Performing Body, Performing Image
Performing Body, Performing Image
Race and the Boundaries of Early Cinematic Narrative
In the first chapter I look at how “race” helped early motion pictures make narratives out of (almost) nothing. Beginning with films that depict the cinematic apparatus (usually through analogies to other arts/technologies), I argue that these films stage a competition between the performing body and the performing image, comparing the powers of the body to the powers of the apparatus. The cinema suffers no shortage of origin stories. These early narratives play with more fluid spectatorial positions (watching and doing, looking and touching, on screen and in theatre) by linking the boundaries of the static frame to spectator/spectacle relations; and these boundaries are repeatedly exploited, transcended, and figured through racialized bodies.
Keywords: Cinema, Race, Technology, Body, Shadow, Rhetoric, Image, Performance
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