But, she wrote her essay in 1975, when women were just starting to make films. I pondered films I'd seen recently trying to figure out if what she was saying still held any water, and I decided that it did. But, rather than women being strictly at the mercy of the male gaze I feel that the last thirty years have been a battle waged between the two genders where in many films both gazes can't cohabit the screen peacefully. While strong women, who are the makers of meaning in film, found it hard to find a place in Hollywood films around the time Mulvey wrote her essay, strong male characters for the heterosexual male to relate to became more scarce as well. For a time during the 1970s there was a broader sense in Hollywood of what heterosexual males could view pleasurably. In films like Midnight Cowboy, among others, we started to see a male that broke the mold. It was a film that did not attempt, as Mulvey suggests, to create male characters that the ego of male viewers could connect to and derive pleasure from. Over time, progressing from Rear Window, the ultimate in scophophilic fantasy, to films of the 1970s and 1980s the 'male gaze' comes under fire, and the following film illustrates this in three parts: 1. Male Gaze 2. Female Gaze 3. The conflict.
After creating this film, I felt that I better understood Mulvey, but I also felt that what I had created had little to do with me. I have never felt personally involved in a battle between males and females, and I don't have any real connection to feminist causes. However, it was a fun exercise because it allowed me to look at films that I had already seen just a little bit closer and draw connection that I wasn't sure had been there before. It was like an awakening to a new level of gender-based consciousness of what I watch.
In search of a topic, I continued to review our readings and came across Bell Hooks critique of Hoop Dreams. To me this film and Bell Hooks essay represent a number questions that hit much closer to home for me.
When I was young I didn’t really know what race was until my best friend asked me if I was black. I said, “No stupid I’m brown, can’t you see! Don’t you know your colors?” I was hurt and confused by her question because in Kindergarten who would think of “blackness” as something good?
Colors were very important. There were girl colors and boy colors, pink and blue, and suddenly, for me, there was blackness. Brown was the color of my skin, but as I would soon learn, Black was my race.
Picture me: The only black person at the entire school, except my sister in the grade above. I felt like a tiger-cub raised in a pack of dogs. I could keep up and I ate meat, but where the f**** was my natural habitat?
I had a great childhood. I can’t say anyone ever deliberately said something racist to me, but the struggle I’m talking about is in the details. It’s the little things that drive me crazy, that replay in my mind as I try to sort out the world.
I used to feel relieved to hear, “Oh I don’t see you as black”. And, ss we got older my friends would say this to me, probably to try and make me feel better, but now I can’t stop thinking…. Did they say it because black is a bad thing and they wanted to absolve me of that burden? Or did they say it because they just saw me as a person? Can we ever just see someone as a person?
Today we have to decide these things.
I don’t like to cast the first stone because my history isn’t squeaky clean. When I was a child I dreaded black people. They didn’t accept me because I talked like a white girl and I didn’t accept them because I was ignorant. All I knew about black people came from movies, mtv and the nightly news … not good. Eventually I went away to boarding school and made my first black friends.
The reality of my own inescapable blackness finally set in and I reversed my whole mindset… I came to hate the man… the white man. White people would try to befriend me and I’d be thinking… Does this White person just want to make a “black” friend?
But then…I never could quite decide if wanting to make a black friend because she’s black was a bad thing. It’s still a friend right? Being racist was complicated.
My racism against whites was new to me and luckily the idea didn’t stick for long… to many good people, and they weren’t the exception they were the rule.
I realized my hypocrisy. If I was raised in an all White world and I turned out racist, then how the heck can I expect a white child to grow up sensitive to my black issues. It’s crazy how nothing really bad has to happen to you to make you paranoid if you’re black. I think it’s because we know better than anyone else how vulnerable our image really is.
As I enter into a career where I might be in a position to make choices, I get a bit scared. If I make a film where the black characters are gangsters am I giving another Black child like me or a White child more reason to thing Black is a bad thing to be?
If I can change I think we all can change. Right? I went from being that freak racist black child to someone who appreciates people of all races. Many of my elementary school friends were not so lucky, they never traveled or experienced more black friendships and their prejudice is locked in, like their political affiliation. If what they grew up on is Hollywood films and television, and they grew up racist, something has got to be wrong. I cringe sometimes when I watch Hollywood films because I know how educated the filmmakers are and yet their films confuse me when I see them as a Black person.
