For this week you will watch Saving Face (2004). It is available in the library. In addition, you will read the following articles:
1) BUTLER-GENDER AS PERFORMANCE
2) George Chauncey-Gay New York-intro
Come ready to talk about these in class but in place of working on your blog, spend some time working on your website project.
Have a good weekend!
Add yourself to the site for the final project here: http://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/peoplingnycwebsiteproject/
Hi all, There are only a few things to watch and read for this week, since your papers are due next Friday by 5PM and I know you are working very hard on them.
1) Devorah Heitner-The Good Side of the Ghetto
2) http://www.thirteen.org/broadcastingwhileblack/2009/02/24/harry-belafonte-on-inside-bed-stuy-1968/
3)RECOMMENDED: 01 #414_ Right to Remain Silent
4) RECOMMENDED: Rivera-Hip-Hop Puerto Ricans and the Ethnoracial Identities in New York
As the articles for this week suggest, New York has historically been a place of significant community media–media that acts as a political outlet for unheard voices. Be thinking about the ways that this media calls for different kinds of spectator participation than either “straight” documentary or “narrative” film. Does it present a different view of some boroughs we have explored in earlier films?
Six million people are under correctional supervision in the U.S.—more than were in Stalin’s gulags. Photograph by Steve Liss.
A prison is a trap for catching time. Good reporting appears often about the inner life of the American prison, but the catch is that American prison life is mostly undramatic—the reported stories fail to grab us, because, for the most part, nothing happens. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is all you need to know about Ivan Denisovich, because the idea that anyone could live for a minute in such circumstances seems impossible; one day in the life of an American prison means much less, because the force of it is that one day typically stretches out for decades. It isn’t the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their inmates. The inmates on death row in Texas are called men in “timeless time,” because they alone aren’t serving time: they aren’t waiting out five years or a decade or a lifetime. The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock.
That’s why no one who has been inside a prison, if only for a day, can ever forget the feeling. Time stops. A note of attenuated panic, of watchful paranoia—anxiety and boredom and fear mixed into a kind of enveloping fog, covering the guards as much as the guarded. “Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard, / Some of us are prisoners, some of us are guards,” Dylan sings, and while it isn’t strictly true—just ask the prisoners—it contains a truth: the guards are doing time, too. As a smart man once wrote after being locked up, the thing about jail is that there are bars on the windows and they won’t let you out. This simple truth governs all the others. What prisoners try to convey to the free is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment. For American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world—Texas alone has sentenced more than four hundred teen-agers to life imprisonment—time becomes in every sense this thing you serve.
For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.
The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a “carceral state,” in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.
The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.
The Peopling of New York-Syllabus to distribute-REVISED
For next week, you need to read the following:
1) Race and Criminalization-Angela Davis
2) Bruce Western Punishment and Inequality Intro
3) “The New U.S. Black Cinema”-Clyde Taylor
Again, there is no blog for this week, since you will be working on paper 2 so diligently. I look forward to seeing the results of your work. Please don’t forget to set up an appointment with Soniya, our Instructional Technology Fellow about the website project!
We won’t have our normal blog for this week (leading up to class on April 20th). Instead, in class we will have a discussion of your papers and will screen and discuss episodes from The Goldbergs, Amos n’ Andy, and All in the Family. Please come ready to discuss your progress on Paper 2!
Here are the reading for Friday (4/20). Please read the article entitled Archie Bunker’s Bigotry completely. But as for “The Meanings of Memory” focus on the sections on “Family Formation and the Economy–Television View” and “Work, Class and Ethnicity.” I know this post is coming in a bit late, so I understand if you cannot give these articles as much thought as you might have otherwise.
2) George Lipsitz-The meaning of memory family class ethnicity in early network television
But please come prepared to talk about Rockeach and Lipsitz’s argument about the function of television in terms of race and ethnicity after we watch the episodes in class.
Looking forward to seeing you on Friday!
Please find your Website Project Assignment here!
