readings list

Question 1

Solanas and Getino on First, Second, and Third Cinemas

Answer 1

first: hollywood imperialists present stereotypes as realities to passive consumers; second: apolitical arthouse indies that still operated within capitalist distribution chains; third: tactical liberation movement calls for revolution, prefers documentary bc truth, and transforms passive consumer into active revolutionary

Question 2

Peter Brooks on the melodramatic imagination

Answer 2

as the french rev collapsed belief in a sacred order of institutions like the family, audiences are drawn to moral dramas of excessive importance, spilling over into bodily gesture and extreme good/evil binaries with no complexity

Question 3

Shohat and Stam on unthinking Eurocentrism

Answer 3

eurocentrism is the rationale for colonialism by arguing that civilization is born in greece and is transported west, which in media, both erases and appropriates non-euro knowledge production

Question 4

Kilpatrick (1999) on Celluloid Indians (the good and the bad)

Answer 4

film analyses of native representation have had a preoccupation with realism/accuracy, but film, as an object of representation, is a tool for creating a real, and film scholars should unravel the layers of interpretation that are involved in creating the real, like how the western films are often trying to justify their own actions; she says that natives don’t have space to utter a response in film until recently

Question 5

Altman on classical genre theory

Answer 5

Aristotle and Horace: defined by internal textual characteristics

Question 6

Altman on neoclassical genre theory

Answer 6

16th-17th cent.: forced to accept monstrous mating of genres and reckon with genre history

Question 7

Altman on Romantic genre theory

Answer 7

influenced by Darwin and biological sciences: genres are a systematic entity with clearly defined borders that evolve along a historical trajectory

Question 8

Altman on 20th cent. genre theory

Answer 8

genres are determined by critics and readers, and every time a critic identifies a characteristic, a writer will always come along and subvert it

Question 9

Altman on 1960s genre theory uptake in film

Answer 9

genre is a contract between industry and audience, a formula that they promise to follow if you purchase the product; evolve only when they become predictable

Question 10

Altman on the origins of the Western film genre

Answer 10

travel genre’s exotic locations; crime melodrama; the noble savage from the earlier movies about white man’s mistreatment of indians is transformed into villain

Question 11

Altman on genre history

Answer 11

genre can never be pinned down into a coherent or stable chart because it is the temporary byproduct of an ongoing process that constantly folds the margins into the center

Question 12

Altman on genre and national identity

Answer 12

genre is a regulatory scheme that integrates diverse experiences into a single unified social fabric for a period of time

Question 13

Altman on syntactic/semantic/pragmatic

Answer 13

syntactic: metaphorical aspects of a film, like the Western represents the border between two value systems; semantic: the commonalities of a film, like the setting on the frontier in the 1840-1900, the use of crane shots and fast tracking shots, the cowboy archetype, etc.; pragmatic: how audiences exercise their own agency in mapping genres based on their own desires

Question 14

Smith (2003) on shooting cowboys and indians

Answer 14

early attempt post-Kilpatrick to determine what is presented in portraying the real; finds that early cinema of attractions films about natives are evidence of federal containment of dangerous indian savagery, but that this changes with Young Deer’s directorial career in developing very individualist characters who assimilate on native terms rather than white terms

Question 15

Gunning on cinema of attractions

Answer 15

prior to 1907, films are presented as exhibitionist artifacts that show off visual tricks and non-diegetic self-awareness, but then by 1907, filmmakers begin to draw on narrativized storytelling medium of literature

Question 16

Marubbio on killing the Indian maiden

Answer 16

indian women or maidens exist on the same savage/civilized binary as indian men; they are either princesses representing the pure natural landscape fetishized as objects of beauty just waiting to be colonized, or they are queens representing the taboo and immoral danger that poses a threat to white men’s safety; maiden characters are often torn between the binary

Question 17

Ramirez on nation and gender

Answer 17

responds to Haunani Kay-Trask’s criticisms of feminist theory as an act of assimilation; she says that neither nation or gender can be prioritized over the other and must be non-hierarchically linked

Question 18

Paul Chaat Smith on romanticism

Answer 18

a threshold concept of native film studies; how sensitive portrayals are still colonial myths that present natives as marked for assimilation or death

Question 19

Columpar on fourth cinema

Answer 19

first, second, and third are all invader cinemas; fourth cinema is derived from “ancient cultures” that still exist within modernity but are markedly distinct from the institutions that drive the film industry; organize global indigeneity based on commonalities and center those core values in indigenous characters

Question 20

Raheja on reservation reelism

Answer 20

framing native representation as a cinematic assault erases the agency of the native actors and directors and crew who engaged with the image of the indian by interacting with hegemonic representational forces

Question 21

Flint on the surround

Answer 21

indians who sat victorian style portraits were often painted with very natural landscape backdrops, but these backdrops were also mechanical reproductions that sort of facilitated natives’ assimilation into and active participation in modernity

Question 22

Gledhill and Williams on melodrama unbound

Answer 22

the demand for melodrama is not from the breakdown in sacred order but in the capitalist rise of the pathos and the humanist individual, endowing ordinary lives with this grand moral significance; defined by its portrayal of human feeling more than its portrayal of historical or social accuracy