Expanding media: crowd-sourced works, ubiquitous media, virtual reality, Internet art

Virtual Life – 2 critiques

 She Puppet by Peggy Ahwesh, 2001, 15:00
“SHE PUPPET is an homage to and a commentary on the female action adventure game Tomb Raider and it’s busty virtual superstar Lara Croft. I played the game on my computer and simutaneously recorded the gameplay onto videotape. Then i treated the material as «found footage» and recut it to my own artistic ends. The limited inventory of Lara’s gestures and the militaristic scenarios of the game are interesting from a feminist perpective and an analysis of the symbolic feminine and the popular culture that has sprung up around Lara Croft. Quotations are from three authors who philosophize the alien, the clone and the orphan: The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, The Female Man by Joanna Russ and the jazz mystic Sun Ra.” –Peggy Ahwesh

from Electronic Arts Intermix:

Re-editing footage collected from months of playing Tomb Raider, Ahwesh transforms the video game into a reflection on identity and mortality. Trading the rules of gaming for art making, she brings Tomb Raider’s cinematic aesthetics to the foreground, and shirks the pre-programmed “mission” of its heroine, Lara Croft. Ahwesh acknowledges the intimate relationship between this fictional character and her player. Moving beyond her implicit feminist critique of the problematic female identity, she enlarges the dilemma of Croft’s entrapment to that of the individual in an increasingly artificial world.

from Video Data Bank:
Lara Croft, the virtual girl-doll of the late 20th century, is recast as a triad of her personas: the alien, the orphan, and the clone in this work based on appropriated footage from the game Tomb Raider.

http://www.tombraiders.net/stella

Tom Raider (1996):
Lara Croft is an English archeologist in search of ancient treasures.

The POV is third person – Lara Croft is always visible. Emphasis on solving puzzles, avoiding traps, and doing amazing jumps through the landscape. Gunplay is mostly about shooting threatening animals, although occasionally there’s a human opponent. The goal is to find artifacts that unlock the secrets of Atlantis. There’s more to it than that.

and

Prim Limit by eteam (2009), 32 min, video, Second Life/United States

The eteam: Franziska Lamprecht & Hajoe Moderegger
http://www.meineigenheim.org/videos/media/primlimit.html

“If second lives have grown into the landscape of social network space and avatars engage a full range of human emotions and experience, it follows that they would eventually encounter existential questions. Prim Limit traces this fascinating unexpected trajectory. A plot of land is purchased in the online 3D Second Life network and a simple question is asked: Where do discarded 3D objects go and can we build a dumpster to accommodate them?” – eteam

online updates on the game before the video was made from:
http://c-cyte.blogspot.com/2008/08/update-program-week-four.html

Update: The Program, Week Four, August 16, 2008

But here’s the scoop on one installation new this week. In Second Life, eteam has created a dumpster for the virtual things people there decide to delete. At right, see a bunch of “virtual-virtual” objects selected by me, Danette Dufilho, and AC Abbott per eteam’s guidelines to resemble such discarded items (which were of course originally designed to look real). These objects were then photographed by Ben Britt and me from multiple angles, and eteam used the photographs to construct virtual-virtual-virtual objects, which they placed in their dumpster in Second Life — see the following virtual photographs of the objects they made and put there (if you see the objects in “Real Life,” eteam’s work is even more impressive — nice work, eteam!). Next, eteam “filmed” the programmed decay of these objects, sent me the file, and it’s playing on the tv included in the installation.
The artists see Second Life Dumpster as “a continuation of their interest in the value of property, possibilities of land use, (web) site specificity, ownership, and investment.”
I also see this project as, among other things, part of a trend toward art as mad scientist-experiment.

and from Lafayette Art Galleries, Lafayette College, Easton PA

Eteam’s Prim Limit, is a poetic meditation created from the materials collected during eteam’s year-long project in Second Life—the online, three-dimensional virtual social network. There, the artist collective gained a piece of land and opened a public plein-air dumpster in which Second Life players could discard their trash. Eteam’s project focused on what is discarded in Second Life, what happens with these items when no longer wanted, and the players’ attitudes toward the debris. Throughout a year, the artists observed the dumpster, its continual changes, and the occasional visitors. The video is accompanied by narration from one of the avatars, music samples, as well as quotations from Samuel Beckett’s Endgame,television and movies like Twin Peaks, Sin City and Lord of the Rings, creating the atmosphere of emptiness, entrapment and decay, while also capturing human aspects and intimate interactions in this curious world, which instead of an ideal utopian model, turns out to be just another reiteration of a life dictated by consume-and-discard.