For this week you will watch two episodes of Welcome Back, Kotter (1975-1979) on Amazon.com. The episodes I would like you to watch are these: “Basket Case” (September 16, 1975) and “Welcome Back” (September 23, 1975).
Your readings are here:
I would like you to think about Kotter (Gabriel Kaplan) in terms of ethnicity. Here are some questions you might consider–pick one among them rather than answering them all.
Hi Folks!
This week, the assignment is to watch Radio Days which is available in the main office but not the library. There will only be one reading for this week: I hope this is a welcome break!
Friedman and Desser-Woody Allen
Prompt: For this week’s blog, you might consider how Radio Days’ ethnic family (both nuclear and more broadly communal)–is similar and different from the ethnic family in Goodfellas (1990). Also, radio is an important part of the film. Why is radio so crucial to the identities of the various family members? What kind of cultural connections does it allow them to make? When and where is ethnicity important to this connection?
For this week, you will watch Goodfellas (1990), either in the library or on Amazon.com.
Readings:
1) Whiteness and the history of white ethnics-Roediger
Prompt: I would like you to address the film in terms of the question of whiteness (and please review our conversation/readings from Richard Dyer). Is Henry (Ray Liotta) white–and does he become white in the course of the film? And do you think his neighborhood is white? Also can you relate the neighborhood Hill grows up in–and is strongly identified with–to Delores Hayden’s project of helping to preserve the memory of vernacular space? Please also feel free to raise your own questions about the film and to comment on other films we have watched or that this film brings to mind.
Film Noir:
PROMPT: Discuss an aspect of film noir from the reading that you found particularly striking or thought-provoking in the film.
For this week, you will watch Dmytryk’s Christ in Concrete (1949) (AKA Give Us This Day). It is available in the library on a Criterion DVD, with very high quality. I recommend watching it this way in order to get the full visual effect.
Note: I am replacing your reading from Red Hollywood with a reading that I think gives you a better introduction to film noir.
1) Some Visual Motifs of Film Noir-Place and Peterson
2) Charles Mayland Film GrisFilm Criticism 26 no 3 2002
3) City that Never Sleeps, “Night City” (Page 243-257)
Readings:
PROMPT:
Ostensibly, The Landlord is about one white man who moves into a Black neighborhood. But might we also read the film as being about neighborhood change more generally? How might we evaluate the film as a narrative about gentrification? Does Elgar embody the spirit of gentrification–as it happens even today? If so, why? If not, why not?
Readings for February 24th:
For this week, your assignment is to watch Do The Right Thing (1989) on Amazon.com or to take it out from the Rosenthal library. Please think about the film in relation to the readings below.
PROMPT:
Who are the people in Spike’s neighborhood? How and why do relations devolve there (pay careful attention to how the visual aesthetics and music mark this decline)? And (the question Michelle and Barack discussed after seeing Do The Right Thing on their first date) why does Mookie throw the garbage can?
Film: For this week, you will need to visit Rosenthal Library to watch The Pawnbroker (1964). The library has two copies–both on reserve on the 4th floor–one is a VHS and the other is a DVD.
The call number for the VHS is PN1997 .P3862 1997 and for the DVD, PN1995.9 .H53 P39 2003. Hopefully this will be the only time you will have to use the library to access films.
Readings:
PROMPT:
This week I would like you to use the blog post to explore one of two questions.
1) Explore, compare and contrast the depiction neighborhoods in the films we have watched to this point. How do they seem to “feel” and why? What cinematic effects contribute to this feeling?
2) How do the various ethnic groups represented in The Pawnbroker (1964) relate to one another? Are the various “ghettos”–past and present–that the film depicts somehow related to one another? If so, how does the film craft this connection?
Prompt for Week 2: It can be argued that for some of New York’s people (im)migration is a one time experience that begins with official entry and culminates with assimilation. For others, however, migrations occur every day, as they pass across myriad boundary lines (some more visible than others) of status, language, race, or culture—having to prove themselves, time and again, as Americans that belong here.
