CSCL1924: Doing Race in Cinema

This seminar uses film as a way to talk about how race, racism, and racial struggle have shaped American life. And it uses race as an analytic that can help us learn about the workings of film—as a way to ask why films look and sound the way they do, why films tell the kinds of stories they tell in the ways they tell them, and why films affect audiences so powerfully. We’ll watch and discuss a range of films that put racial identity and racial conflict in the foreground. This range will encompass recent Hollywood films, indie and experimental cinema, and examples of action/adventure, sci-fi, musical, and comedy; it’ll emphasize films by directors of color and women directors, and it’ll include movies by renowned figures like Spike Lee and the early Black American director Oscar Micheaux. Throughout our discussions we’ll be asking how films "materialize" racial, ethnic, gender, and national identities: how films can depict, perform, and help create these identities, and how they show what it’s like to "live" these identities.

View on University Catalog