Black Cinema.
Description This is an open book exam and you are encouraged to watch the films again if you are having trouble remembering plot points and characters. Remember you can look up character, cast and plot information online – part of your grade will depend upon getting those details right. Do not spend big chunks of your answer recapping the films; only include as much of that detail as is necessary for me to understand your response. It is okay if you repeat my question back to me in your response, but that won’t count as original thinking. Carefully choose specific examples from the movies referred to in the questions to illustrate your answers. You will be required to run your final answers through Turnitin so be sure to use your own words. 1. Religious practices, critiques of organized religion, and depictions of faith and spiritual community recur throughout many of the films we have seen so far this semester. How is the role of religion in Black people’s lives depicted in the following films: “Selma,” “Within Our Gates,” “Daughters of the Dust” and “12 Years a Slave”? How are religious practices and communal expressions of faith presented as indicators of identity, relationships and belonging among Black characters? How is religion shown as a tool for social control and for political organizing? What does Julie Dash seem to be suggesting about Black identity when she presents multiple faith traditions – Muslim, Christian, remnants of African religions – in “Daughters of the Dust”? 2. “12 Years a Slave” (2013), “Rebirth of a Nation” (2007, based on D.W. Griffith’s 1915 “The Birth of a Nation,” “Within Our Gates,” (1920), “Daughters of the Dust” (1991), “Malcolm X” (1992), “Selma” (2014) and “I Am Not Your Negro” (2016) – taken together, these films trace major developments in the history of Black people and relations between Blacks and whites in America, from slavery to Reconstruction, to Jim Crow, to the beginnings of the Great Migration, to the Civil Rights Movement to the present day. Considering these films as a whole, what ideas about Black experience – and white expectations — are this set of filmmakers presenting? What does white supremacy look like as you travel from “12 Years a Slave” through the set of films to “I Am Not Your Negro”? How do these filmmakers depict interactions – of various sorts, not just sexual – between Black and white bodies? What cultural and political critiques of whiteness – and in the case of “Daughters of the Dust,” its absence –are these filmmakers making? Nikole Hannah Jones’ essay in the 1619 magazine is a good refresher for how you might consider these questions