1st Report
Reading: Robin R. Coleman Means, “Introduction: Studying Blacks and Horror Films.”
Topic: What is the difference between ‘Blacks in Horror Films’ and ‘Black Horror Films’? Why is it important? Discuss using one or two of film examples. We encourage you to use your own film examples.
In Robin Means Colman’s book: ‘Horror Noire: Black is in American horror from the
1890’s to present; he defines notions of ‘Blacks in horror films’ and how African Americans depict the genre of horror. African American characters are often cast as the racial ‘other’; or in the horror genres case, ‘monstrous’ (6). Thus, causing African American characters within horror films to seem inferior in comparison to the dominant (white) race subjectivity. ‘Blacks
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For example, Ian Softly’s film Skeleton Key (2005) the narrative lacks a regular (alive) African American character, yet the attention that Caroline, the white woman, protagonist, draws attention to the late African Americans history. That is voodoo, revealing the hardships of the deceased African American servants and influence their spirits to have over the white occupants of the house. A powerful illustration of this is when Caroline goes into the attic of the historic southern house in the attic she finds an array of voodoo symbols and items thus identifying an historical African American presence within the film. ‘Blacks in horror films ‘are often mistaken for black horror films. ‘Black horror films’ differentiate from ‘Blacks in horror films,' as ‘Black horror films’ are often described as “race films” (7). The genre is dominantly influenced by African “history, ideologies, experiences, politics, language, humour, aesthetic, style, music” (Means Colman, 20011, pp. 7). Combined with the context of fear and monstrosity within the horror genre, this is significant …show more content…
Simpson raises how the “issue of trespass” (4) is dealt with in relation to the ‘resilience’ indigenous animals of the echo horror film genre. Drawing off James Lovelocke’s (2007) comments on how “earth is a dynamic living organism, as a self-regulating evolving system in which everything is interrelated” (James Lovelock, 2007) (44). Simpson's article denotes how the ‘exploitations” of echo horror has a lot to do with the ‘social issues’ (Simpson,2007, pp. 44).The way these animals are illustrated within the genre drives viewers to “acknowledge more culturally, plural forms of being” such as the effect of “human environmental destruction” (55) and what it means to the indigenous occupants.Simpson matins theses clams throughout the article with examples of Australian natural predators; such as Crocodiles, Snakes, and Dingo’s. Many Australian films convey its countries environment to be unpredictable and somewhat hazardous, its occupants can be when disturbed, stressing the effect of how dangerous they can be if one is unacquainted with the Australian environment and the animal’s capabilities (47). From this example, Simpson suggests that anxieties that local humans may have been transcribed through animals (46) by a culture shift. In turn supporting Woods (1986) claim that “the true subject of the (echo)
Reid covers three genres of African American film types such as comedy, black family film, and black action film whether it be independent and/or commercial films. Under the comedy genre, Reid evaluates three subtypes, which include Blackface Minstrelsy, Hybrid Minstrelsy and Satiric Hybrid Minstrel films. Blackface Minstrelsy was the only film subtype, I was familiar with in African American film history. Hybrid Minstrelsy and Satiric Hybrid Minstrel films were new genres learned from
These stereotypes depicted “drug dealers, prostitutes, single mothers, and complacent drag queens” (Harris, 51). In the 1980s, African American filmmakers began to make a name for themselves. These films are “social commentaries, indictments of racism and depictions of ‘everyday’ American lives” (Harris, 51). Compared to the traditional representations of blacks and blackness, New Black cinema takes on this cultural intervention and the recoding of blackness. Harris describes this as “revising the visual codes surrounding black skin on the screen and in the public
Australian landscapes have long been used to place fear and anxiety in the Anglo-Australian’s psyche. This anxiety and the requirement for Indigenous peoples to negotiate white ideals is reflected in current Australian literature and cinematic identities. This essay will discuss the critical arguments of what makes the chosen texts Australian literature. This discussion will be restricted to the critiques of the film Lantana directed by Ray Lawrence and the novel Biten’ Back written by Vivienne Cleven. The will firstly look at the use of landscape as a crime scene and how this links to the anxieties caused by the doctrine of terra nullius and the perceived threats from an introduced species. It will then look at the Australian fear of a different ‘other’ followed then by a discussion around masculinity and the need for Indigenous people to negotiate white ideals. The essay will argue that Australian literature and film reflect a nation that still has anxieties about the true sovereignty of the land and assert that Indigenous people have a requirement to fit in with white ideals.
In order to fully ascertain the gravity of negative archetypes, it is important to explore a common one. Donald Bogle is a film historian and lecturer at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Bogle has authored a book entitled Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks, in which he outlines a few of cinemas most infamous black architypes. The one most salient this this essay is that of brutal black buck. Bogle divides the brutal black buck into two subcategories: “black bucks” and “black brutes.”
