CIN270Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Cognitive Map
11 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Tuesday, Jan. 30, 2018
CIN270Y1
CLASS 2.7
Cinematic Unrest: Politics and New Black Cinema
Clockers
● Source material from The Wire inspired by this film
● Macho posture, Strike is still a child searching for himself
● Reassure themselves to stay alive
Embodied/Enacted
● Films embody or enact scenarios
● Some kind of challenge for us as viewers, films don’t simply tell us about their scenarios
● What they intend to critique, they must SHOW.
● Even abstract formulations are “represented” onscreen
- Like justice, a very abstract notion, is represented on screen
● So, these are not “descriptions” of Violence or Racism
● They’re shown in “embodied acts”
Reflect Upon…
● Films aren’t “reflections” of the world or reality; this is a work of fiction, but it wants us
to understand something about the real world
● A film is not a mirror, it would be a mistake to see it as such; it is not a reflection of
anything
● They’re reflections UPON the world
● They provide imaginative “maps” for understanding reality.
- The courtyard in Clockers
- The plague of drugs, the way the place is warped by economic imperatives
- This film provides an imaginative map for reality
- Not only do we see the space empty, occupied, the film offering a perspective on
that reality
- Film continually returns to this space; both a prison and a stage
- They find themselves in view, always under surveillance (prison) always doing
drug deals in plain sight
- Car of the police is a shark, circling and encroaching upon the space
- Camera arching around the two characters; cat and mouse, lack of equilibrium.
Sense of enclosure, everything is contained in that movement. Rocco can leave,
but Strike and his buddies can’t leave the space. Camera renders that space,
giving a prison-like quality of that space; those characters are going nowhere
● They’re thinking about - and making sense of - the real world
“Cognitive Mapping”
● Cognitive mapping: the mental processing of physical spaces we inhabit
- Spaces we inhabit are often too big for us to hold in our mind
- Maps are useful for navigating that problem
- The “sublime”;
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Source material from the wire inspired by this film. Macho posture, strike is still a child searching for himself. Some kind of challenge for us as viewers, films don"t simply tell us about their scenarios. What they intend to critique, they must show. Like justice, a very abstract notion, is represented on screen. So, these are not descriptions of violence or racism. Films aren"t reflections of the world or reality; this is a work of fiction, but it wants us to understand something about the real world. A film is not a mirror, it would be a mistake to see it as such; it is not a reflection of anything. They provide imaginative maps for understanding reality. The plague of drugs, the way the place is warped by economic imperatives. This film provides an imaginative map for reality. Not only do we see the space empty, occupied, the film offering a perspective on that reality.
