Link Between Cinema and Decoloniality Essay

The things you need to do are:

Reflection essay on your progress during the quarter (500 words). Consider the aspects: writing skill, new critical knowledge, new knowledge about film, things that were more eye-opening.

One essay rewrite(choose from essay 1-3). Include brief paragraph explaining why you decided to rewrite that essay.

Three Writing exercises of the quarter.

Writing exercise 1

Description and Rationale:

Although we usually need multiple views in order to have a nuanced grasp of a film, oftentimes the impressions of the first screening will deeply shape our ideas and subsequent experiences with that film. Here we are going to practice thinking, writing, and fixating these first impressions. The goal of this exercise is to practice writing and consolidating your impressions right after a screening, and thus create a firm ground for future writing.

Usually, writing that invests in sensory details tends to be more convincing because it creates a deeper impression on the reader. We tend to remember and relate first to our immediate senses. Paying attention to the sensorial aspects of a film beyond its narrative not only engages the reader, but it also produces a richer text that is more “respectful” to the aesthetic complexity of a film.

In this exercise we will focus on this: the sensorial aspects of the film–color, light, atmosphere, sound, gestures, textures. Whatever stands out to you.

After watching K’Bela (Yasmin Thayná, 2015) please, answer the questions below.

1. Write here three visual elements of the film that particularly caught your attention. Answer with short sentences or words.
2. Choose five keywords that you think apply to the film.
3. How would you describe the film to someone that has not seen it? Write a short paragraph.
4. Describe one image/scene that, in your opinion, summarizes the film.

Writing exercise 2

Description and Rationale

This exercise is a practice on connecting conceptual ideas with a film. You will write a paragraph in which you will explain the decolonial aspects of K’bela. In other words, how and why K’bela can be considered a good example of a decolonial film.

The exercise: you will continue the paragraph from the opening sentences written below. Make sure to write a concise paragraph that states the relation between the film K’bela and the concept of “decolonial,” introducing examples that would be further developed and analyzed in the subsequent paragraphs. Consider how the film shows the body and which bodies are shown. Please, feel free to use your answers to exercise 1. You can also use this exercise as a base to your discussion board post of this week.

Paragraph:

The Brazilian film K’bela (Yasmin Thayná, 2015) provides us with a good example of the “decolonial” in film. As María Lugones argues,……..

Writing Exercise 3: explaining Galt

Description and Rationale

This exercise is a practice of reading and writing. Here are three quotes from Rosalind Galt’s “Pretty as Troublesome Image” that contain core elements of her argument. This chapter is the introduction of an academic book, and was written in a dense conceptual style. The exercise here consists in two main tasks:

• To grasp the gist of the quotes: the central concepts, the examples, the arguments
• To rewrite the paragraph in a less academic style, conveying the central argument and concepts

Focus on the idea and change the wording. Think of strategies that might make the sentences more straightforward, such as cutting out jargon and too many references. You will be explaining the ideas to a “general audience” (imagine someone that is not an FMS major, or someone that is not in the School of Humanities).

Quotes:

1. “The production of the pretty as a space of rhetorical exclusion depends heavily on its connection to the wrong kinds of bodies. Plato’s cosmetics instantiate a connection of the untrustworthy image with the deceptive woman that has dogged the history of Western art, and the devices and tricks of the cinematic pretty oppose an overly fussy feminine mise-en scène to the grandeur of the masculine exterior. Moreover, the classical binary of Attic authority versus overly flowery Asiatic rhetoric links decorative style both to the non-Western and, in the binary’s modern forms, to effeminacy and sexual perversion. The politics of the pretty is therefore always engaged in a critique of gender, sexuality, and race as these terms have been imagined and codified through visual culture.” (20)
2. “The bodily politics of the pretty, as entirely formal constructions of aesthetic value, are usefully distinct from identitarian categories: the persistent denigration of decorative images in the languages of femininity, perversion, or orientalism enables us to think beyond a politics of representation and to see histories of bodily exclusion instead as underwriting the structuring principles of cinematic value.” (20 – 21)
3. “Madame Satã, for example, narrates the life of João Francisco dos Santos, a 1930s Afro-Brazilian pop cultural icon who was a famous criminal, drag performer, and queer outlaw. The film’s use of lush cinematography and staging for João’s erotic and criminal lives as well as its presentation of his “exotic” drag performances as “Madame Satã” or “the Negress of the Bulacoche” tie a recuperative queer politics to a sometimes uncomfortable aestheticization of sexual and racial stereotypes. And yet this excessive stylishness is quite clearly at the heart of the film’s historical analysis. The burnished tones of a visual schema that aesthetically marks dark skin, bright costume, and nostalgic period lighting are as much a performative articulation as is the protagonist’s drag act.” (21)