For example, I went with a group of my White friends to see the summer blockbuster, The Hangover. My expectations were high, and I didn't come into the film thinking "oh, the main characters are all white." However, by the end of the film I wasn't sure if I would be revoking my Black card if I said I liked it. The only black people in the whole film are Mike Tyson (A violent, stupid, athlete who keeps a pet tiger) and a petty criminal who acts as the typical black comic relief saying things that amount to, "Hey I'm black and black people wouldn't do that." I saw the director of the Hangover defining blacks in this selection and I was too disturbed by the end of the film to even come to a verdict about him. Is he a racist who really thinks that's all there is to Black people? Or is he just so ignorant about the Black gaze that he thought we wouldn't notice or care if the only Blacks in the film were raging stereotypes?
On the one hand, I feel very lucky to have read Bell Hook's critique of Hoop Dreams this year, but on the other hand I feel she has taken me one step deeper into my Black paranoid mania. For years I have had mainstream classic Hollywood films like Gone With the Wind, on my radar, but after this semester even more films are tricky for me to deal with.
Colors were very important. There were girl colors and boy colors, pink and blue, and suddenly, for me, there was blackness. Brown was the color of my skin, but as I would soon learn, Black was my race.
Picture me: The only black person at the entire school, except my sister in the grade above. I felt like a tiger-cub raised in a pack of dogs. I could keep up and I ate meat, but where the f**** was my natural habitat?
I had a great childhood. I can’t say anyone ever deliberately said something racist to me, but the struggle I’m talking about is in the details. It’s the little things that drive me crazy, that replay in my mind as I try to sort out the world.
I used to feel relieved to hear, “Oh I don’t see you as black”. And, ss we got older my friends would say this to me, probably to try and make me feel better, but now I can’t stop thinking…. Did they say it because black is a bad thing and they wanted to absolve me of that burden? Or did they say it because they just saw me as a person? Can we ever just see someone as a person?
Today we have to decide these things.
I don’t like to cast the first stone because my history isn’t squeaky clean. When I was a child I dreaded black people. They didn’t accept me because I talked like a white girl and I didn’t accept them because I was ignorant. All I knew about black people came from movies, mtv and the nightly news … not good. Eventually I went away to boarding school and made my first black friends.
The reality of my own inescapable blackness finally set in and I reversed my whole mindset… I came to hate the man… the white man. White people would try to befriend me and I’d be thinking… Does this White person just want to make a “black” friend?
But then…I never could quite decide if wanting to make a black friend because she’s black was a bad thing. It’s still a friend right? Being racist was complicated.
My racism against whites was new to me and luckily the idea didn’t stick for long… to many good people, and they weren’t the exception they were the rule.
I realized my hypocrisy. If I was raised in an all White world and I turned out racist, then how the heck can I expect a white child to grow up sensitive to my black issues. It’s crazy how nothing really bad has to happen to you to make you paranoid if you’re black. I think it’s because we know better than anyone else how vulnerable our image really is.
As I enter into a career where I might be in a position to make choices, I get a bit scared. If I make a film where the black characters are gangsters am I giving another Black child like me or a White child more reason to thing Black is a bad thing to be?
If I can change I think we all can change. Right? I went from being that freak racist black child to someone who appreciates people of all races. Many of my elementary school friends were not so lucky, they never traveled or experienced more black friendships and their prejudice is locked in, like their political affiliation. If what they grew up on is Hollywood films and television, and they grew up racist, something has got to be wrong. I cringe sometimes when I watch Hollywood films because I know how educated the filmmakers are and yet their films confuse me when I see them as a Black person.
For example, I went with a group of my White friends to see the summer blockbuster, The Hangover. My expectations were high, and I didn't come into the film thinking "oh, the main characters are all white." However, by the end of the film I wasn't sure if I would be revoking my Black card if I said I liked it. The only black people in the whole film are Mike Tyson (A violent, stupid, athlete who keeps a pet tiger) and a petty criminal who acts as the typical black comic relief saying things that amount to, "Hey I'm black and black people wouldn't do that." I saw the director of the Hangover defining blacks in this selection and I was too disturbed by the end of the film to even come to a verdict about him. Is he a racist who really thinks that's all there is to Black people? Or is he just so ignorant about the Black gaze that he thought we wouldn't notice or care if the only Blacks in the film were raging stereotypes?
