Deconstructing Black Panther. What issues and concerns do you see writing about and deconstructing in your film in relation to class (the American dream), race/ethnicity and gender? Read Hall’s article on Ethnicity and Difference. Apply Hall’s chain of meaning: how a film’s ideologies of race, class and gender are embedded and absorbed subconsciously. The paper must analyze racial coding in the film Black Panther and analyze questions of identity and representation in the African American directed film. Use Stuart Hall reading “Ethnicity: Identity and Difference” for discussion of recovered and evolving identities, and how identities are subject to history, culture and politics, etc
RE: Requirements for the final paper
You should be deciding what film you want to write about for your final paper. What issues and concerns do you see writing about and deconstructing in your film in relation to class (the American dream), race/ethnicity and gender? The material you choose must have all three elements (class, race/ethnicity and gender). You can combine two or more films; in that case you are looking for narrative threads or comparisons between them. WHAT IS IT THAT THE AUDIENCE WALKS AWAY WITH KNOWING ABOUT THE SUBJECTED RACE? (The notes are meant to suggest areas of analysis and not as a structure for your paper, which should be a critical essay.)
Notes for Final Paper, Critical Analysis of Race, Class and Gender
Final paper:
A 12 page paper deconstructing a U.S. film. Papers must be typed, double-spaced and WITH page numbers. NOTE that only U.S. films are eligible, as we have studied race in an American context. Race plays out differently historically in different parts of the world.
The goal here is to apply Hall’s chain of meaning: to see how in a given film’s ideologies of race, class and gender are embedded or positioned and hence absorbed subconsciously. Some of it may be overt, but also much more is inferential. Read Hall’s article on Ethnicity and Difference from the first reading packet.
PAPER of:
- A paper analyzing racial coding in a Hollywood film and analyzing questions of identity and representation in an African American-, Latino-, Asian- (etc.) directed Hollywood film. Use Stuart Hall reading “Ethnicity: Identity and Difference” for discussion of recovered and evolving identities, and how identities are subject to history, culture and politics, etc.
NOTE: Be sure to identify the director and year films that are referenced were made, i.e.: The Searchers (John Ford, 1956). While this is not primarily a research paper, if you utilize articles, class readings and/or Internet sources, list them in ENDNOTES under “Works Cited.” List URLs for WWW sources.
A. Analyze Film Content
Storylines/Narratives: Analyze the story, plots and subplots. Note if people of color are major or minor characters. Does the action revolve around characters we would identify as white? Example: In Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939), a film about the greatest racial cataclysm the nation has experienced, white plantation owners are the main protagonists while African-American slaves and house servants are background characters.
Film Characters, lead and secondary roles: Who are the protagonists around whom the action revolves? Who is the audience supposed to identify with? Through whose eyes are the stories told? Who is the hero or heroine? Whose point of view is privileged? Who’s in charge? Who has agency, the power to make things happen? Who’s in control of his or her fate or destiny and who is at the mercy of someone else or relies on the generosity of others? Who is dependent and who is independent, has access to wealth, resources or power? Who acts, who initiates the action and is not merely acted upon? Who dominates and who’s dominated? Who comes out winning? Who loses? What color are these people? Is there a hierarchy of color, power and privilege? Or does it undermine commonsense knowledge of race, class and gender?
Conflict: Look at the situations characters encounter, often involving conflict and resolution. Is the resolution satisfactory and to whom?
Content is also the visual and aural: analyze the images and scenes in which the action takes place, what’s in the foreground and what’s in the background? What ideas are conveyed visually (as in homes, dress, possessions)? How are scenes put together, edited and sequenced to make meaning and to propel the story?
- Race: How is “race” or ethnicity expressed explicitly or implicitly in your film through the characters and storylines? Is the film about race or does it tangentially deal with race, ethnicity and identity? What does it add to the dialogue about race? What does it end up saying about race?
USE Stuart Hall’s conceptualization of race as reflecting a chain of meaning and also overt and inferential racism. Does the film affirm or subvert or undermine the chain of meaning for African Americans/Asians/Latinos/South Asians/Arabs, etc., and for European Americans? Does it do both?
DO NOT OMIT that race is also about whiteness or white identity. Whiteness is often taken for granted as just the way “normal” people are and thus made invisible — whether in the relationship between different characters or as an expression of power and influence, the people who matter. Do not allow whiteness to be invisible, to remain inferential. What is assumed, taken for granted, or the prevailing commonsense about Americans of European descent?
Note how people of different races and classes interact. Remember that race in U.S. history is also about who is a “real” American and fit for citizenship. Historically, one is either black or white in the United States. Latinos and others who are multiracial face difficulties in this binary racial order. Does the filmmaker address this? Does the depiction of other “Others” complicate ideas about race and identity?
