Image by Kansas Sebastian
by Lisa Danker Kritzer
Protests following the recent killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, have raised greater awareness of how racism pervades all institutions and rituals of daily life in the United States. As educators in film and media, we can do some of our part by taking a close look at what and how we teach. I’ll share resources that could help make it easier for instructors to incorporate anti-racist teaching materials into our (mostly remote) courses in the fall.
Black and POC students face institutionalized racism at all levels of education and in their careers. Black and POC professionals also lack support, among peers and mentors, within their fields, and filmmaking is no exception. The USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, in 2019, updated their report “Inequality in 1,200 Popular Films,” which provides statistics on these problems. Though independent and experimental spheres may include more directors and films featuring people of color, many would agree that they also lack diversity and a sense of inclusivity.
Screen Widely: Diversify & Decolonize the Canon
We must drastically increase the numbers of films shown by Black and POC filmmakers, while also shifting the perspective as much as possible away from a white, Western-centric position of learning. This can be done in every single class. Even a Film History or Film Survey course could benefit from showing films made entirely by Black and POC filmmakers, not as a form of tokenism, but as a means of radically shifting the perspective of what cinema is, has been, and can be. For more information about what it means to decolonize syllabi, check out the Keele manifesto for decolonizing the curriculum and Professor Chanelle Wilson’s description of her syllabus decolonization process on the Bryn Mawr website.
For ideas on films:
- The Criterion Collection is streaming the program “Pioneers of African American Cinema” until September 30th.
- Check out this article by Allyson Nadia Field, published on the Criterion site: Black Cinema at Its Birth.
- Dessane Lopez Cassell compiled links to some filmmakers’ websites & Vimeo pages who have made their work available to the public in Tired of Netflix? Stream Experimental Films & Video Art.
- This spreadsheet of African and African Diaspora Cinema has been compiled by Culture Art Society.
- Video clips can also be found under Teaching Materials on the EDIT Media website.
- Black Women Directors is a digital library about Black women and nonbinary filmmakers.
Among the many lists of films by Black filmmakers in recent years, see:
- MUBI’s Notable Films by Black Directors,
- The Black Film Canon published by Aisha Harris and Dan Kois on Slate
- A Guide to Essential, Underrated, Flat-Out Extraordinary Films by Black Women Directors by Matthew Eng for Tribeca Film.
For scholarship on Black cinema (a topic which we hope will be covered in more detail in a future Edit Media blog post) start with:
- Black Camera is an academic journal, published by Indiana University Press, available through Project Muse and JSTOR.
Teach Inclusively
The EDIT Media Resources page includes links to some of the extensive literature on inclusive teaching. Specific lessons and notes for inclusive teaching can be found under EDIT Media Teaching Materials. Hegemonic Cinematography Exercise, posted by Ruth Goldman, for example, provides some slides and instructions for exercises on lighting for different skin colors. Notes on facilitating inclusive critiques, by Malia Bruker, could be a helpful review a day or two before a critique session.
Most of us, to some extent, can sense when students in a class feel included. They speak up, they engage in lively discussions about the work we show and read, and their work is strong. It nevertheless might be a good idea to give student surveys at least once during the semester to gauge how they feel about their ability to participate actively in the course, and this would be even more useful in those courses where things don’t seem to be ‘clicking’ with some or most of the students, or for remote classes, where it might not be easy to pull a student aside after class. The survey could include questions such as “Do you feel comfortable participating in class discussions? If not, could you tell me a little more about why?”
Anti-racism and anti-sexism are at the foundation of inclusive teaching. This working document for scaffolding anti-racism resources has been widely circulated and can be a good starting point for anti-racist work. This Anti-Racist Educator Self-Examination is geared to teaching, which I’ll be starting to use this fall for my own teaching.
References
Smith, Stacy L., Marc Choueiti, Katherine Pieper, Kevin Yao, Ariana Case, and Angel Choi. Inequality in 1,200 Popular Films: Examining Portrayals of Gender, Race/Ethnicity, LGBTQ & Disability from 2007 to 2018. USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, Published September 2019, http://assets.uscannenberg.org/docs/aii-inequality-report-2019-09-03.pdf
Lisa Danker Kritzer is an Associate Professor in Film at the University of Central Florida.