btw, What is a prim? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tlcXwR-A2s

and btw, What is a prim limit?http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Video_Tutorial/Land/Region_%26_parcel_prim_limits

or same same here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OF8XM3vyDmA

and

Larger essay: TK eteam, July 2013, with more detailed information

http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/279001/tk-eteam

 

Augmented Reality

Uncovr App – New Yorker magazine augmented reality cover

Cover Story: Christoph Niemann’s “On the Go”
by Françoise Mouly and Mina Kaneko, May 2016

 “The idea of an augmented or virtual reality is inherent in any drawing—it’s almost the definition of a drawing,” the artist Christoph Niemann says. “If you create a world on paper, you create a window. Usually, you just break the surface with your mind, but you always have the feeling of: What if you could step into that world or if something could come out of it?” Niemann’s work “On the Go” appears—in a first for the magazine—on both the front and the back covers of this week’s Innovators Issue. In another first, his images are the prompt for an animated three-dimensional city that is revealed when you look at either cover on your tablet or phone through an app. Niemann says of the concept, “In a drawing, the barrier between the real world and the made-up world is the surface, so at the very beginning I thought of an elevator with its doors closing. But then I realized that the subway is even better, because it really does take you to a different world. The closing doors are a flat surface that separates two worlds, and so are the covers of a magazine—separating before you read it and after you read it, what you know and don’t know, how your views change. So between the front and the back cover, and the experience created by the app, I like that we could show essentially two different angles on the same world. Like stepping through a mirror.”

Layar App – another augmented reality app – can’t get it to work!

Virtual reality video

The Fight for Falluja, NY Times
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ar0UkmID6s

The Displaced, NY Times
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecavbpCuvkI

Seeking Pluto’s Frigid Heart, NY Times
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIxQXGTl_mo

Ted Talk by Chris Milk: How Virtual Reality Can Create the Ultimate Empathy Machine
https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_milk_how_virtual_reality_can_create_the_ultimate_empathy_machine

Online, Interactive and Internet Art

The Question Bridge: Black Males
crowd-sourced online documentary
by Chris Johnson, Hank Willin Thomas, Bayette Ross Smith, Kamal Sinclair

http://questionbridge.com/

from Sundance New Frontier
http://www.sundance.org/programs/new-frontier

So what is Question Bridge: Black Males?
The Question Bridge: Black Males project is a platform for Black men of all ages and backgrounds to ask and respond to questions about life in America. We created it to stimulate connections and understanding among Black men, but we also wanted to show the diversity of thought, character and identity in the Black male population so rarely seen in American media. In essence, we want to represent and redefine Black male identity in America.

In 2012, the project launched as a documentary-styled video art installation, but since then, it has expanded to include an interactive website and mobile app, community engagement events and an education curriculum for high school students.

Why do you feel the need to redefine black male identity?
Because we want to break down the negative perceptions people have about Black males. American media rarely shows whole, complex and authentic images of black men, so by creating a space where these images can live, we hope that people will start to see things differently.

So what exactly is a “Question Bridge?”
It’s a method used by those who want to create honest expression and healing dialogue among members of a particular group. It works like this: first, one person asks a question looking into camera, as if they are talking directly to another person. Later, another person responds by talking directly into a camera. This question-answer exchange, the Question Bridge, reduces the stress of normal face-to-face conversations and makes people feel more comfortable with expressing their deeply held feelings on topics that divide, unite and puzzle. This was the central approach used in the project.

and

Rome: Three Dreams of Black, an interactive film by Chris Milk
http://www.ro.me/

and

18 Days of Egypt
http://beta.18daysinegypt.com/

and

Indirect Flights by Joe Hamilton

http://indirect.flights/

Daniel Temkin
Cameron’s World by Cameron Askin
http://www.cameronsworld.net/

“Cameron’s World is a web-collage of text and images excavated from the buried neighbourhoods of archived GeoCities pages (1994–2009).”

Hyperallergic Art site review and links:

http://hyperallergic.com/230415/hundreds-of-geocities-images-organized-neatly/

from Wikipedia: What is GeoCities?

