https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY5ptG_95-Y
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birth of. A nation
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/us/remembering-emmett-till-legacy-virtual-reality.ht
ml
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Emmett Till
https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/14/us/ahmaud-arbery-hate-crime-trial-opening/index.html
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Ahmaud Arbery
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYOjWnS4cMY
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This is America
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/rodney-king-beating-25-years-ago-opened-era
-viral-cop-n531091
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Rodney King
certain cinematic conventions of the horror film are uniquely suited to bring into
visibility everyday, endemic horror
As a form of politically inflected horror, it has potential to perform the kind of
materialist history that Walter Benjamin theorizes, in which the historical
materialist ‘appropriate[es] a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger’ in
order to recast the present.
uses the mechanics of the horror genre to expose actually existing racism, to
render newly visible the very real, but often masked, racial landscape of a
professedly liberal post-racial America.
its performing of the historical materialism Benjamin describes, in which the
jarring confrontation of the past and the present radically alters the landscape of
the present.
Walter Benjamin, in 1935, famously described what he called the ‘optical
unconscious’ of photography. Photography, as a technology of vision, enables its
viewers to see – both literally and metaphorically – those aspects of everyday life
that remain invisible to the naked eye.
For Benjamin a committed Marxist, photography might function as a tool to enable
people to see the crimes of capitalism, to see the world they inhabit for what it is:
‘isn’t every square inch of our cities a crime scene?’ he asks. ‘Every passer- by a
culprit? Isn’t it the task of the photographer . . . to reveal the guilt and to point out
the guilty in his pictures?’
As Benjamin explains, ‘film furthers insight into the necessities governing our
lives by its use of close-ups, by its accentuation of hidden details in familiar
objects, and by its exploration of commonplace milieu through the ingenious
guidance of the camera’. The camera performs a revelation; the revelation is
political because it lends itself to action, to making visible new possible sites of
intervention; he continues, ‘it manages to assure us of a vast and unsuspected
field of action’ .
Film, in Benjamin’s account, has radical, even revolutionary potential in its
capacity to awaken people to the dominant ideologies that appear invisible,
‘natural’, normalized, and that nevertheless govern their lives.
-He writes, ‘Our bars and city streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our
railroad stations and our factories seemed to close relentlessly around us. Then
came film and exploded this prison-world with the dynamite of the split second,
so that now we can set off calmly on journeys of adventure among its far-flung
debris. With close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended ...
Clearly, it is another nature which speaks to the camera as compared to the eye’
-collective mode of reception and the other with
-its training of perception.
-the fundamental material conditions of society that are generally masked by
ideology, is precisely the work done by the film,
In structuring perception, the cinema can facilitate what Benjamin envisions as a
process of coming to consciousness about the material oppressive conditions of
society that are shrouded by ideology.
‘A representation that alienates is one which allows us to recognize its subject, but at
the same time makes it seem unfamiliar’. In this process of defamiliarization, that
which is familiar and thus often invisible, is rendered strange, unnatural.
At any given historical moment, a society’s dominant ideologies – be they
capitalist, or white supremacist, or patriarchal – seem natural, timeless.
-to enable the masses to see through the naturalized, reified, familiar configurations of
society –
‘Crude thoughts’, writes Benjamin ‘have a special place in dialectical thinking because
their sole function is to direct theory toward practice ... a thought must be crude to find
its way into action’.
-mechanisms for defamiliarization that force such crude thoughts, and predispose the
audience towards action by ‘aligning the masses with reality’.
‘Every representation is also playing with what is represented, and perhaps
playing with horror aims at letting people come to terms with things they are otherwise
blindly subject to’.
=utulize the genre to make an unimaginable reality imaginable and visible.
– the mechanics of horror are here engaged in a project of re-representing the
present.
In other words, the typical horror film usually offers some kind of terrifying psychological
fantasy. the terrifying nightmare is everyday reality.
-The stylistic conventions of horror – its shocks and jolts – interrupt the forward
movement of the narrative. They have the effect of forcing viewers back into their own
bodies, breaking the narrative ‘spell’.
