What is Cinema? Critical Approaches Postcolonialism I

Lecture structure Early approaches to colonialism, race and ethnicity: positive and negative images Classical approaches: political positioning and cinematic codes The Battle of Algiers Frantz Fanon: identification, the gaze and violence

Definitions Colonialism: ‘the process by which the European powers (including the United States) reached a position of economic, military, political and cultural domination in much of Asia, Africa and Latin America’ (Stam and Spence, ‘Colonialism, Racism and Representation’) Race: a social invention based primarily on physical criteria Ethnicity: a social invention based primarily on cultural criteria

1. Early approaches to colonialism, race and ethnicity: positive and negative images

Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939): vilifying indigenous Americans

‘Stereotype analysis’ Oliver Twist (David Lean, 1948) Oliver Twist (Roman Polanski, 2005) ‘Stereotype analysis’ Eg Lester Friedman’s Hollywood’s Image of the Jew (1982)

Supposedly ‘positive’ images can have racist connotations.

2. Classical approaches: political positioning and cinematic codes Stam and Spence: stereotype analysis leads to privileging of characterisation over other important concerns We should also consider ‘the mediations which intervene between “reality” and representation’, including narrative structure, genre conventions, film style and spectator positioning.

Classical feminist and postcolonial film theory intersect in their concern with film form and spectator positioning.

Imagery of encirclement

‘Which characters are afforded close-ups and which are relegated to the background? Does a character look and act, or merely appear, to be looked at and acted upon? With whom is the audience permitted intimacy? Is there is off-screen commentary or dialogue, what is its relation to the image?’ (Stam and Spence, ‘Colonialism, Racism and Representation’)

3. The Battle of Algiers Ali La Pointe (Brahim Haggiag) in The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, Italy/Algeria, 1966): extended close- ups; encircled by French military

Saadi Yacef (second from left) Gillo Pontecorvo (on right)

‘How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas ‘How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. Children shoot soldiers at point-blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film.’ (Flyer for screening of The Battle of Algiers. The Pentagon, 2003.)

Influenced by Italian neo-realism and Soviet cinema

Stam and Spence: the film ‘consistently fosters our complicity with the Algerians’ Key sequences suggest that race (as well as gender) is an ideological construction.

4. Frantz Fanon: identification, the gaze and violence

Fanon: colonialism promotes psychological and political identification with the coloniser Les Damnés de la terre reimagined by Ousmane Sembene

Fanon: revolution can disrupt the damaging identification with the coloniser.

‘I am being dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes ‘I am being dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes. I am fixed’ (Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks) Isaac Julien uses film to ‘unfix’ Fanon and ‘decolonise’ the gaze.

Concerning Violence (Göran Olsson, 2014)

Like Fanon, The Battle of Algiers explores the role of violence in colonialism and decolonisation.