Yahoo! GeoCities (also known as GeoCities) is a web hosting service, currently available only in Japan. It was founded in November 1994 by David Bohnett and John Rezner, and was called Beverly Hills Internet (BHI) for a very short time. On January 28, 1999, GeoCities was acquired by Yahoo!; at that time it was the third-most visited website on the World Wide Web. In its original form, site users selected a “city” in which to place their web pages. The “cities” were named after real cities or regions according to their content—for example, computer-related sites were placed in “SiliconValley” and those dealing with entertainment were assigned to “Hollywood”—hence the name of the site. Shortly after its acquisition by Yahoo!, this practice was abandoned in favor of using the Yahoo! member names in the URLs.

In April 2009, approximately ten years after Yahoo! bought GeoCities, the company announced that it would shut down the United States GeoCities service on October 26, 2009. There were at least 38 million user-built pages on GeoCities before it was shut down. The GeoCities Japan version of the service is still available.

Shortly after the GeoCities closing announcement, the Internet Archive announced a project to archive GeoCities pages, stating “GeoCities has been an important outlet for personal expression on the Web for almost 15 years.” Internet Archive made it their task to ensure the thoroughness and completeness of their archive of GeoCities sites. The website InternetArchaeology.org also archived and is showcasing artifacts from GeoCities. The operators of the Web site Reocities downloaded as much of the content hosted on GeoCities as they could before it shut down in the intent to create a mirror of GeoCities, albeit an incomplete one.

Kyle McDonald, artist

https://vimeo.com/kylemcdonald

Body Anxiety

http://bodyanxiety.com/gallery/landing/

“Curators Leah Schrager and Jennifer Chan pulled together 21 artists including Kate Durbin, Ann Hirsch, and Faith Holland to explore gender constructs in contemporary art in this online-only exhibition. Unlike most projects that make this list, though, Body Anxiety isn’t mainly concerned with how artists experiment with the internet as canvas but rather takes advantage of the visibility and accessibility of online platforms to celebrate the female voice.”

Code Art

working from the code
http://danieltemkin.com/Tutorials


*Glitch art, Nick Briz
data bending
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOemlx2sBIo&feature=relmfu

The Vernacular of File Formats, Rosa Menkman
http://rosa-menkman.blogspot.com/2010/08/vernacular-of-file-formats-2-workshop.html

Clouds in Cloudless Skies from Glenn Marshall on Vimeo.

http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/premiere-dive-into-the-clouds-in-this-code-generated-music-video

“Clouds in Cloudless Skies” is a boundless, four-and-a-half minute ode to the infinitude of all things procedurally-generated. Entirely created in Processing, this one is a swan-dive into a sprawling visual soundscape, materialized without the use of video camera technology. 

What is ubiquitous media?

In the 2003 short paper “Creating and Experiencing Ubimedia“, members of my research group sketched a new conceptual model for interconnected media experiences in a ubiquitous computing environment. At the time, we observed that media was evolving from single content objects in a single format (e.g., a movie or a book), to collections of related content objects across several formats. This was exemplified by media properties like Pokemon and Star Wars, which manifested as coherent fictional universes of character and story across TV, movies, books, games, physical action figures, clothing and toys, and American Idol which harnessed large-scale participatory engagement across TV, phones/text, live concerts and the web. Along the same lines, social scientist Mimi Ito wrote about her study of Japanese media mix culture in “Technologies of the Childhood Imagination: Yugioh, Media Mixes, and Otaku” in 2004, and Henry Jenkins published his notable Convergence Culture in 2006. We know this phenomenon today as cross-media, transmedia, or any of dozens of related terms.

Coming from a ubicomp perspective, our view was that the implicit semantic linkages between media objects would also become explicit connections, through digital and physical hyperlinking. Any single media object would become a connected facet of a larger interlinked media structure that spanned the physical and digital worlds. Further, the creation and experience of these ubimedia structures would take place in the context of a ubiquitous computing technology platform combining fixed, mobile, embedded and cloud computing with a wide range of physical sensing and actuating technologies. So this is the sense in which I use the term ubiquitous media; it is hypermedia that is made for and experienced on a ubicomp platform in the blended physical/digital world.

Of course the definitions of ubicomp and transmedia are already quite fuzzy, and the boundaries are constantly expanding as more research and creative development occur.

What is Afrofuturism?

All Credits go to Del Tha Funkee Homosapien and Dan the Automator. This is the 2008 Re-issue of the original 2000 Album by the rap group Deltron 3030

 

Warp 9, 1983

Samuel Delany, science-fiction author who wrote my favorite book of all time, Dhalgren.

loz-delany2016

Samuel Ray Delany, Jr. (/dəˈleɪni/; born April 1, 1942), Chip Delany to his friends, is an American author, professor and literary critic. His work includes fiction (especially science fiction), memoir, criticism, and essays on sexuality and society.

from http://www.conceptualfiction.com/dhalgren.html

Okay, some folks will want to read the whole dang
thing-a-ma-boob. Delany sets the tone from the
opening three sentences:

to wound the autumnal city. So howled out for the world
to give him a name.  The in-dark answered with the wind.

