Film Studies 1022 Lecture Notes - Lecture 20: Radiance, Set Piece (Filmmaking), Apotheosis
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,
espeiall for white people ad their edia, to see whiteess
• 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 ouiatio test, the iagiar sustitutio of lak 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 itets ad 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.