- Gender roles: What roles do women play? What are their relationships to men? What agency do women have? How much control over their own lives or aspects of their lives do they exercise? Historically, for female characters there has been a difference between the private and the public spheres with women having some power in the family and little or none in public life, the world of work or politics or power. What is women’s relationship to power? Is there a difference between the power and agency of women-of-color versus European American women?
- Class: How is class membership depicted in Hollywood films or in minority cinema? What is the weight of class and how does it intersect with race or ethnicity? To the extent that class involves hierarchy and power, who is higher or lower on the social scale? White working class people are less often the protagonists of the story or are portrayed in negative ways. A common stereotype about working-class people of color is that there is an underclass and a culture of poverty in minority communities that makes for dysfunctional families and criminal behavior. But what most people do in Black and Latino communities is to go to work every day and raise families—are these folks invisible?
* History: Is the film in dialogue with American history? Does it shed light on our past, rewrite the past or offer new stories about American history? If so, does the film change or challenge the way we see ourselves or reinforce the often-idealized ways we learn U.S. history?
- In addition, for 2nd option: Films made by African American, Latino, Asian or Native American, South Asian, etc, filmmakers
Use the Stuart Hall article on Ethnicity and Identity to think about the voices and images of those whose representations have been historically stereotyped and whose points of view and more complex realities have been repressed or distorted. How do these filmmakers tell their own stories? What stories do they tell? Is the film in dialogue or in counterpoint to prevailing (including updated) stereotypes? Does it reflect on dominant discourses of race (Hall’s commonsense) through characters and plots? Is the filmmaker challenging the status quo and seeking to expand the conception of who is and what it means to be an American? How does the film add to the American story? Does it problematize the American story, what kind of nation we are? What does it say about the intersection of class, race and gender? Are other groups depicted? What relationships are shown between different people? Is there solidarity and empathy?
C. Film convey cultural accepted or dominant values and norms
* Family and community: Family means a great deal in immigrant or traditional communities, though this is really a universal value: family and clan is a cornerstone of all human societies. Family and community are often important subtexts in minority films. What are the family ties and the family roles? Does family help to ground characters or is family a hindrance, something to escape from or to transcend? And from whose perspectives do you analyze that, from the point-of-view of the individual, the family and ethnic community or the larger society? What about new families that challenger gender roles and gender stereotyping in the 21st century (both male and female typecasting)?
* One implicit difference in values is the Individual versus the Collective or community. The Lone Cowboy is an example of highlighting the rugged individual. What individualist or collective values are expressed in your film? What view or images of ethnic or racial communities are conveyed?
* National Myths: Films project stories about nations and peoples; they produce mythologies about what kind of people we are and about who the “Others” are. If this applies to your film, note what national myths and stories are being projected. The saga is that in the land of opportunity anyone who wants to make it and is willing to work hard enough, can succeed. This is also a narrative about re-making yourself, about taking on new possibilities and new identities. Though central to American history, the stories of non-European Americans have been marginalized in the 100 year-old history of U.S. film. What stories are told about about non-European Americans?
Films like Traffic (Steven Soderbergh, 2000) also project views of an entire nation (Mexico vis-à-vis the United States): What views of nations or peoples are conveyed?
* Filmmaker’s Craft/Genre: Because film is an art form you may also want to address the filmmaker’s artistic and creative expression and how it adds to our pleasure or displeasure as audience members. Consider the intent or the vision of the filmmaker. What are the filmmaker’s strategies for communicating his/her vision? How well is that realized in the end? What is left problematic? Consider editing, visual style, etc. as part of the craft of filmmaking and as inferential depictions of race. Consider genre if it applies to race and gender. What you can do/say in comedy or do in children’s programming would be done differently if in a drama.
D. And Think About Historical Context
Films have historical context. They are made in a given time and space by individuals who are produced by their individual and collective histories and experiences. This presupposes that films deal with issue as they were experienced back then. That is the case with Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915); it needs to be understood as a film that reveals a great deal about race in the U.S. in 1915, 50 years after the Civil War. Films made in the Civil Rights era may have something to say about race, as it was being undermined or challenged at that time. In the Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison, 1967) is an example of an African-American hero made possible by the Civil Rights movement. But films can be ahead of their time or lodged in the past — whenever they are made — in terms of the ideas they convey about race through their characters and story lines. The old ideas or myths about race don’t just die; sometimes they get recycled or updated. And sometimes they get transformed and offer us a new vision of what is possible. What is the case in your film?
