Browsing by Author "Gaines, Jane"

Impure Cinema: Political Pedagogies in Film and Theory asks what are the ways that the politics of film theory have been conceptualized since the era now known as "70s film theory." In particular, it analyzes the writings on cinema, politics and art by contemporary French philosophers Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière in relation to the influential approaches of Louis Althusser and Gilles Deleuze and to theories of documentary cinema. I argue that unlike the political modernism of 70s film theory and the post-theory turn of 90s film studies, Badiou and Rancière offer an approach to film theory that neither assumes that all films are political, nor that politics underdetermine theory, but rather suggests that we analyze both theories and films in terms of how they construct connections between cinema and politics. Following Deleuze, I call these connections "pedagogical" not because they transmit knowledge but because they always involve a new kind of connection or relation that seeks to transform habitual ways of seeing, saying or doing. For Badiou and Rancière this is based on a conception of cinema as "impure." Cinema, they argue, is never free of elements from other arts or daily life, but it is this impurity that is the grounds for linking its artistic and political possibilities. I look at various film forms that highlight cinema's impurity, in particular the "actuality" and how it has been reappropriated in various forms of documentary and essayistic practices as a way of giving cinematic form to questions of political equality.

This dissertation investigates the social, emotional, and ethical implications of looking at the suffering and death of African Americans. Drawing on film theory, visual studies, literary criticism, and semiotics, the study addresses events and images from 1834 to 2000 in which the humanity of the black body was called into question. The events discussed include: a nineteenth-century riot over the abuse of slaves; the mass media depiction of Hurricane Katrina survivors; the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's 1935 antilynching art exhibition; James Allen's 2000 exhibition of lynching photography; the Emmett Till case; and the Spike Lee-directed film Bamboozled (2000). The project ultimately argues for a nuanced appreciation of looking relations that takes into account the ethics of the look, especially when that look is directed toward bodies that cannot speak for and in defense of themselves.

For a brief moment in feminist time, from 1968 to 1974, women's documentaries were influential in the emerging field of feminist film studies and for feminist activism. By the late sixties feminists had identified visual representation within popular culture, film, and the media as one of the central battlegrounds for women's activism. For feminist filmmakers, documentary, with its alleged superlative grip on truth and transparency, seemed to provide an ideal counterpoint to the perceived mis-representation of "real" women in dominant, narrative cinema. Within seventies feminist film theory, however, scholars elaborated a gender-specific take on the ideological critique of realism that disavowed women's documentary films as naïve, unsophisticated, and complicit with the ideologies of patriarchy and capitalism.

In this project, I recast realism as an unruly and contradictory set of codes and conventions that generate oppositional and revolutionary political documentaries. In contrast to the dominant anti-realist reception of feminist documentaries in seventies feminist film theory then, I argue that these documentaries contain unacknowledged nuance and neglected visions of the political aspirations (however flawed) of second wave feminism. Key figures in feminist political theory, such as Nancy Fraser and Hannah Arendt, shed light on the political and subjective configurations brought forth in several feminist documentaries, including I Am Somebody (1969), Janie's Janie (1971), The Woman's Film (1971), and Joyce at 34 (1972), and Self-Health (1974), which depend rather on second wave aspirations of collectivity and agency, and the power of self-authorship and experience.