Discussion Threads are a place for you to ask questions, engage with your TAs and peers, to find collaborators, and generally deepen your engagement with the course and your own learning. You should think of these posts as mini papers. Write in complete sentences, do not use bullet points or ellipses. Your response should be between 250-500 words. The style of your post can be speculative and personal, you do need to come up with arguments, rather just reflect on your own comprehension of the material. Write in your own voice. But this is not a social media space– your posts should be thoughtful and structured.
In her interview with Scott MacDonald (“Film as Translation, A Net With No Fisherman”), Trinh T Minh-ha reflects on her filmmaking practice in relation to theory. On page 123 she writes,” But I, myself, think of theory as a practice that changes your life entirely, because it acts on your conscience….I see theory as a constant questioning of the framing of consciousness — a practice capable of informing another practice, such as film production, in a reciprocal challenge.” Her statement seems to echo the activist sentiment of Mulvey’s essay (“Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema”), which is a call to disrupt the usual ways of looking in classical cinema. In your post this week, reflect upon these two calls to ‘see differently.’ How do you read these two pieces of writing as a call to activity (to do something differently) and what gets in the way of that (its specialized language, the difficulty of its concepts)? This post is an opportunity for you to engage in a generous and good faith reflection of your own reading of these two authors (Mulvey and Trinh).
