Decolonize your holiday movies
Blaxploitation, Lars von Trier, Love Actually, and solidarity in cinema
Here we are at the last Public Seminar newsletter of the year. Before you crash on the couch for a week of movie-watching, consider the counsel of our critics. Bella Okuya dives into the dream-world of slow cinema. Rehana Esmail and Kate Millar chat about a new streaming platform dedicated to decolonizing the film canon. Zenzelé Soa-Clarke considers “an unstable blend of irony and homage” in They Killed Tyrone. Emma Slack-Jørgensen tackles Lars von Trier’s most controversial movie. And the latest Past Present podcast dissects just what is it that’s wrong with Love Actually.
Here’s to a new year of criticism, essays, interviews, scholarly research, and spirited public debate. And until then, happy holidays!
Netflix Revives the Genre of the “Blaxploitation” Film to Attract Black Subscribers
Zenzelé Soa-Clarke
As a genre, Blaxploitation films were often morally ambiguous: though made for and by Black filmmakers and audiences, and sometimes depicting a kind of dead-end domestic colonialism, the films often normalized misogynistic treatment of Black women and uncritical ideals of Black capitalism. They Cloned Tyrone embraces the ambiguity almost ardently.
On “Slow Cinema”
Bella Okuya
Though many key works of slow cinema have won praise and awards at various film festivals, the movement has drawn criticism from some writers. It has been called passive aggressive for the demands the sheer duration of the films makes of viewers. Others decry the elitism of a form that caters to a niche audience.
What Are We to Make of Lars von Trier?
Emma Slack-Jørgensen
Despite embracing the avant-garde, von Trier’s fixation on specific forms of humiliation is at the same time oddly traditional. The paradoxically priestly tone pervades his films, which often concern the endless suffering of female martyrs with good souls. Karen is one amongst many saintly women that suffer at the hands of von Trier, their pain often a lesson in redemption. But the very extremity of the suffering he shows us risks alienating the viewer.
Controversies over Christmas “Classics”
Nicole Hemmer, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, and Neil J. Young
Beloved Christmas songs and movies, like so many cultural products, have come under new scrutiny recently.
Cinelogue Is Decolonizing the Film Canon
Rehana Esmail and Kate Millar
When it comes to cinema, the non-Western world is often projected as a homogenous space without diversity, specificity, and complexity. This results in the visual consumption of films by the global majority as something to be passively gazed upon rather than actively seen.