In their ‘manifesto,’ “Reclaiming Black Film and Media Studies,” Racquel J. Gates and Michael Boyce Gillespie offer a series of ‘expectations bundles as concerns.’ Included in their list are: “we must remember that traditionally the field of film studies was designed around the centering of heterosexual white men. This forms the bedrock of the film industry and of film studies,” and “we must insist on being attentive to issues of film form as opposed to focusing on content alone.”
They end on a note of ambivalence, in specific regard to Black film historiography, but ambivalence is evident throughout the manifesto and particularly present in the juxtaposition of the two concerns I have listed above: film studies has centered whiteness and also, and yet, the specialized languages and terminologies of film studies do provide useful analytical categories for understanding film– what it is and how it works.
With that in mind, identify and discuss some moment of reflexivity in Sorry to Bother You. That is, some moment when you became aware of the film reflecting upon itself as a film. And, if possible, how did that moment of reflexivity produce, in you, some critical way to think about the film’s representation of whiteness or blackness?
(Boots Riley, 2018, 112 min.)
