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Chapter 3 explores how white indie filmmaker Michel Gondry appropriates The Watermelon Woman’s oppositional aesthetics as a culturally appropriative, cross-racial ventriloquism. Like The Watermelon Woman, Be Kind Rewind (2008) creates an archive of classical quotations around a Black classical Hollywood artist, but while Watermelon Woman invented a fictional Black artist within an archival absence, Be Kind creates over a real-life artist, Fats Waller, a racist erasure by a white director fabricating Black artistry through cross-racial ventriloquism. Be Kind’s faux-35mm footage overlooks composer, artist, and activist Fats Waller’s real life and career and, instead, instrumentalizes Waller as a signifier, an image, a symbol of ancestral and commercial aura through monochrome’s cultural-memory-making power. Be Kind has too long masqueraded as goofy comedy without the critical weight to warrant interrogation of its (in)appropriation-via-quotation. Focusing on film quotation reveals this film’s strange, strained relationship to classical archive, Hollywood historiography, and race.
The introduction theorizes a new term, “film quotation” for the medium-specific re-framing, and re-viewing of preexisting films within subsequent films. This chapter theorizes film quotation as a visual corollary to literary quotation, drawing on the way humanities make meaning; the pull-quote, epigraph, and quotation remain the standard for citing evidence, invoking authority, or interrogating both literary and scholarly writing. This chapter theorizes film quotation as a specific manifestation within film intertextuality, in a specific historical frame. By focusing on film quotations of classical Hollywood film--mainstream American studio production, 1915-1950--as quoted in post-classical Hollywood, roughly 1960 to present, accesses a key turn in Hollywood and American cultural history, allowing post-classical cinema to visualize its own “belatedness,” its awareness of coming after a “classical” period. As a constitutive element of post-classical authorship, film quotations amass and manufacture “classical” Hollywood in retrospective, simultaneously creative and critical ways
Classical Projections theorizes a new term, “film quotation,” for the medium-specific repurposing, re-framing, and re-viewing of preexisting films within subsequent films. As a visual corollary to literary quotation, film quotation embeds film fragments within on-screen televisions, movie theaters, and computer screens. Quotation accesses the way the humanities make meaning; the pull-quote, epigraph, and quotation are standard for citing evidence, invoking authority, or interrogating literary and scholarly writing. Film studies has yet to seriously examine how film quotations convene interaction and create new knowledge across time. Classical Projections focuses on film quotations of classical Hollywood film—mainstream American studio production, 1915–1950—as quoted in post-classical Hollywood, roughly 1960 to present. Though film quotation has been used since early silent cinema, this strategic historical frame asks, How does post-classical cinema visualize its own “belatedness,” its awareness of coming after a “classical” or “golden age”? How do post-classical filmmakers claim or disavow classical history? How do historically disenfranchised post-classical filmmakers, whether marginalized by gender, sexuality, or race, grapple with exclusionary and stereotype-ridden canons? As a constitutive element of post-classical authorship, film quotations amass and manufacture “classical” Hollywood in retrospective, highly strategic ways. Considering both archival quotations and “created-quotations,” which are fabricated by the quoting filmmakers, uncovers the images, voices, and fragments of the “classical” canon that either never existed, were never preserved, were mired in caricature, or that classical Hollywood could not “image/imagine.” By revealing how quotational tellings of film history build and embolden exclusionary, myopic canons, Classical Projections uncovers opportunities to construct more capacious cultural memory.
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