And if you didn’t appreciate it sufficiently the first
time, you will get a second chance eighty pages
later, when the protagonist finds a handwritten
journal which he decides to peruse. The opening
page begins: “to wound the autumnal city…”  
We’re back where we started. And after you’ve
trudged your way from page 80 to page 800, you
may think you still haven’t gone too far.

You want to know more about the protagonist?  
Well, there’s not much too say. He doesn’t know
his age, his name, his purpose. People call him
Kidd. Or some people call him the Kid. His
setting is almost as ambiguous as his past. He has
arrived in the post-apocalyptic city Bellona, where a
few straggling survivors contrive makeshift
existences in the aftermath of….Well, I haven’t
figured that one out. Something bad must have
happened in Bellona, but if author Delany knows
what it is, he ain’t telling.

But Bellona is a strange city. “I go down a street:
buildings are burning,” remarks one of the aimless
drifters who pass as characters in this book. “I go
down the same street the next day.  They’re still
burning.  Two weeks later, I go down the same
street and nothing looks like it’s been burned at all.  
Maybe time is just running backward here. Or
sideways. But that’s impossible too.” Strange
things are also happening in the sky. Morning light
comes from different directions, depending on the
day. On a rare evening, when the smoke and haze
clear, two moons are seen in the sky. A few days
later, the sun grows to huge proportions, yet the
temperature doesn’t change. Then the sun
subsides, and the haze returns.

Octavia Butler, sci-fi and fantasy author (now properly termed “speculative fiction”)

butler_signing

Octavia Estelle Butler (June 22, 1947 – February 24, 2006) was an American science fiction writer. A multiple recipient of both the Hugo and Nebula awards, Butler was one of the best-known women in the field. In 1995, she became the first science fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Fellowship, nicknamed the “Genius Grant”.

Her writing, from Wikipedia

Patternist series

  • Patternmaster (Doubleday 1976; Avon 1979; Warner 1995)
  • Mind of My Mind (Doubleday 1977; Warner 1994)
  • Survivor (Doubleday 1978)
  • Wild Seed (Doubleday 1980; Warner 1988, 2001)
  • Clay’s Ark (St. Martin’s Press 1984; Ace Books 1985; Warner 1996)
  • Seed to Harvest (Grand Central Publishing 2007; omnibus excluding Survivor)

Xenogenesis series

  • Dawn (Warner 1987, 1989, 1997)
  • Adulthood Rites (Warner 1988, 1977)
  • Imago (Warner 1989, 1997)
  • Xenogenesis (Guild America Books 1989; omnibus)
  • Lilith’s Brood (Warner 2000; omnibus)

Parable series (also referred to as the Earthseed series)

  • Parable of the Sower (Four Walls, Eight Windows 1993; Women’s Press 1995; Warner 1995, 2000).
  • Parable of the Talents (Seven Stories Press 1998; Quality Paperback Book Club 1999; Women’s Press 2000, 2001; Warner 2000, 2001)

Standalone novels[edit]

  • Kindred (Doubleday 1979; Beacon Press 1988, 2004).
  • Fledgling (Seven Stories Press 2005; Grand Central Publishing 2007).

Short story collections[edit]

  • Bloodchild and Other Stories (Four Walls, Eight Windows, 1995; Seven Stories Press, 1996, 2005; second edition includes “Amnesty” and “The Book of Martha”).
  • Unexpected Stories (2014, includes “A Necessary Being” and “Childfinder”)

Essays and speeches[edit]

 

and, of course, Sun Ra and his Arkestra, from the brilliant concept performance Space is the Place (1974)

“Excerpt from the introduction of Space is the Place (1974), starring Sun Ra.”

 

Notes on the Readings: Representing the Races or, “who’s zooming who?”

