Joshua Glick
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780520293700
- eISBN:
- 9780520966918
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520293700.003.0008
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter considers more resistant forms of national remembrance than those created for the bicentennial celebrations. As Hollywood docudrama incorporated minorities into a streamlined vision of ...
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This chapter considers more resistant forms of national remembrance than those created for the bicentennial celebrations. As Hollywood docudrama incorporated minorities into a streamlined vision of the American social fabric, alternative films depicted a more contentious relationship between a historic present and past. This chapter argues for the persistence of filmmakers’ interest in documentary, even as they experimented with other media or blended fiction and nonfiction. Long-form films and photo-books by the collective Visual Communications (Wataridori: Birds of Passage [1974] and In Movement: A Pictorial History of Asian America [1977]), documentaries made from the collaboration between anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff and director Lynne Littman (Number Our Days [1976]), and the artisanal filmmaking of Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep [1977]) presented more nuanced stories about the resilience of the city’s marginalized communities. Their work on Asian Americans in Little Tokyo, elderly Jews in Venice, and African Americans in Watts denounced national myths of bootstrap individualism and upward mobility, as well as industrial decentralization and uneven downtown redevelopment under the Bradley administration.Less
This chapter considers more resistant forms of national remembrance than those created for the bicentennial celebrations. As Hollywood docudrama incorporated minorities into a streamlined vision of the American social fabric, alternative films depicted a more contentious relationship between a historic present and past. This chapter argues for the persistence of filmmakers’ interest in documentary, even as they experimented with other media or blended fiction and nonfiction. Long-form films and photo-books by the collective Visual Communications (Wataridori: Birds of Passage [1974] and In Movement: A Pictorial History of Asian America [1977]), documentaries made from the collaboration between anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff and director Lynne Littman (Number Our Days [1976]), and the artisanal filmmaking of Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep [1977]) presented more nuanced stories about the resilience of the city’s marginalized communities. Their work on Asian Americans in Little Tokyo, elderly Jews in Venice, and African Americans in Watts denounced national myths of bootstrap individualism and upward mobility, as well as industrial decentralization and uneven downtown redevelopment under the Bradley administration.
Simone C. Drake
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226363837
- eISBN:
- 9780226364025
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226364025.003.0005
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
This chapter uses Hwesu S. Murray v. National Broadcasting Company, Inc., (1987) as a theoretical tool for analysing three films: Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1977); Kasi Lemmon’s The Caveman’s ...
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This chapter uses Hwesu S. Murray v. National Broadcasting Company, Inc., (1987) as a theoretical tool for analysing three films: Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1977); Kasi Lemmon’s The Caveman’s Valentine (2001); and Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012). Considering the Court’s holding that Murray’s sitcom proposal that eventually became NBC’s The Cosby Show was not a “novel” idea and therefore not intellectual property, this chapter turns to culture as a site where images of black people and the production of knowledge around the meaning of those images has directly affected the social and political lives of black people. Film is used to demonstrate the troubling ways in which the government and society view black men’s relationship to black families by reading Murray through the 1965 report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action and the President’s National Fatherhood Initiative. Doing so reveals the insidious haunting effects legal activity and social policy impose on black fathers, and in particular the father-daughter relationship. The haunting is compounded by nationalism, patriarchy, and neoliberalism.Less
This chapter uses Hwesu S. Murray v. National Broadcasting Company, Inc., (1987) as a theoretical tool for analysing three films: Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1977); Kasi Lemmon’s The Caveman’s Valentine (2001); and Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012). Considering the Court’s holding that Murray’s sitcom proposal that eventually became NBC’s The Cosby Show was not a “novel” idea and therefore not intellectual property, this chapter turns to culture as a site where images of black people and the production of knowledge around the meaning of those images has directly affected the social and political lives of black people. Film is used to demonstrate the troubling ways in which the government and society view black men’s relationship to black families by reading Murray through the 1965 report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action and the President’s National Fatherhood Initiative. Doing so reveals the insidious haunting effects legal activity and social policy impose on black fathers, and in particular the father-daughter relationship. The haunting is compounded by nationalism, patriarchy, and neoliberalism.
Peter Lurie
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780199797318
- eISBN:
- 9780190225735
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780199797318.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This book concludes by relating its discussion of visualizing history to the media and the public response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It shows their overly mediated depiction to have a precedent ...
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This book concludes by relating its discussion of visualizing history to the media and the public response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It shows their overly mediated depiction to have a precedent in Civil War photography, and it avers the shared impulse to visualize attending each of these epochal historical events. The Conclusion reads Toni Morrison’s Beloved as offering a salutary “forgetful remembrance” of history in the novel’s model of “rememory” and as an alternative to historicist criticism, as well as to U.S. culture’s visual archiving of a supposedly accessible and remediable past. The discussion also links Morrison’s work to post-9/11 poetry and to contemporary and recent African-American cinema, which, like Beloved, shows the occasion and the need for a willful look forward for both racialized subjects and for the U.S. polity generally in a postdigital age.Less
This book concludes by relating its discussion of visualizing history to the media and the public response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It shows their overly mediated depiction to have a precedent in Civil War photography, and it avers the shared impulse to visualize attending each of these epochal historical events. The Conclusion reads Toni Morrison’s Beloved as offering a salutary “forgetful remembrance” of history in the novel’s model of “rememory” and as an alternative to historicist criticism, as well as to U.S. culture’s visual archiving of a supposedly accessible and remediable past. The discussion also links Morrison’s work to post-9/11 poetry and to contemporary and recent African-American cinema, which, like Beloved, shows the occasion and the need for a willful look forward for both racialized subjects and for the U.S. polity generally in a postdigital age.