These moments of interruption can be intellectually productive. Horror is one of the
‘body’ genres, in that it engages its spectators in a physical, visceral way. I want to
emphasize here how in the case of horror, one’s body is put on alert, made to feel
uncomfortable. And this discomfort is achieved affectively.
through artificial means (outrageous, unrealistic plots, heavy-handed visual and aural
shocks), the present and everyday is rendered unfamiliar and grotesque in order to
bring the real conditions of society into sharp relief.
The true horror of the Armitage house, though, emerges gradually as the veneer of
normalcy begins to peel away;
-the film literalizes an exaggerated version of white exploitation of blacks: the film offers
a kind of science-fiction version of slavery where white people steal black bodies and
use them for their own purposes. By setting this ‘slavery’ in the present day, the film
points to the violence still perpetrated against African Americans,
-suggesting that racist exploitation is alive and well even among supposedly liberal
white people.
- it uses the conventions of horror to expose everyday racial violence;
- the film relies on a dialectic of sleeping and waking up – a dialectic literalized by the
tension between hypnosis on the one hand and the photograph as a tool for vision
on the other; and
-third, the film performs the kind of historical materialism called for by Benjamin, in
which
-the jarring confrontation of the past and
-the present
-radically alters the way we read the present.
The film uses the formal mechanics of horror not for cheap thrills, but to advance
a point about the invisibility of racial exploitation among ‘liberal’ whites.
is the very explicit dialectic the film sets up between sleeping, as signified by hypnosis
and the ‘sunken place’, and waking up and coming to consciousness, a process largely
enabled by the camera and photography more generally.
the sunken place is a place of black paralysis, a place of imprisonment that exists
within white liberalism under the banner of the post-racial.
the most startling and horrifying images of the film – the slave auction. In this scene,
there is cross cutting between Rose and Chris, out by the lake, having a normal
conversation about Chris’s plan to return to the city, and the unthinkable,
abnormal, live auctioning of a human being. The cross cutting here emphasizes
the coex- istence of these two events – this auction is literally happening within,
and is perhaps a central facet of, liberal white society. By depicting a slave
auction – white people in a seemingly civilized fashion bidding on a black body –
the film performs a radical form of history-writing, bringing the present into
contact with an unexpected past precisely to interrupt the present, to serve as a
wake-up call.
Bernjamin: ‘It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is
present its light on what is past; rather . . . what has been comes together in a
clash with the now to form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics at a
standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is purely temporal,
-the relation of the what-has-been to the now is dialectical: not only temporal in nature
but figural’ (Benjamin 1999, p. 463).
History is only ever a product of the present, a dialectic between
-what was
-with what is, and
--as such possesses the capacity
-to expose the crisis of the present.
-The slave auction in the present forces us to re-read the present in a radically different
way. ‘Articulating the past historically’ writes Benjamin (2003, p.391), ‘does not mean
recognizing it “the way it really was.”
-It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger.
Historical materialism wishes to hold fast that image of the past which unexpectedly
appears to the historical subject in a moment of danger’. The slave auction in the
present is just such an image. It calls attention to the emergency that is the present.
By imaging – quite literally figuring on screen the slave auction in contemporary,
ostensibly ‘post-racial’American society– the film brings the present to crisis through a
historical materialist gesture.
It is history aimed at changing the course of the present, at rupturing the status quo
by awakening people to the reality in which they live by bringing the past into a
dialectical relationship with the present. The task of history as here imagined is to
render visible the material conditions and the social relations that are masked by
ideology.
-one such strategy is to defamiliarize the present, to render it strange.
-It is by means of his camera that the true conditions of racial exploitation in
contemporary America become legible.
uses this technology to constellate the past and the present in order to radically reframe
the present.
visual and aural strategies to defamiliarize the everyday with a goal of, in Kracauer’s
words, ‘letting people come to terms with things they are otherwise blindly subject to’.
By juxtaposing a highly recognizable everyday with those elements that seem
unimaginable – we are seeing what we cannot be seeing,:
- a slave auction in 2017 America –