As is discernible in each of the films discussed, there exists a necessary relationship of cross-pollination between contemporary black consciousness politics, narrative and character constructions, and the messages embedded within them. Working parallel to these attributes is the representation of Africa and Africans.
Reading the employment of African elements in the films involves more than just contextualisation, however. It insists on an understanding of cinema’s basic operating mechanisms and codes. This includes being familiar with standard filmic conventions, which include how cinema can manipulate space (i.e., by lighting, camera angles and framing, settings, depth of field, focus – the technical, literal aspects) and time (i.e., the abstract aspects as elucidated in the plot/script). It also includes other salient mechanisms, like understanding that the audience may be privy to information that the characters are not, by way of slates, soliloquies or other types of revelations. Depending on how well this is executed, a film can lock the audience in their diegesis, where they can then engage them with the messages, lessons and sensations they wish to inspire. Watching a film is thus a multifaceted, communicative gazing and refracting from both sides of the screen.
What I have chosen to articulate briefly here are only a few factors a viewer is expected to be cognisant of while watching a film, and I do so in order to illustrate how context and the extra-diegetic societal conventions that inform the reading or
meaning-making processes of any film, affects the spectator’s understanding (and appreciation) of it.
In the proceeding chapter, I will concentrate on assessing potential associations of the spectator to what is presented on the screen, and the correlation of this with the constitutive identity-making processes inherently involved in watching a film.
4. A Reading of the African Elements
Having established a contextual framework with which to read the African elements in the selected films by analysing the permutations of black consciousness movements in US America, and the socio-political conditions that necessitated them, as well as by assessing the messages in the narratives and their objectives, what remains is an examination of the African elements themselves and thus, a rendering of how they can be seen as an extension and reflection of the afore-mentioned contexts.
In various scholarly texts, film has been characterised as a system of signs with relations to the subject/object (or “the signified”), mediated by cinematic (e.g., scene composition, framing or editing) and non-cinematic codes (e.g., dialogue and costuming), thus implying a need for them to be translated, without which their raison d’être is made redundant.84 Born out of semiotics, the theories used to explicate how film produces meaning converge on the understanding that at its core, the signs must go through a transformative process from which the content in these systems of signs and coding are released. In order to do so, the film must have a spectator. In short, meaning is made possible by spectator interaction.
From this conceptual perspective, the presented African elements operate as signs which function alongside several other codes to construct and produce meaning in the selected films. As they are conceived of in this thesis, for the varied purposes of their plots, the discussed films need to transmit settings (i.e., diegetic environments) and/or characterisations (i.e., of people and spirituality) that are inferred and are to be immediately read as Africa and African (in actuality or in the implied form via décor, clothing, art, hair, language or sonically) to, primarily, US Americans, from which African Americans are the target audience. For in constructing implicit subject matter by selecting signs for specific functions based on decisions for what to emphasise in the story, the films principle producers do so with the added cognisance of what they must assume their primary audience would understand from their production. This speaks to the assertion in chapter one, that because these films are either by African Americans, are black-cast, and addresses African American socio-political experiences, it therefore follows that the target audience is African American.
More than just decoding the presented signs, the spectator must also understand the context, for without contextualisation, there is an implicit limit to the production of meaning.
84 See Wollen, Silverman, Miller and Stam, Lapsley and Westlake.
Signifying elements in cultural industries like film rely on a contextualisation rooted in dominant societal practice. As a result, as both a constitutive and constituted form of expression, these signs thus have the potential to produce many interpretations with infinite repercussions, as they are dependent on individual readings of them.