How do West Side Story and The Brother from Another Planet express the experience of being among New York’s permanent others and marginal citizens? In order to practice your skills at mise-en-scene criticism, try to use a detailed description of one scene from each film as an example, as well as reference to the readings, which similarly describe marginal migrant experience.
Hi folks,
I will be providing you with a prompt each week to guide your thinking about the films and readings for the week. My questions are designed to facilitate your engagement with the texts but if you have another compelling question or concern that you would like to raise, please feel free to write about it instead, provided you consider it relevant to the course material.
For this week, I would like to you think about Ellis Island (1981), Hester Street (1975) and The Jazz Singer (1928) in terms of questions of identity. What conflicts of identity–and specifically racial and religious identity–do each of the films raise? How does each film resolve these issues, if at all? You might choose a scene from either film that you think makes the film’s strategy for depicting and resolving racial and religious conflict clear. Do you agree with Rogin’s reading of the function of whiteness and blackness in The Jazz Singer? And what might Michael Rogin have to say about Hester Street or Ellis Island? Finally, how might we relate the history of immigration that Foner describes to these films which engage with the same historical period in a more lyrical fashion than Foner’s text? What is present in the films that is absent in Foner’s work–and vice versa?
Again you don’t need to answer all of these questions but please do engage with those that strike your interest. Your answer should at least 300 words or roughly a page in length but may be as long as 3 pages.
According to the article, people may have greater feeling on their ethnicity in the film. For example, an African American may have stronger feelings on African Americans depicted in the films than other people of different ethnicity. They would be more sensitive to the stereotypes and falsity regarding their race. Therefore, people may know better about the characters in the film if they are from similar cultural backgrounds.
In Radio Days, Woody Allen depicted a Jewish family that wasn’t familiar with their Judaism traditions. Because I came from a totally different cultural background, so I don’t know whether the family in this film was a typical American-Jewish family or not. However, from the discussion in class, I realized that Allen somehow twisted the truth of the life of the typical American-Jewish families. The film is not a realistic reflection of the American-Jewish families. In my opinion, viewers of similar cultural backgrounds may have “more rights” in commenting this film. They knew about the culture and tradition, and they are more sensitive to the characters’ actions. From Radio Days, I realized why Woody Allen has earned a reputation of self-hatred. Although I didn’t come from the Jewish culture, I could understand that Allen had twisted the images of American-Jewish family, while Allen himself was an American-Jewish director.
In Welcome Back, Kotter, a similar situation may raise. In the episode of Basket Case, Washington, who was Mr. Kotter’s student, thought he would pass because he was in the basketball team. From an “outsider’s” point of view, I felt silly for Washington as well as his classmates, because academic is independent from sports. I don’t understand why Mr. Kotter’s students would even ask their teacher to pass Washington simply because he was in the basketball team. Moreover, the principal and P.E. teacher would even tell Mr. Kotter to pass Washington because “the team cannot win without Washington.” The principal’s comment on Mr. Kotter’s test question “When was the Declaration of Independence signed” as a tricky question was laughable but also stereotypical. Washington, who was an African American, was being portrayed as the underprivileged students in the education system. I don’t know what opinions African American viewers would have about this scene. Yet, I believed they wouldn’t agree with Washington’s actions, and they would treat it as a stereotype against African American students. In addition to the students’ plea, I don’t understand why the principal and the P.E. teacher would persuade Mr. Kotter’s to pass Washington. I would rather believe that the director has twisted the fact than to believe my point of view is totally deviated from the Americans’ point of view. I understand that Americans emphasize on the balance between extracurricular activities and academics, but I don’t believe they would prefer sports over education. Therefore, I would conclude that the director has twisted the facts in order to make the show “funny.”
Radio Days and Welcome Back, Kotter have depicted a rather stereotypical aspect of the ethnicities. While I don’t know how the people of the same ethnicity feel in these two films, I believe they wouldn’t think the characters’ actions are justifiable in terms of the culture. Yet, I would like to know how African Americans feel for Washington in Welcome Back, Kotter.
