MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Solidarity — and showing solidarity through art — is a tricky thing. Media saturation and new technology in the late 20th century put the marginalization of many groups in America under a magnifying glass, and the dawn of a so-called “New Hollywood” allowed filmmakers inside and outside of mainstream media to capitalize on this visibility by making films with radical political messages. Film’s new activist potential was quickly realized by artists aligned with the feminist movement, leading to the rise of innovators such as Barbara Hammer, Carolee Schneemann, and others. Because of this movement’s theoretical base of progressive politics, many feminist artists also used their voice to advocate for other marginalized communities, such as the black community. Many white feminists viewed their and African-Americans’ struggles for liberation as one in the same, but this line of thinking neglected to consider how many of the leaders of the feminist movement benefitted from white privilege.

Agnès Varda’s Black Panthers (1968), Shirley Clarke’s The Cool World (1964) and Portrait of Jason (1967), and Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning (1992) are four landmark films that address various aspects of blackness within an American context. Although many of these films succeed in ways that are both artistic and political, the whiteness of their creators is inescapable from a critical context. Varda, Clarke, and Livingston’s films all showcase the delicate balance between allyship and voyeurism in telling the stories of a marginalized group if you exist outside of said group. This research will examine the complicated ethics of documentary and cinema verité films that feature the struggles of black American life through the writings of film theorists and critics, and in the spirit of the project itself will center black academics.