1. What is Cinema? Critical Approaches Postcolonialism II

2. Lecture structure
1. What is postcolonialism? 2. The ‘third eye’ 3. Making whiteness visible 4. District 9: genre, allegory, violence

3. Postclassical film theory
( s) ‘Early’ film theory: Altenloh, Balazs, Eisenstein, Bazin, Kracauer, the Frankfurt School
(1960s-1980s) ‘Classical’ film theory: structuralism, semiotics (the ‘linguistic turn’), psychoanalysis, ideology critique, feminism (sometimes called ‘Screen theory’; Bordwell alludes disparagingly to ‘SLAB’ theory)
(1990s-present) ‘Post-classical’ film theory?: cognitivism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, postmodernism, queer theory, phenomenology, ethics, posthumanism

4. 1. What is postcolonialism?

5. Postcolonialism: the period after colonialism?

6. Postcolonialism: a set of critical ideas and practices.

7. Postcolonial film theory: focus shifts from stereotypes (pre-1980s) to spectatorship and the gaze (1980s onwards)
District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, 2009)

8. 2. The ‘third eye’
King Kong (Merian C. Cooper, 1933)
Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922)
Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle (1996)
Criticises objectification of non-western indigenous peoples, especially in ethnographic film

9. Fanon: experience of being marked as other by the white European gaze
‘With another eye I see how I am pictured as a landscape, a museum display, an ethnographic spectacle, an exotic’ (Tobing Rony, p. 17)

10. The ‘third eye’ has critical potential; it can help reveal colonial and ethnographic tropes in films such as The Piano.

11. Actor Cliff Curtis

12. Tobing Rony: ethnographic tropes can be reappropriated and parodied by non-western indigenous peoples and people of colour in new forms of self-representation.
Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (Tracey Moffat, Australia, 1990)

13. Gesture vs. speech

14. 3. Making whiteness visible
Qallunaat! Why White People are Funny (Mark Sandiford, 2007)
Subverts conventions of ethnographic cinema.

15. Richard Dyer: ‘The photographic media and […] movie lighting assume, privilege and construct whiteness’ (White, p. 89)

17. 4. District 9: genre, allegory, violence
Genre films that allegorise colonial violence
Eg District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, US/New Zealand/Canada/South Africa, 2009); Avatar (James Cameron, US, 2009); Inglorious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, US/Germany, 2009)

18. ‘spectacularly violent, racialised revenge fantasies directed against white-male representatives of organised racial injustice’ (John Rieder, ‘Race and Revenge Fantasies in Avatar, District 9 and Inglourious Basterds’, p. 41)
Do these films use violence legitimately?

20. Commentary on mass media
The responsible spectator?: District 9 makes us ‘infer connections between past and present wrongs carried out in the name of humanity and […] assume responsibility for them’ (Chaudhuri, Cinema of the Dark Side, p. 143)