AAST 291: Racing Through the Movies: Race in Film, Fall 2017
Course Syllabus
COURSE INFORMATION
a. Course Number: AAST 291, Sec. 01
b. Course Request Number (CRN): 74883
c. Room# and time: NAC (Native American Center) room 009, 11:00-11:50, MWF
d. Prerequisites: none
e. Credits: 3
PROFESSOR COMMUNICATION INFORMATION (I like communication!)
a. Professor: Dr. George R. Price
b. Office Hours and Location: MWF, 10:15-10:45, 1:00-1:45, and 3:30-5:00 (MW only, not
Friday), no appointment necessary, or Tu/Th and MWF after 5:00 by appointment only, in
my office, NAC (Native American Center) 203E (on the 2nd floor, south end of the building)
c. E-mail:
d. Phone: 243-2302 (my office)
Course Description: This course is an opportunity to study perceptions and portrayals of human intergroup relations and human group identities, as portrayed in film over the last 60 years. The focus will be on “racial,” class, and ethnic groups in the U.S., with some comparison to portrayals of human intergroup relations in other countries, using both foreign and domestic films. The class will mainly involve viewing and discussing films, through a historical and sociological perspective, with some help from context-framing introductory lectures and guided partially by study questions (but we can certainly venture beyond those). It will also include a relatively small amount of writing and reading.
The course is divided into five themed parts, usually with two films for each theme (or, topic). We will watch ten films over the 15-week semester, divided into roughly 45-minute segments, which means that we will spend a little less than two thirds of the semester viewing the films and a little more than one third discussing the films or listening to my brief introductory lecture/comments for each topic. There will be no exams in this class. Instead, grading will be based on short essays, discussion, and one final long essay paper. (See details below.)
Here is a list of the films we will watch, arranged by theme. Detailed descriptions of each film are given further down in this syllabus. There will be no documentaries in this class, but instead all dramas and one comedy/satire.
Part 1: Constructing and Deconstructing “Whiteness”
The origins, purposes, and results of the creation of race theory.
Golden Door (original title, “Nuovo Mondo”) (Italian, 2006, 1 hr, 58 min.) (I own the DVD)
A Bronx Tale (U.S., 1993, 2 hr, 1 min.) (I have on VHS, not in Mansfield Library)
Winter’s Bone (U.S., 2010, 1 hr, 40 min.) (In Mansfield)
Part 2: The Legacy of Colonialism
One of the purposes of creating race theory and “White/Christian/Male Supremacy” was an attempt to justify the taking of Indigenous American homelands and the attempts to destroy their cultures, and to convince people to accept those acts as right and proper.
Where the Spirit Lives (Canadian, 1989, 1 hr, 36 min.) (I have VHS, Mansfield has the DVD)
Thunderheart (U.S., 1992, 1 hr, 59 min.) (I have VHS, Mansfield has VHS)
Part 3: The Legacy of Slavery
The impacts of race-based slavery, and the Jim Crow terrorism that replaced it, deeply permeate American social reality to this day, but so does our long history of struggle and resistance to that.
Hollywood Shuffle (U.S., 1987, 1 hr, 18 min.) (I have VHS; Mansfield has the DVD)
The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (U.S., 1959, 1 hr, 35 min.) (I have VHS)
Part 4: Working Against “Divide and Conquer”
“Divide and Conquer” has long been a strategy used by oppressors and exploiters of humankind in attempt to keep the oppressed from uniting against them and liberating themselves. These two films are about real, historical examples of oppressed people successfully uniting across racial and ethnic lines to resist their oppressors.
Salt of the Earth (U.S., 1954, 1 hr, 34 min.) (I have VHS; Mansfield has DVD)
Matewan (U.S., 1987, 2 hr, 15 min.) (I have poor quality VHS, so I will purchase the DVD)
Part 5: Almost Everything in One
Guess who gets left out when one ambitious Hollywood film tries to deal with almost all of the issues of all oppressed peoples in the U.S.A.. There will be much to discuss and critique from this film!
Crash (U.S., 2004, 1 hr, 52 min.) (I have VHS; Mansfield has the DVD)
Descriptions of Our Films
Golden Door (original title, Nuovo Mondo) (Italian, 2006) This artful and beautiful film is set in the era of rampant immigration to the United States from eastern and southern Europe (c. 1890-1930, about 1910, in this story). Identity for these immigrants, before leaving their homelands, was very local, primarily village or rural district identities. The central characters in this film are from a remote rural location in the mountains of Sicily. They had no idea that most people in the United States thought of them as something called “Italians” and they had never heard of a place called “Italy.” They also had no concept of an identity group called “white people.” All of that begins to change on the ship taking them across the ocean, and really starts to become their new reality at a place called Ellis Island.
A Bronx Tale (1993) As the immigrants from Italy (and many other European nations) in the early and mid-twentieth century engaged themselves in the process of trying to become “Americans,” they were compelled to learn the meanings of “race.” In order to live safely in the Jim Crow era United States, they had to learn what it meant to be “white” and what it meant to be “black.” Set in the Bronx borough of New York City in the 1960s, A Bronx Tale is a moving and well-told story of the world which the children and grandchildren of Italian immigrants had inherited and how they navigated that world in varying ways. Some characters in the story are still caught up in the gangster world, others had found niches in the conventional, “honest living,” working-class economy, still seeking respect and acceptance from the dominant Euro-American majority group: the people whose “whiteness” and pre-eminence went unquestioned. Perhaps surprisingly, this film is actually as much about loving relationships as it is about anything else.