At the same time however, social convention (by virtue of its ordering mechanisms) influences the multiplicit potential of their readings and thus can also reduce the scope of a signs interpretation by an individual, and hence its meaning. So though they may read as being representationally true and thus ingenuous, filmic signs inevitably impose a highly selective political, social or spiritual outlook on the viewer. For, the reasons for choices of shots, music, props, etc., are not simply due to the fact that the filmmakers want to simply say something, they also want the audience to understand that something, and at the same time be able to contextualise or relate to it. What is meant by “relating to it,” includes the occasions of a negative-relation, namely, that the viewer consociates to the divergent or opposite of what is presented. Thus, as an alternate result of the same constitutive elements that elicited positive associations, a film and its signs can also be an exclusionary medium of expression which thereby serves as a demonstration of power by the privileging of one perspective over another.
For example, the presence of women’s “asses” in Barbershop may resonate differently when viewed by an individual who does not comply with the scopophilic expectation tacitly implied by the totality of the use of women in the film. Because the close-up, slow-motion framing of these buttocks does not serve a practical function in the unfolding of the plot, they present as a kind of narrative drifting which ultimately acts as a projection of the heteronormative, male-dominant parlance of the film, and which is in turn tied to the construction in it of a masculine ideal. Presence of female identities in Barbershop therefore interrupt this stress in its plot, and so are promptly employed in a way that enhances it at the expense of a more fully developed female characterisation, as per the demands of the patriarchal framework of the film’s narrative. Compelling the viewer to recognise and participate by way of a negative-relation process, births, as Manthia Diawara formulates a
“resistant spectator” (1993: 219). The reading of these particular frames are intended to provoke a response which I argue the viewer is consciously aware of, given the repeated, displayed diegetic reactions to women’s buttocks. I therefore borrow the phrase and by it, the adjective, “resistant,” because cognisant of this, any viewer who does not share the diegetic and, thus, inferred response to these frames as per the generally-assumed societal convention of expressed heterosexuality, is then “resistant,” as the word implies an active, conscious
disassociation.
Thereupon, as part of the spectrum of “resisting spectatorship,” I emphasise the conscious spectator who becomes impassive in their “active criticism,” which allows the occasion for that critique to potentially transform similar renderings in future (Diawara 1993:
219). Thus, in addition to Diawara’s formulation, I stress that such a viewing experience can also simultaneously transform the position of the spectator to one which is empowered. In such instances, film, as a cultural medium for individual and collective identity construction, which simultaneously either reflects and maintains, or refracts expressions of these, can then function as a persuasive, galvanising tool. Moreover, I apply this position to any scene, in any film that inspires such a response from a spectator.
What the former discussion also reveals, is that, crucially, the processes of reading a film encourages observations through either paradigmatic or syntagmatic inference from the viewer. Consequently, the spectator goes through the imperative procedure of “relating” to what is being shown, because through this form of interpretation, they inject “themselves”
into the task, therewith recognising aspects of their own identities in what they see represented in the film. Lastly, depending on what they identify with (or not with) from the scenes and/or plot, the spectator’s readings are then usually either confirmed or denied in other, and often, increasingly obvious ways.85
Given that the afore-mentioned “reading-interpreting-reacting” spectator processes necessarily induces differing viewing experiences derived from the same, presented material, this chapter will thus engage a cognitive or psychoanalytical approach to the reading of the African elements in the films. For while watching, the spectator is continually developing an architecture for understanding the diegesis based on what is deemed to be the intended message behind the film’s cinematic codes. As the plot evolves and more information is given to the spectator, so too does their contextual framework of understanding. In addition, as suggested earlier, this also necessarily includes the viewer’s own identity and its relation to what is shown. Further, this approach will best explicate how, if reading their signifying qualities from the position as a “conscious” spectator, making meaning from the African elements may generate the requisite conscientising premised in chapter one.86
85 For examples, see the analysis of John Singleton’s Higher Learning in chapter three.
86 As can be read in Stephen Prince’s contribution in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, it could be argued that analysing viewing experiences of films in connection with (what is essentially assumed) detected narrative messages would be enriched by an empirical contribution. I will, however, forego such anaddition to my analyses in this regard, because the scope of this thesis is not concerned with, for example, the viewing behaviours of the spectators. My interest is with the overall resonances of the messages in relation to the African elements.