Reel to Real: Race, Sex and Class at the Movies (Routledge Classics)
Bell Hooks
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0415964806
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Movies matter – that is the message of Reel to Real, bell hooks’ classic collection of essays on film. They matter on a personal level, providing us with unforgettable moments, even life-changing experiences and they can confront us, too, with the most profound social issues of race, sex and class. Here bell hooks – one of America’s most celebrated and thrilling cultural critics – talks back to films that have moved and provoked her, from Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction to the work of Spike Lee. Including also her conversations with master filmmakers such as Charles Burnett and Julie Dash, Reel to Real is a must read for anyone who believes that movies are worth arguing about.
The Feminist Movement of Today
day-in-a-life style of presentation demands that the viewer see nothing wrong with this picture. The camera aggressively normalizes. Didactic, these family scenes are presented unproblematically; hence they appear to be positive representations, and Lee fulfills his quest to bring to the big screen “authentic” black aesthetic subjects that are rarely seen. Since Spike Lee’s cinematic genius is best revealed during those moments when the filmmaker documents familiar aspects of a rich black
film leads him to appear more innocent than Telly. In fact, the film suggests that the boys’ homosocial bond masks Casper’s envy of Telly, who is better at exploiting girls. All the usual race, sex, and class hierarchies remain intact in the fictive teenage world Clark creates in Kids. Even when Ruby and Jennie are tested to see if they are HIV positive, the nurses are racially matched. Ruby has a dark-skinned nurse who is as nonchalant about the issue as is the teenager. Jennie has a white
alluring; she can win, through “pussy power,” in the heterosexual patriarchal arena. These images, and others like them, suggest that white females and black males should not be disturbed by racist, sexist hierarchies that pit them against one another but should rather enjoy playing the game, reaping the rewards. Both remain “objects” in relation to white male subjectivity. They share the politics of envy and longing for white male power. Represented as upholding the existing white supremacist
then you try to craft it as best as you can. Why can’t you make a slightly different kind of film but also maybe about the same subject matter with the same sets and the same people and the same everything, but then it’s completely different, and yet it’s also similar? It’s almost like when I was painting. I went through a stage where my painting was very realistic, almost photographic, and at the same time I was painting the same subject matter or emotion in abstract expressionism. Smoke is the
not say that he uses the same kind of camera angle or shot that was so successful in Boyz In the Hood, or any other kind of urban drama, so that there’s always that risk that we will fall in the gap of erasure. Even though Daughters of the Dust is popular, there’s still that risk that five years from now people won’t know Julie Dash’s name as a filmmaker. And people can still talk about Spike as though Spike sprang out of the— A.J.: the head of Zeus. bh: Right, by himself. No other black