In his essay entitled, “Bakhtin, Polyphony, and Racial-Ethnic Representation”, Robert Stam said that Bakhtinian analysis of film can allow viewers to examine ethnic relationships without being concerned about truth and fact. This idea appealed to me when I watched the TV show this week. I believe this fact allowed characters to joke about standard touchy subjects relating to ethnicity without viewers getting offended. This allows viewers to have an open mind when thinking about ethnic relationships.
In the episode, “Welcome Back”, Kotter initially expressed his disgust for his job and the students he was teaching. He wanted nothing to do with them and was frustrated when he could not get through to them. The students initially ignored him, insulted him, and made him feel worthless. If this TV show had been a drama, viewers would likely be disgusted by all the characters in this show and could potentially consider many of them racist. The inference that their negative interactions were related to race was emphasized based on a sprinkling of multiple ethnicities throughout the classroom. However, the fact that this show is a comedy changed everything. Viewers are given the opportunity to view the interactions between teacher and students without being blinded by realism. Insulting comments can be viewed in a different light when they are phrased as jokes. The open, friendly mindset inspired by comedies can allow for a more understanding view of each ethnicity present in the show.
In addition, humor allows the characters to interact without truly hurting each other, thus allowing them to maintain the lines of communication. For example, in the episode entitled, “Basket Case”, Kotter is able to get through to Washington using humor. Serious rebukes simply served to make Washington defensive but humor made Washington feel Kotter was on his side. Humor broke down the student-teacher barrier, as well as the ethnic barrier between Kotter and Washington, allowing them to communicate rationally and effectively. The saying, “laughter is the best medicine”, certainly applies when you consider the effects of humor on ethnic relationships.
Welcome Back, Kotter uses comic relief to cover the tense urban space where the characters perform. After re-watching the first and second episodes, I noticed that the space allotted is quite clustered. In the first episode, Pilot, we see Kotter’s cramped bedroom, kitchen, living and dining room all in less than one floor of the house. The theme song then interrupts and we see multiple shots of a bustling city environment. There is the sign of Brooklyn being the 4th largest city of the world followed by a crowded street. Once the theme song finishes, we are presented with the irregular structure of the school where the hallway twists and turns, and appears almost abnormal in appearance. Though we are less than three minutes into the episode, it is quite clear of the uninviting space which occupies most of the scenes.
To complement the small and narrow spaces presented before us, we are introduced to the solemnness of the unresponsive class, which almost seems like a jail cell. At the beginning there is hardly any life to the students and we are turned away from the classroom by the characters, especially Ebstein, who is “most likely to take a life” (4:40) and whose favorite subject is assault. The awkwardness of Horshack and the principal’s rugged attitude further discourages the viewer in this space.
However, to much avail, we are lured into Kotter’s world by the comedy presented before us. Throughout every moment of tight spaces, we find ourselves laughing and though we do not want to be a part of the space, we cannot resist. At the end of the first episode, the students have a desire to write a paper on whatever they are passionate about and this creates an atmosphere of where we wouldn’t mind being sucked into the urban landscape because the students are showing a positive change.
Basketcase, likewise, does not seem welcoming at all. The spatial arrangement of Kotter’s ‘house’ is still cramped. Additionally, we are resisting the urban space occupied by Kotter because there is much tension presented in two scenes: Kotter versus the class and Kotter versus the principal and coach. In both scenes, Kotter stands alone, but the comedy presented in both situations cuts the tension and does an excellent job in making it seem as if it’s not even there. When Kotter is not able to win the class over regarding the grades of “Boom-Boom,” Barbarino shifts the attention in participating in a comedic talk with Kotter.
Thus, the space does not seem inviting, but this is of no concern to the viewer. We are caught in the moment of the joke and this partially shifts our attention away from the problem at hand because we feel confident that our protagonist Kotter will find some way to deal with it.
