1. What is Cinema? Critical Approaches Postcolonialism II

2. Lecture structure
1. The postclassical and the postcolonial 2. Ethnographic cinema and the ‘third eye’ 3. Why white people are funny

3. 1. The postclassical and the postcolonial
( 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

4. The anticolonial and the postcolonial

5. From the classical (1970s apparatus theory) to the postclassical (performance, parody and recontextualisation as strategies of resistance)

6. 2. Ethnographic cinema and the ‘third eye’
Tobing Rony focuses on the ‘ethnographic’ in seeking ‘to explain what I see as the pervasive “racialization” of indigenous peoples in both popular and traditional scientific cinema’ (Tobing Rony, The Third Eye, p. 8)

7. Félix-Louis Regnault’s chronophotography (late 19thc)
Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922)
King Kong (Merian C. Cooper, 1933)

8. the ‘third eye’
‘For a person of colour growing up in the United States, the experience of viewing oneself as an object is profoundly formative’ (Tobing Rony, p. 4)
‘We turn to the movies to find images of ourselves and find ourselves reflected in the eyes of others’ (ibid.)

9. Tobing Rony draws on the writing of W. E. Dubois and Frantz Fanon
Tobing Rony draws on the writing of W. E. Dubois and Frantz Fanon. For Fanon, too, the cinema offers ‘third eye’ experiences.

10. Concerning Violence (Göran Olsson, 2014)

11. ‘the movements, the attitudes, the glances of the other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye’ (Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 82)

13. ‘With another eye I see how I am pictured as a landscape, a museum display, an ethnographic spectacle, an exotic’ (Tobing Rony, p. 17)
But the ‘third eye’ can be mobilised as a political tool by performers in ethnographic films.

14. Tobing Rony: reappropriation and parody of ethnographic tropes by indigenous filmmakers; performance strategies
Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (Tracey Moffat, Australia, 1990)

15. Gesture vs. language

16. 3. Why white people are funny
Qallunaat! Why White People are Funny (Mark Sandiford and Zebedee Nungak, Canada, 2007)

17. Qallunaat parodies (cinematic) ethnography by
reappropriating archival film
mocking the scientific pretensions of filmmakers like Flaherty
emphasising performance
exploring language