On the one hand, I feel very lucky to have read Bell Hook's critique of Hoop Dreams this year, but on the other hand I feel she has taken me one step deeper into my Black paranoid mania. For years I have had mainstream classic Hollywood films like Gone With the Wind, on my radar, but after this semester even more films are tricky for me to deal with.
My first encounter with Hoop Dreams was my Sophomore year at Vanderbilt. I watched Hoop Dreams in a documentary class and was awarded a prize by the film's director and producers at the Vanderbilt Film Festival. I was so excited to meet people already so established in the industry that I didn't bother questioning the film on a deeper, more philosophical level until years later. It was one of the first documentaries I ever really enjoyed, so I just left it at that.
Watching the film again for class, I enjoyed the film, but my enjoyment was not the same as it had been all those years ago. I had somehow in the intervening years become a more informed viewer and lost the ability to 'just watch' anything. As a child, I even loved films like Gone With the Wind. I thought, "Gosh, this film is so romantic!" I even thought I wanted to be Scarlett. By 13, I would watch Gone With The Wind and all I could see was racism, like it was written across Scarlett's smug little face. White people I talk to tend not to notice racism in Gone With the Wind because they remember the great stuff, the fantasy of it all, but if you're aware you don't have that luxury.Although it took until now, this semester, to start to question Hoop Dreams the same way I came to question Gone With the Wind, it has finally come to pass and I can't really can't go back.To me there is a certain paranoid mania that comes with being a minority or a woman in this country that makes you look for jabs, even in places where they might not be. It's impossible to 'just watch' anything because there have been so many films that I have seen that have not been sensitive to Black issues or to women etc.
No matter how hard you might try to escape it, if you are not a wealthy white male, you are almost forced to watch films on defense mode. If the only black character is a criminal, does that mean the director has something against black people? Or did he just happen to have cast the movie that way? It can be something subtle or something very overt, but my upbringing into this world and my introduction to Hollywood films has caused me to become slowly more and more difficult to please, in terms of the portrayals of blacks in the media.
I put this short video together to illustrate what I think of when I see this opening sequence from Hoop Dreams. When I wasn't thinking about race I thought it was exciting. But, when I look at it as a black person, I see a typical B-roll shot of the hood, then the magical negroes on the court rising to White fame on a basketball court. It might sound cynical, but someone out there made these deliberate editing choices. They said, "let's put that shot of the hood there to let them know where the boys are coming from, then we'll have this particular shot of a man cheering."
Since Sophomore year, I have created films myself, and in doing so I have discovered the world behind the camera. Through reading Kracauer, Arnheim, Eisenstein, Stam and Mulvey (among others) I have learned film theory. I have learned to question everything about the medium I love, and in doing so I haven't come to love it less but I do think of it very differently. Armed with my new education, I watched Hoop Dreams, and I noticed that the filmmakers captured life and behavior, but what we take away from what they chose to show us is a deliberately constructed message. It could be a very different reality than what we might feel we had seen in the film because that is the power of filmmaking and editing.
There are films like "The Thing Blue Line" and films by Chris Marker etc. that don't involve the level of intentional deception that the creators of Hoop Dreams chose. Instead of creating a film that is highly stylized in terms of camera movement and angles, the Hoop Dreams crew decided to shoot the film like a newsreel. There are some stand-up interviews, but for the most part the filmmakers chose to hide their hand.
But, I can't really judge them for their decisions because the film I created was not doubt a much greater distortion of reality.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhfaMHwHbIM
When I was creating my first 'documentary', "A Home Away From Home," I made a lot of decisions that I can't say aided the reality of my film. I cut out an interview where the mother of the little girl featured in the film discusses how her daughter is a trouble to her because her new boyfriend doesn't like her. She told me she sometimes wished it was just she and her son.There are films like "The Thing Blue Line" and films by Chris Marker etc. that don't involve the level of intentional deception that the creators of Hoop Dreams chose. Instead of creating a film that is highly stylized in terms of camera movement and angles, the Hoop Dreams crew decided to shoot the film like a newsreel. There are some stand-up interviews, but for the most part the filmmakers chose to hide their hand.
