Pawnbroker
• “Blindness should be understood here as the
purest mode of looking, the only way not to turn
away from a reality that is literally blinding:
clairvoyance itself. To direct a frontal look at
horror requires that one renounce distractions
and escape-hatches, first the primary among
them, the most falsely central, the question why,
with the indefinite retinue of academic frivolities
and dirty dracks that it ceaselessly induces.”
(Claude Lanzmann, “Here There is No Why”)
• A film devoted to the Holocaust can only be a
counter-myth, that is, an investigation into the
presentness of the Holocaust, an investigation
into a past whose wounds are so fresh and so
keenly inscribed in consciousness that they
are present in a haunting timelessness.” –
Claude Lanzmann “Here There is No Why”
Mise-en-scene
• Aspects of Mise-en-scene:
– Setting
– Lighting
– Costume and Make-up
– Framing
Montage
• Editing—coordination of one shot with the next.
• Continuity editing—A style of editing marked by its effort to
maintain a continuous and seemingly uninterrupted flow of
action.
• Parallel Editing (or Cross-Cutting)—Altneration between two
shots of two or more locations inviting us to find a
relationship bewteen two or more events. Splicing together
of two points of action occurring at roughly the same time
but at a distance from one another. Creates a conceptual
relationship between the two events or builds suspense.
• Graphic Match—when a filmmaker joins two shots with
some visual similarity.
• Shot-Reverse Shot—when two positions on opposite sides of
the axis of vision are joined, usually through editing.
• Jump cut-A cut that jumps forward with a single action, thus
creating a sense of discontinuity. An ellipsi in time without
the bridging effect of a cut-away.
Common sense” definition of “white”
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“invisible,
“Natural”
the absence of color,
pure,
the standard,
truth,
the norm,
the right way,
the real,
“inevitable,”
Everyday
domestic,
white people are “the regular people,”
“the true Americans,” “vanilla” “Death”,
“otherworldliness” ghostliness
-“order rationality
rigidity, qualities
brought out by the
contrast with black
disorder, irrationality,
and looseness.
-white people as
materially dependent on
black people”—Is this
true of white
representation in
general?
Critical Definition: The Principles of
Whiteness
• “The color around which power, mobility and
capital have arranged themselves”
• A highly exclusive Class category arranged
around color and birth.
• “The unmarked category against which
difference is constructed” (George Lipsitz);
Whiteness is what is and that against which
everything else has to prove itself.
Debunking whiteness
• If, as Dyer suggests, whiteness is the norm, how
do we begin to see it? Look for the strange in
white representations—look for moments of
ethnicity.
• Dyer suggests that some films, particularly those
made in third world or diasporic cinemas, can
debunk whiteness’s normalcy.
• Does Romero’s film do this? What are the limits
of its critique of whiteness?
• Who is the ideal spectator in Romero’s film? How
might white and black people derive pleasure
from the film?