Issues in Part 9 or Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contyemporary Readings

Construction of racial identity:
a. Representational – what is being shown, seen

b. Institutional – how the representational comes into being – the film industry, creative control, participation in production process (director, camera, crew, editor, writer) – history of exclusion in the process

Decline of the studio system in the US:

  • Rise of independent cinema including financing practices
  • Filmmakers rooted in Black culture, representation changed and how representations came into being changed

Making statements:

Getting rid of negative images that reinforce harmful stereotypes

Creating positive images

Losing context and rootedness

The complete interview with Color Adjustment director, Marlon Riggs:

http://www.pbs.org/pov/coloradjustment/video/marlon-riggs-uncut-1992/

Frantz Fanon, from Black Skin, White Masks

Who is it that waits in line for a film? How is one person’s waiting in line for a film different from another’s? The different sense of “I” that emphasis on “skin color” dictates for Black people. The idea that Blackness is up for interpretation and for judgement by those who don’t possess this “quality.”

The Black person has to take an extra step into his/her sense of self to be free of imposed identities and expectations, in order to see and be the self that is actually there.

This is mirrored in film representations of Black characters and other characters of color in films – these characters come to represent something additionally by their “fact of blackness”. This applies to all non-white characters. It leads to phrases such as “happens to be Black” as a possible or desired route out of this scenario, but that, in itself, begins to set up a process of denial.

What is ontology? The study of “being.” What is the nature of being, what does it mean “to be?”

The identity of the Black person comes into being through the other. Consciousness of the body comes to the foreground and the body, which is primarily what we use to gain our consciousness in the world, becomes that which is seen and identified (“Look, a negro!”) when the body belongs to a Black person. The state of being Black is both imposed from the outside and nascent, essential, from the inside. The essential being of the Black person comes from outside that person via identification.

Where, today, do we see this most publicly? Profiling, a most deadly form of stereotyping.

Fanon calls this creating a “real dialectic between my body and the world.” The body has to be reclaimed by its rightful owner.

Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, from Unthinking Eurocentrism

Let’s discuss academic language:

Manichean: based in dualities: good and evil, either/or, no middle ground, the struggles of opposites

Discussion of gender, sexuality, race, nationality/ethnicity in relation to each other, no in separate terms. This is a step in the right direction (horizontal). Comes to define multiculturalism. They call it “cultural syncretism.” They call it “polycentric multiculturalism.” Horizontal, and not vertical. A fusion of differences.

Why a fusion? Because that’s what we actually have – ongoing and ever-changing. Nothing, no one, no culture stays the same.

Struggles over representation: who struggles? First of all, people who don’t like the way they’ve been presented to the world, collectively. This leads us to the idea of realism and truth, or objectivity. What would be a more realistic way of representing the races?

Post-structuralism: we have no language for “the real,” no way of representing it. Everything is language-construction.

Tactics:

Progressive realism – self-determined representation, creating a vision of real identity by those who hold that identity. The problem is that what is real is always framed ideologically, and therefore hard to get to.

Art/film is constructed. So we have to come up with constructions that we like at this moment in our history, that say what needs to be said at this moment. What we say is therefore, “historically constructed.” This is what is meant by discourse. What conversation, what construction of reality, are you in conversation with?

Reality is meant to be distorted. That’s all it can be within systems or institutions of representation. But this is where discursive strategy comes in – strategies of what you want to say and how best to say it. Being accurate or being inaccurate don’t figure into the equation. In fact, there is no equation. There’s only moving, spreading, horizontally.

In thinking of reality, or realistic representations, remember that the audience, too, has its own ideas of what is real and what is true, and what is the best way to say it. So the factors become numerous and the truth needs a vehicle that is a creative vehicle, not necessarily on a path to realism.

Dangerous ground, p. 806, first para., where stereotypes of ethnic whites are not as harmful as stereotypes of more systematically oppressed people within the same society. I don’t think it’s a matter of degrees. It’s a matter of history and a valuable lesson in how various immigrant groups became white, in America, regardless of DNA.

Question: why try to bargain with Hollywood to create better (whatever that can be) images of Black people in cinema? Hollywood is not in the business of social justice. It’s in the business of making money.

Question: then should we look to audiences? Elected representatives? Funders and other rich people to save the day? This is the problem of capitalism – not that it represents the desire of the people in terms of their wallets and in order to work, it has to respond to the market demand, but that institutionalized racism is necessary and is, indeed, the absolute foundation of American free enterprise. Slavery defines capitalism. So an ethical solution is a very long-term commitment.

Spike Lee, in a panel at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco, replied to a question by African-American filmmaker Cheryl Dunye about why the female characters and the portrayal of women in his films was sexist. Why he does not understand that feminism is as important an element of liberation statements as is anti-racism. He responded that if she wants more positive images of women in film, she needs to put them in her own films. The conversation, in other words, has many threads and some of them contradict each other.

