1, DUE: Final draft of Ad Analysis (make sure to attach your ad)
2, Read “Turning Boys into Girls” ( 486); “We Should Relinquish Some Liberty in Exchange for Security” (540); and write a paragraph responding to each article
3, Read the following NYTimes article "Africa, at the Cineplex" and make a comment about what you've read on the blog. DO NOT summarize what the article is about, we've all read it. What do you think about what this article is saying? How does it make you feel?
February 4, 2007
Film Fatigue
Africa, at the Cineplex
By
MANOHLA DARGISAmerican children used to connect with their deprived African counterparts mostly by cleaning their plates. Today, those same children have a dizzying variety of ways of reaching out to the continent and its inhabitants: they can shop at the Gap, mind
Bono, listen to Kanye West, read
Dave Eggers and watch an Oscar-nominated film or two, like “Blood Diamond” or “The Last King of Scotland,” and, while flipping through their favorite magazine, contemplate the
AIDS awareness ad campaign in which celebrities like
Richard Gere and
Gwyneth Paltrow, faces daubed with paint, declare “I am African.”
Well, really, aren’t we all? The new African awareness isn’t just deeply, appreciably earnest; it’s personal, too.
Angelina Jolie, the head of the new class of celebrity missionaries, not only adopted an Ethiopian girl, but has also poured money into Namibian maternity wards. The same goes for
Oprah Winfrey, who founded a girls’ school in South Africa, and the rapper
Jay-Z, who last year traveled the world, including parts of Africa, for “The Diary of Jay-Z: Water for Life,” a documentary. The diary was the product of a rather unusual collaboration, as signaled on a Web page for the
United Nations: “The United Nations, MTV and Jay-Z team up to raise attention of the world water crisis.”
If you didn’t know about the documentary or the United Nations-initiated Water for Life campaign, you are probably not alone. The humanitarian crises in Africa are overwhelming, but they’re also now such a familiar fixture in our 24/7 news-and-entertainment spin cycle that it can be hard to keep up. Yet if the bad news out of Africa never seems to end, neither do the pop-cultural responses.
IN 1984, that response to African tragedy seemed purely seasonal, exemplified by the hit single on behalf of Ethiopian famine relief, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” For the last few years or so, every week seems to bring another documentary, another song, another ad campaign, another press conference, another celebrity sighting.
And why not? As
George Clooney, a supple manipulator of the media, explained after embarking on a high-profile effort to bring attention to the Darfur region of Sudan, “If you’re going to be famous and have cameras follow you around, you might as well go where the cameras will do some good.” Last April, Mr. Clooney and his father, Nick, visited refugee camps in the Sudan, and the son subsequently joined Senators
Sam Brownback and
Barack Obama at a news conference where he passionately urged that greater international attention be paid to the crisis. It was a tough sell, even for the Sexiest Man Alive, who at one point also admitted that it was hard to capture people’s attention because, as he put it, “We have tragedy fatigue on television.”
I know what he means. It’s hard enough to keep track of the globe-trotting Ms. Jolie, who has done more good in the world than most of the housebound pundits who poke fun at her. My problem is that I have almost bottomed out when it comes to films about Africa. Not the real deal, like the films of the great Senegalese-born auteur
Ousmane Sembène, whose 1966 drama “Black Girl” is a classic of postcolonial cinema, and whose 2004 film, “Moolaadé,” manages to tackle the issue of female genital mutilation and critique patriarchic Islam in one entertaining package (really). My problem, rather, is all those films filled with suffering, struggling black Africans who, for the most part, seem to be on camera to make me feel bad.
These faces, weeping and smiling by turns, show up in fiction and documentary films, in big-budget Hollywood fare like “Blood Diamond” and more modest studio offerings like “The Last King of Scotland.” In the old Tarzan days, of course,
Johnny Weissmuller yodeled across a back-lot jungle while black extras ran amok in feathered headdress borrowed from the cowboys-and-Indians department. In that Hollywood, Africa was an extension of the studio lot (often it was the studio lot), the setting for thrilling adventures, big-game safaris and the occasional bloody conflict with native peoples. Mostly, though, Africa was the exotic backdrop for white characters, who paid about as much attention to its black populace as they did to the black populace back home.
These days, black African characters in American-produced films generally serve more than a decorative function; some of them actually speak lines and share serious screen time with the white stars. Now and again, as in “Hotel Rwanda” and “Sometimes in April,” two films from 2004 and 2005 about the Rwandan genocide, the stars themselves are actually black, if not African, and their characters help drive the narrative. In the case of the HBO film “Sometimes in April,” the director is also black, the Haitian-born Raoul Peck. In both “April” and “Hotel Rwanda,” the white characters are peripheral, just as they were during the genocide; in each, the victims and the victimizers are black, but so, too, are the heroes.
New films tend to be smarter about race if not necessarily its representation. One of the truths about the movies is that, no matter how high-minded a director or how earnest his intentions, what he puts in front of his camera usually talks louder and more honestly than anything he himself might say. The director and the screenwriter may be on the same resolute page, with nicely composed speeches about Africa, the West and how something, finally, must be done. But the black faces on the screen — the babies with the swollen bellies and pipe-cleaner limbs, and the legless men crawling alongside them — tend to tell a different story, one of hopelessness and despair that all too often feels as immutable as the earth.
This sense of immutability, that the violence and the hunger are persistent, almost eternal and natural, infects too many films about Africa. There is a long tradition of victim documentaries, films about the wretched of the earth from Welsh and Appalachian mining towns, South African shantytowns and New York City homeless shelters. By turns touristic and voyeuristic, these films habitually follow a reassuringly familiar trajectory. They evade unpleasant truths about history, power and ideology in favor of heroic stories about individual resistance and triumph that wouldn’t be out of place in a studio potboiler. As any Hollywood producer knows, real life can be a total bummer, which is why a Lost Boy of Sudan newly transplanted to America makes a better commercial bet than one who didn’t make it out of Africa.
Most American films about Africa mean well, at least those without
Bruce Willis, and even openly commercial studio fare like “Blood Diamond” wears its bleeding, thudding heart on its sleeve. But what, exactly, are we meant to do with all their images, I wonder? Like “The Constant Gardener” and “Catch a Fire,” two other thrillers set in Africa, “Blood Diamond” was designed to make money, not instigate change. Watching
Leonardo DiCaprio share the screen with genuine handless black Africans or
Ralph Fiennes’s gardener learn a lesson in postcolonial realpolitik while I munch my popcorn doesn’t rouse me to action; it stirs horror, pity, sometimes repulsion, sentiments that linger uneasily until the action starts up again to sweep away that empathy with another explosion, gunfight or rousing chase.
It is exhausting having your conscience pricked so regularly. It may also be counterproductive to the stated aims of the people who make these films. It’s an article of faith that social-issue movies are worthwhile, important, even brave, as people in Hollywood like to insist. But it is naïve to think that these films, including a fair share of the documentaries, are being made on behalf of Africa and its people; they are made for us. They provide us a night’s entertainment and perhaps, for a couple of hours, they may make us think outside the multiplex box. They serve as balm for our media-saturated, fatigued hearts and minds. Like one of those Gap (Product) RED cashmere sweaters, they temporarily wrap us in their fuzzy goodness, shielding us from the chilling world outside.
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