hooks - Reel to Real

hooks, bell. Reel to Real: Race, Class and Sex at the Movies. New York: Routledge, 2009.

Argument
Hollywood suffers from inherent white supremacy, as well as masculine dominance. As a result, it is extremely difficult for films to portray minorities and women in a non-discriminatory way.

Hooks writes approvingly of Stuart Hall's theories on audience viewing, and describes that blacks must find themselves consistently viewing films from an oppositional viewpoint. "When most black people in the United States first had the opportunity to look at film and television, they did so fully aware that the mass media was a system of knowledge and power reproducing and maintaining white supremacy. To stare at the television, or mainstream movies, to engage its images was to engage its negation of black representation. It was the oppositional black gaze that responded to these looking relations by developing an independent black cinema. ...looking was also about contestation and confrontation." 255-6

Hooks also notes the difficulty for black filmmakers in creating a truly radical, revolutionary, oppositional portrayal of blacks. In fact, she credits some white filmmakers with proceeding further into avant-garde experimentation and thus having better success in this area.

Connection
Hooks is an Arnheimian: "Movies make magic. They change things. They take the real and make it into something else right before our very eyes. ... They give the reimagined, reinvented version of the real." 1

She also mentions Stuart Hall (noted above). She complicates Laura Mulvey's discussion of the male gaze, noting that black viewers would have a much more complex reaction to the scopophilic gaze of a white female sex object. She also approvingly mentions Manthia Diawara's theories on the power of the spectator, and the rupture that occurs when the spectator resists "complete identification with the film's discourse." (Diawara's words)

Mulvey - "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” From Braudy, Leo, and Marshall Cohen. Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, 837-848.

Argument
Mulvey applies Freudian analysis to break down the gender issues she sees as inherent in mainstream Hollywood cinema. She notes that while independent films are increasingly economically possible, such films can only position themselves in opposition to the norm she is describing here.

There are two contradictory aspects of the pleasurable structure of looks within Hollywood cinema
1. Scopophilia
2. The narcissistic aspect of identifying with the male lead as the ideal likeness of the self (ego). There is pleasure in seeing the male lead exert power and get the girl in the end.

Mulvey subsequently breaks down how these aspects play out in film - how directors position the female lead as the object of the look, how the medium emphasizes female as object (darkened room, you can't see the camera)

She discusses the films of Sternberg & Dietrich, and the construction of Dietrich's characters as erotic objects. Then she goes further into Hitchcock's Marnie, Vertigo, and Rear Window as key examples.

Key Terms
scopophilia - taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze. As in, the film audience's pleasure taken from watching an actress as sex symbol. Voyeurism.