  1. 810, bottom of the page: “The focus on “good” and “bad” characters in image analysis confronts racist [and I dare say, sexist] discourse on that discourse’s favored ground,” sliding into moralism, “Manichean” schemas of good and evil, and treats complex situations as easily grasped and dealt with.
  2. 813, Toni Morrison notices that moralistic and individualistic (I am not personally racist, e.g.) approaches to stereotyping create situations where both ends of a polar opposite are expressed – one is benevolent, harmless and servile, and at the same time, insane, over-sexed, chaotic, and I might add murderous. These are the good and evil choices. Obviously we need to create new choices, i.e. do what Spike Lee says, make our own movies.

Critique of positive image cinema. Masks of perfection.

In white cinema and television, these masks of perfection work differently. They promote a myth that is not only unrealistic, but also dangerous in that white culture is posited and promoted, and a demand created for it to be the main culture, the only culture, the highest form of national culture. Positive image cinema for people of color, for queers, for other others is a plea for mercy and a show of assimilationist values. We can be just like that! The truth is, no one is just like that. But the myth functions very powerfully to keep everyone in their places.

Richard Dyer, “White”

Trying to make the invisible visible. Another side to the same argument that Franz Fanon is making. Some people get to be simply people. Others acquire a confrontational identity on the way to being themselves.

The idea of winning recognition (Fanon). Depersonalization, denial of recognition.

The invisibility of whiteness, so a great difficulty occurs in winning recognition from people or a force or an idea that you cannot see or define.

A norm that you cannot see – you can only see the results of how it functions within your society.

But this may not be true. What is whiteness? What are white traits? Let’s not discuss dancing, please. Dyer says whiteness comes into focus only in relation to the traits given people of color. This is not an issue of majority/minority, i.e. this is not an off-shoot of a democratic-style construction of culture.

Ana M. Lopez, “Are All Latins from Manhattan?”

Issues that have come up before (e.g. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Bill Nichols): ethnography, anthropology, cultural colonialism

Issues behind the issues: Geopolitical power, multinational corporatism, the military-industrial complex, aka The Good Neighbor Policy. If you scratch the surface a little you’ll get a lot more information and insight into what you’re seeing on the screen.

Latin America as belonging to an earlier era, hence the people there are more innocent, or naïve than savvy colonialists. What is the consciousness of the peasant? (Also a question in DD).

This diplomacy is enacted through the bodies of women. The women, however are real.

The inclusion of Latin America and Latin American stars in Hollywood narratives, scenarios, and screen presences is an expression of ethnography, or at least a nod to ethnography, in displays that come entirely from the needs of Americans and not much, or not at all, from the realities of lives touched by American cultural and corporate encroachment.

I think Lopez does not go far enough in her analysis.

Carmen Miranda, the lady in the tutti-frutti hat. Notice the genius behind every gesture, every bit of comic timing, every skillfully planned sexual innuendo, and the double-entendre in every bit of “broken English.”

Lupe Velez, the Mexican Spitfire. A more problematic representation because her sexuality is confrontational.

Dolores Del Rio, no specific nomenclature to explain her. She is simply a skilled actor, a major screen presence, and a superstar in the Hollywood tradition.

Toni Cade Bambara, “Reading the Signs, Empowering the Eye: Daughters of the Dust and the Black Independent Cinema Movement”

The signs we’re reading are not new, they’ve just been kept out of a more public viewing until the last few decades, where we see Black cinema for Black audiences, which have great appeal with others as well. Our society is still segregated, not legally, as in the era of American apartheid, but socially, as in places of culture, play, learning; as in expectations of income, and careers; as in histories that are still categorized and specialized: Black History.

The idea being that the myths of Hollywood are not only harmful to those whose communities are maligned, but also to the entire society that birthed them. Everyone recognizes when a character is stereotyped. Everyone also recognizes when a character is put into place to represent the opposite of previous stereotyping. What may have once been a threat, or a joke, is now a signifier of that white mask that Fanon refers to.

Filmmakers went to the source, not in response to stereotypes, but as a necessity, as the step to take in order to not engage with white discourse.

At UCLA, the feeder school for Hollywood, students wanted to see more than what was on offer from the official canon of filmmakers and filmmaking. Bambara refers to it as “world film culture.”

This puts into question the idea of the classics. For me, it points to not needing something to be named a classic, but needing open filmic discussions that broaden the language of film: montage/editing; narrative and the narrative arc; archetypal characters (heroes and villains, religious figures, wizards, and all of those characters that don’t need to be explained but have roots in cultural values outside the film narrative).