1. What is Cinema? Critical Approaches Postcolonialism II

2. 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, posthumanism

3. Lecture structure
1. Film and the postcolonial 2. Ethnographic cinema and the ‘third eye’ 3. District 9: postcolonial allegory

4. 1. Film and the postcolonial

5. Postcolonialism: the period after colonialism?

6. Postcolonialism: a set of critical practices?

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

8. 2. Ethnographic cinema and 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-white indigenous peoples in ethnographic cinema

9. The ‘third eye’: cinema offers us images of ourselves as seen through other people’s eyes.

10. For Fanon, too, the cinema offers ‘third eye’ experiences.

11. Fanon critiques the white gaze for objectifying and fixing people of colour.
Isaac Julien uses film to ‘unfix’ Fanon and ‘decolonise’ the gaze.

12. ‘With another eye I see how I am pictured as a landscape, a museum display, an ethnographic spectacle, an exotic’ (Tobing Rony, p. 17)
The ‘third eye’ has critical potential; it can help reveal ethnographic and colonial tropes in films such as The Piano.

13. Actor Cliff Curtis

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

15. Gesture vs. speech

16. 3. District 9: postcolonial allegory
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)

17. ‘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)
How appropriate is the traditional conflict-based narrative to the topic of colonialism?

18. 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)