Film Studies 1022 Lecture Notes - Lecture 20: Radiance, Set Piece (Filmmaking), Apotheosis

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White
By: Richard Dyer
White power secures its dominance by seeming not to be anything in particular
- When whiteness qua whiteness does come into focus, it is often revealed as
emptiness, absence or death
Whiteness is a culturally constructed category
Groups defined as oppressed, marginal or subordinate:
- Women, working class, ethnic and other minorities (lesbians, gay men, disabled
people and elderly)
The norm has carried on as if it is the natural, inevitable, ordinary way of being human
Two convolutions that characterize male writing about masculinity: guilt and me too-ism
Power in contemporary society habitually passes itself off as embodied in the normal as
opposed to the superior
- Works in a seductive way with whiteness because of the way it is rooted in
common-sense though
There are inevitable associations of:
- White with light (therefore safety)
o Not anything not an identity or a quality because it is everything
No colour because it is all colours
o White domination is reproduced by the way that white people colonize the
definition of normal
- Black with dark (therefore danger)
o Always marked as a colour
- Judaeo-Christian use of white and black to symbolize good and evil
The colourless multi-colouedness of whiteness secures white power by making it hard,
espeiall for white people ad their edia, to see whiteess
White interviewees refer easily to gender, age, nationality or looks - but never to
ethnicity
- Sub-categories (Irish, Jewishness, Britishness) take over, so that the particularity of
whiteness itself begins to disappear
- The participants settle in to talking with confidence about what they know:
stereotypes of black people
Talking about blackness gives us a clue as to where we might begin to see whiteness:
- Where its difference from blackness if inescapable and at issue
- The study of the characterization whites in Third World or diaspora cinema
- Images of the white race in avowedly racist and fascist cinema
- The use of the ouiatio test, the iagiar sustitutio of lak for white
performers in films such as Brief Encounter/Ordinary People
- What ideas of whiteness are implied by such widespread observations as that Sidney
Poitier or Diane Ross say, are too itets ad purposes white
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Document Summary

By: richard dyer: white power secures its dominance by seeming not to be anything in particular. When whiteness qua whiteness does come into focus, it is often revealed as emptiness, absence or death: whiteness is a culturally constructed category, groups defined as oppressed, marginal or subordinate: Works in a seductive way with whiteness because of the way it is rooted in common-sense though: there are inevitable associations of: Black with dark (therefore danger: always marked as a colour. Sub-categories (irish, jewishness, britishness) take over, so that the particularity of whiteness itself begins to disappear. The participants settle in to talking with confidence about what they know: stereotypes of black people: talking about blackness gives us a clue as to where we might begin to see whiteness: Where its difference from blackness if inescapable and at issue. The study of the characterization whites in third world or diaspora cinema.

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