bell hooks on Video: Cultural Criticism & Transformation

If when I die, I'm shoved tumbling into hell for my various breaches of political correctness and my seamy career as a closet cultural critic, this is the video I'll be forced to watch for a terrible flaming eternity: bell hooks (yes, lower case), City College of New York English professor, setting us straight on how culture constructs filmmakers who construct films in culture's image. And what a shared image it is, bristling, according to hooks, with "white supremacist capitalist patriarchal" fangs and warts. In the first part of this two-part filmed lecture, hooks discusses the concept of cultural criticism, the need for a critical reading of media and for an unflagging awareness of how media representations insinuate their cultural messages into our lives. The second half of the tape is a deconstructive exercise in which hooks applies the concepts of cultural criticism to specific cases: the O.J. trial (the media circus; race as smokescreen for issues of patriarchy and male violence), Madonna (ex-feminist turned capitalistic lackey sellout), and Spike Lee (as victim of the white Hollywood power structure). She also takes on the movie Kids, rap, Hollywood's appropriation of "blackness," and the media representation of the black female body. In this second half in particular, hooks has a lot of important and fascinating things to say (her comparison of white boys listening to rap to white tourists plundering a Third World country, for example, is rather brilliant). Trouble is, this discourse is so mired in politically correct rhetoric and academic buzz that it rapidly becomes indigestible. There are also basic production problems which get in the way of the message. For most of the video, hooks is shot in 3/4 profile (avoiding the patriarchal gaze, perhaps? Or simply filmed in the act of lecturing to an unseen audience by an inept cameraperson?). Interspersed throughout are distracting quick-fire clips from the types of movies hooks is discussing (unfortunately, they're more interesting to look at than the lecturer). Intertitles are also flashed on the screen periodically (THE IDEOLOGY OF WHITE SUPREMACY ALLOWS THE COLLUSION OF BLACK PEOPLE WITH THE FORCES OF RACISM); they're like translations from some impenetrable foreign language--which they are in a way. Academic libraries with strong holdings in film, mass communications, or ethnic studies might consider this as a marginal purchase. Aud: C. (G. Handman)