moral values’. Moreover, its visual pleasures are deliberately constructed against the grain of male voyeuristic pleasures and offer women (especially lesbian women) a rare opportunity to dissect and ridicule male sexism, homophobia, and voyeuristic power. Verhoeven's Elle (2016) is a much more subtle and complex critique of how women's self-image is ‘mediated’ by patriarchal culture, and the film makes explicit or oblique references to tabloid journalism, the gaming industry, and religion in the construction of a total culture that presents women as ‘others’ not only to men but also to themselves. Meanwhile, Spike Lee has been a frequent target for the ‘sexist’ label. The chapter argues that this is unfair, given Lee's relatively frequent attempts to make films about female sexual empowerment (or the causes of female sexual disempowerment). The three examples of She's Gotta Have It (1986), She Hate Me (2004), and BlacKkKlansman (2018) suggest that Lee has in various ways attempted to represent females as empowered sexual agents, and to address social double standards erected by men to possess women through the possession of their bodies.

Studying Feminist Film Theory

This book is aimed at helping media and film studies teachers introduce the basics of feminist film theory. No prior knowledge of feminist theory is required, the intended readers being university undergraduate teachers and students of film and media studies. Areas of emphasis include spectatorship, narrative, and ideology. Many illustrative case studies from popular cinema are used to offer students an opportunity to consider the connotations of visual and aural elements of film, narrative conflicts and oppositions, the implications of spectator 'positioning' and viewer identification, and an ideological critical approach to film. Explanations of key terminology are included, along with classroom exercises and practice questions. Each chapter begins with key definitions and explanations of the concepts to be studied, including some historical background where relevant. Case studies include film noir, Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days and the work of directors Spike Lee, Claire Denis, and Paul Verhoeven.