But, I can't really judge them for their decisions because the film I created was not doubt a much greater distortion of reality.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhfaMHwHbIM
She also said that her son likes to make up big stories, like the stories he told us for the purposes of the film. Apparently his father was shot at in a car, but the dramatic play of events between father and son described is false.
When we found out in editing that we had a liar on our hands, we could have cut out his interviews, but it suited our ultimate message much more to leave it in the film. I know now that in editing the film, we created something that was so far from "documentary" in some ways that it should not have been included in the category, but I also feel empowered after learning about film theory to break free of the rules that I was taught in my documentary film class.
On one hand, I think that creatively editing a story that people will believe to be reality is an action that can have dangerous and far-reaching consequences. However, as filmmakers we have to creatively edit because it is how we insert or personal vision or a narrative. The real questions that I feel I must ask myself in the future are: Does the film have a duty to stick to reality? And do I have to disclose to the audience any artifice?
In creating my own documentary all those years ago, I thought I had to stick to the rules. Like, 'capture lots of b-roll' so that you can illustrate what the person is saying and stick to your 'truth claim' and gravitate towards capturing footage that will ultimately illustrate that truth claim. I actually went out into the environment of Fannie Battle with a rough script already constructed, and all I really had to do as a filmmaker was capture those events. I wish that my film education at that time had been more extensive so that I could have taken more liberties in shooting the film and creating the soundtrack. I think now that when the truth is already so distorted as soon as the image has been captured, one might as well push the film more deliberatly towards one's own ends. However, at the time I was being taught that the most important thing about non-fiction filmmaking was it's claim to 'truth'. It's why people watch documentaries.
We all have an innate desire to just watch. Mulvey describes it as scophophilia, and when it comes to documentaries, if you use the typical devices to indicate to people that the footage captured is 'real life' they will enter into a state of enjoyment in your work as they get a chance to see the world and meet people they might not have otherwise known. People enjoy a narrative and they enjoy 'learning' about people and places they haven't got a lot of access to. Both Hoop Dreams and Home Away From Home are examples of a films that both tells about the "other" and create a deeply compelling narrative from the lives of the people we watched through the lens.
In the end, I just have to agree with Bell Hooks and Laura Mulvey, about women in film and blacks. The answer is not a simple one to end creative editing or creating laws to govern the portayal of Black is films, but a mass awakening to the existence and reality of these questions. Had I not had experience creating my own 'documentary' I might still believe that a filmmaker could just make a true film without any distortions created by their own personal views. I might also think that directors just happen to portray Blacks in certain ways in their films were it not for the fact that I am Black, and so acutely aware of how Blacks factor into every film I see.
I don't want Hollywood or Documentarians to feel so burdened by rules and stigmas that they can't create films, but I think that before any creates films they should read more film theory. I would have been more conscious about my tampering with reality in A Home Away From Home and perhaps taken more creative ownership in shooting and editing the film if I had been better educated. Maybe, I wouldn't have initially accepted Hoop Dreams at face value. Perhaps, I would have been more conscious all these years of why I enjoy watching films in the first place if I had read Laura Mulvey.
I feel personally connected to a large amount of film criticism because I constantly watch films, but I also live in the real world. Very often the two comment on each other and interact, and I feel that become a better filmmaker and a more critical viewer it is necessary to be educated not only in the technical aspects of creating films, but to have the ability to create films that conscious of the world we live in and other films. In order to make more intentional films in the future, I will continue to read film criticism because it helps me to be more critically diligent about the world in which we live. Even though I'm black, Bell Hooks taught me that I should be an even more enlightened witness of films that might not on the surface seem to be making any intentional racial statement. And, even though I'm a woman, I didn't look at women in film from such a distinct historical and psychological perspective until I read Laura Mulvey. I think that my future as a filmmaker is a little brighter and a little more free after this semester, even though I'm more aware of all the pitfalls I am also more aware of film's potential, and that is more than motivation enough for me to continue into the future.