Through the use of images, films, and other media outlets harmful stereotypes are often times created. One of the many challenges that American cinema endures is the inability to correctly portray characters of color. Film directors have formed a habit of creating and defining characters in a way that the audiences can easily identify with, thus leading to the reproduction of racial stereotyping. Black characters have generally been stigmatized throughout the course of history as aggressive, inferior, and irrational beings. These common stereotypes are perpetuated through the use of redundant film clichés that have a significant impact on society’s popular image of blacks. Within the article In Living Color, Michael Omi claims that despite progressive changes in America pertaining to race, popular culture is still responsible for damaging racial stereotypes and racism. Whereas, within Matt Zoller Seitz article, The Offensive Movie Cliché That Won’t Die, he discusses film clichés such as “Magical Negro” that uses an African American character for the sole purpose of acting as a mentor for their oblivious white counterpart. However, Get Out, a horror satire on the micro-aggressive black experience, directed by Jordan Peele, debunks these racial stereotypes centered around black men. The film subverts the use of racial stereotypes, as it rejects America’s depiction of common black men behavior pertaining to their criminalized lifestyle, masculinity, and aggression in
Film noir, literally meaning ‘black film’, refers to 1940s style detective thriller films that are typically dark in both themes and visual style (Luhr 2004, pp. 93). Although Fargo explores gruesome crimes inspired by the “grim theme of desperation”, the film’s visual palette is oppressively white, both in terms of its bleak snow-covered landscape and its predominantly White-Christian, suburban Upper Midwestern setting (Luhr 2004, pp. 93). Moreover, Fargo challenges film noir conventions in its revelation of the crime’s culprits at the very beginning of a linear and straightforward plot (Bordwell
Often in many films that undermine African Americans, they are depicted as thief's, murders, or unintelligent. These images are used to show that African Americans are unlike their white counterparts. According to Friedman, "This formulation undermines the racially and sexually based violence toward African Americans, wiping out the memory of rape, castration, and lynching of slaves that occurred in the past" (Friedman). The development of African American films, or films that truly put African Americans in any type of positive light did not really start to occur until the 1970's or 1980's. Before then films were often negative in spirit. Paula Massood describes the Hollywood depictions of African Americans in the previous era as, "failing to recognize the sociopolitical changes in the American landscape. African American characters most often appeared within a southern setting, largely ignoring the black city space and culture that figured in the lives and the imaginations of a vast majority of African Americans" (Massood). However, in the following years the development and progression of African American films was able to be seen.
Tommy L. Lott, Redefining Black Film (1995), asserts that the growing number of Hollywood movies by black independent filmmakers demand a more black film commentary, which was fostered by the Blaxploitation era
According to Tukachinsky, Mastro, and Yarchi, prior to 1930, the role of Blacks on screen were seen involving mostly in criminality and idleness (540). That role still persists until the present, with Blacks usually have to withstand to “longstanding and unfavorable media stereotypes including sexually provocative females and aggressive male thugs” (Tukachinsky 540). 1970’s movies such as The Mack, Black Caesar and Coffy have reinforced this stereotypic image of the black community. The
In a nutshell, Coleman defines “Blacks in Horror Films” to be films in which black characters are featured and a greater commentary can be derived from the piece concerning African Americans and race even if that is not the films primary focus, such as Jurassic Park. On the other hand, “Black Horror Films” are films that concern themselves with race; their narratives, though possessing the tropes of conventional horror films, “call attention to racial identity...Black culture, history, ideologies, experiences...etc”(Means-Coleman). These films often have Black directors, primary actors, writers, and producers and are intended to speak to a Black
In looking at the 1992 horror film entitled Candyman that was directed by Bernard Rose and Clive Barker, race is one of key parts of the film. Many aspects of the film were changed from the short story that Clive Barker wrote in 1985 entitled The Forbidden. Most the notable aspects of the film are missing in the original story and this brings the to mind the idea that something caused Clive Barker to change so many key features of his story as he brought the story to life on the silver screen. As mentioned by Mark Pellegrini in his article about Candyman “as he appeared in “The Forbidden” was actually a white guy with long blonde hair and incredibly pale skin. Another difference was Candyman’s garb. In the film he wears a long overcoat, while in the book he is clad in a brightly colored patchwork outfit. The actor that plays Candyman in the film is the furthest possible image from The Forbidden could ever be as a 6’5-foot African American actor named Tony Todd. Another notable change was the location of the story itself as it was supposed to be set in London, England but was instead moved to the housing project in Chicago, Illinois for the film. The film, Candyman, is notable not only as one of the few slasher films that features African Americans but it is one of the few horror movies that not only showed African Americans as racially inferior human beings and as products of victimization while also challenging racial stereotypes of the period of the late 1980s through
[1] Before I start this essay, I feel the need to remind the reader that I find slavery in all its forms to be an oppressive and terrible institution, and I firmly believe that for centuries (including this one) bigotry is one of the most terrible stains on our civilization. The views I intend to express in the following essay are in no way meant to condone the practices of slavery or racism; they are meant only to evaluate and interpret the construction of slavery in film.
Quentin Tarantino’s film Jackie Brown, released in 1997, challenges the pervasive stereotyping of not only blacks but specifically black women. Nowhere is the cinematic devaluation of African Americans more evident than in images of black women which, in the history of cinematography, the white ideal for female beauty has overlooked. The portrayal of black women as the racial Extra has been fabricated through many semblances in the history of American film. Film scholars and feminists alike have long been plagued with lament for the negativity and stereotyping that sticks with black women in American cinema. In this paper, I will argue that Jackie Brown highlights and stresses the racial variance of the female African American protagonist,
However, according to African American film scholar Thomas Cripps, these early films were not truly Black because their function, more or less, were to enlighten and mollify White people’s curiosity concerning Black culture. The argument presented by Cripps creates an opportunity for speculation on how to categorize a well-known group of films about Black people that in most cases included the participation of White filmmakers. How do we define the term “race film”? Moreover, can these films be considered a “genre” or are they imitations of similar narratives produced by White filmmakers such as comedies,
Genre is a reflection of society. Film noir is a genre that has a distinctive relationship with the American society from 1941 - 1958 because it reflects America’s fears and concerns from when they experienced major upheaval after The Great Depression and during World War I. In particular, the unstable atmosphere from the aftermath of World War 1 as Bruce Crowther, author of the book ‘Film Noir: Reflections in a Dark Mirror’, elaborates on how Film Noir films produce “a dark quality that derived as much from the character's depiction as from the cinematographer’s art.” These dark moods are transparent through the key features of the femme fatale, the film techniques and the impact of the Hay’s code on American film and American society.