Winter’s Bone (2010) Set in southern Missouri (the northernmost of America’s “slave states”), near the Ozark Mountains, in the present, Winter’s Bone is a dark, sometimes frightening thriller. The protagonist in this story, is a strong, wise-beyond-her-years teenage girl who is the primary caregiver for her two young siblings and their psychologically disabled mother. Although the specific historical contexts that helped to form the circumstances of the characters in this film, such as the history of slavery and sharecropping in southern Missouri, are not directly mentioned in the film, we will deal with this background information through materials that I will provide in lecture, as well as short articles. I could have placed this film in the “Legacy of Slavery” category, since the plight of poor, white-identified southerners is rooted in how they were exploited by the wealthy, slave-owning southern minority, but, after much internal debate, I decided to place this film here, since it also clearly illustrates the limitations and struggles that race theory placed upon this particular demographic of white-identified people.
Where the Spirit Lives (Canadian, 1989) After stealing the lands of the First Americans and leaving them only with small remnant parcels of those lands (called “reservations” in the U.S. and “reserves” in Canada), the governments of both the United States and Canada attempted to deculturalize and re-form the remaining indigenous peoples into people whose presence they could accept—people who were culturally more like themselves. One part of this process was the forced removal of Native American children from their families and homes to place them in boarding schools designed to, as one of those schools’ founder succinctly put it, “kill the Indian to save the man.” This story follows two Kanai Blackfoot children from Alberta through this experience, while interweaving the experiences of several other children in the school, and the varying motivations and characters of the people who ran the place and did the actual teaching. A very moving, complex, and educational film, well-acted, and well-made.
Thunderheart (U.S., 1992) One of the topics covered in our textbook that I will be discussing in class is how most Hollywood studio movies position the relevance of people of color in relation to how they are either perceived by and/or how they affect or impact the Euro-American characters in the film. This is due, in part, to the fact that the vast majority of movies have been made by and for the pleasure of Euro-American males. That has certainly been true in the ways Native Americans have usually been portrayed in film, with a few exceptions in recent years, particularly in movies written or directed by Indigenous Americans. When movies that were a little more sympathetic to Native American perspectives first appeared in the 1970s (i.e., Little Big Man and Soldier Blue), the Indigenous perspective still had to be filtered through or translated by a white-identified male character in the leading role. In Thunderheart (1992), that trope repeated itself, but with a subtle new twist: a man who has been living as a “white man,” but who is also a descendant of the Lakota people, who, as an FBI agent investigating a crime on the Pine Ridge reservation begins to reassess his identity while he becomes acquainted with this particular ancestral culture. Other issues in reservation society are also dealt with in that film, encased within a captivating, sometimes intense crime story.
Hollywood Shuffle (1987) This independent comedy was written by African American actor, Robert Townsend, based on his own experiences and the experiences of others like him, trying to overcome the obstacles of Hollywood stereotyping and commercial conservatism while pursuing careers in the film business. There is lots of whacked-out humor (sometimes offensive or possible “triggers”), while making some insightful, valid observations on American racism and the underlying assumptions of race theory. The writer uses the format of many short vignettes as examples, including one of my favorites about a “Black Acting School,” in which aspiring African American actors receive instruction from Euro-American film professionals on how to “act black.” There are plenty of springboards in this film and in our study guide for vital discussion of some core American social issues associated with group and sub-group identities.
The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1959) Besides dealing with the “dangers” of “interracial” love and the power of the taboo against it, this film also happens to be one of the first “post-apocalyptic” films in the history of that genre. Here is the plot summary, from the Internet Movie Database: “Ralph Burton is a miner who is trapped for several days as a result of a cave-in. When he finally manages to dig himself out, he realizes that all of mankind seems to have been destroyed in a nuclear holocaust. He travels to New York City only to find it deserted. Making a life for himself there, he is flabbergasted to eventually find Sarah Crandall, who also managed to survive. Together, they form a close friendship until the arrival of Benson Thacker who has managed to pilot his small boat into the city's harbor. At this point the tensions rise between the three, particularly between Thacker, who is white and Burton, who is black.” An interesting element of the film is how the old taboo maintains its power even when it appears that Ralph and Sarah are the last two people on Earth. The film also deals subtly with issues of class and privilege, and the social expectations that arise from that within this unique, hypothetical situation. (Will Smith’s 2007 film, “I am Legend,” was partially inspired by this old classic, but not nearly as well-made.)
Salt of the Earth (1954) This was a dangerous film to make in the middle of the “Red-baiting” McCarthy era. Two of the film’s creators had already been blacklisted and labeled as “Communists,” and they went into the project knowing that the film had almost no commercial potential. It was a labor of love, meant to illuminate the struggles of America’s working class, and thereby hopefully stimulate a movement towards social change. Not only does this film deal with the struggles of union laborers against oppressive forces, it also has some very ahead-of-its-time lessons to reveal on women’s efforts towards self-empowerment through courageous and creative social activism. Even though most of the characters in the film are Mexican-American, the film does not deal that much with the racism they experience, choosing instead to focus on issues of economic injustice and the power of the people united.
Matewan (1987) This film ties several of our previous topics together when African American and Italian immigrant laborers are brought in by the mining company bosses to use as “scabs,” or strike-breakers. The union organizers then attempt to unite all of the workers across “racial” and ethnic lines to fight together against their common enemy for their common interests. A great, epic film that, along with some historical background presented in lecture, will give us much to talk about. James Earl Jones plays one of the main characters.
Crash (2004) Our final film, Crash, takes all of the topics that we have dealt with so far and weaves a mosaic-like, interconnected collection of gripping and moving tales. This film will be the springboard for our closing discussion which will deal with the connections between all of the human identity issues that we have looked at and their various implications for the present and future.