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Imagining selves : the politics of representation, film narratives, and adult education / Aristides Gazetas.

Gazetas, Aristides, 1930- . Imagining selves : the politics of representation, film narratives, and adult education / Aristides Gazetas. 0820445665 (pbk.) series New York : Peter Lang, c2000.

Aristides Gazetas’ Imagining Selves: the Politics of Representation, Film Narrative, and Adult Education" offers a metaphysic perspective of the representation of reality in cinema. In its third chapter, “Film Narratives and Historical Representation”, the author explores the way cinema diffuse precise cultural discourses, or, in other words, what Jean Baudrillard calls a “politics of representation.” As a powerful means of visual information, cinema spreads particular imaginaries: through film narratives, it proposes definitions of cultural identities and the Other. As a result, it heavily influences our way to understand the world.
However, the rise of postmodernist theory (Lyotard) challenges and criticizes the given metanarratives enforced by the mainstream discourse. Postmodernist sensibility suggests a deconstruction of any foundational conceptions of knowledge. It opposes the indoctrination, the imposing of social representations operated by the saturation of rhetoric images hidden in the cinematographic medium. By reformulating the approach to these images, post-structural discourses give way to the complexity and multiplicity of the reality.

“Film Narratives and Historical Representation” provides a theoretical understanding of the articulation of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song in its discursive and historical context. The film appears as initiating a new way of cinematic representation which breaks with the positivist dominant discourse. Through a deconstruction of the images of Black people or the use of collage/bricolage (and through maybe its French New Wave influence), Van Peebles opposes the mainstream discourse and frontally displays the complexity of the world. He presents a distinct mode of representation which allows a multiplicity in the interpretation of reality. The director abandons the former “total representation” which “solidify” any identity in a type. If not directly addressing Van Peebles’ production, Gazetas proposes a powerful theoretical perspective on the philosophical stakes raised by Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song.

belongs to Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song Annotated Bibliography project
tagged postmodernism representation van_peebles by thomleon ...on 09-APR-08