The Witch's Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense

Perverse Modernities

by Kara Keeling

Kara Keeling contends that cinema and cinematic processes had a profound significance for twentieth-century anticapitalist Black Liberation movements based in the United States. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s notion of “the cinematic”—not just as a phenomenon confined to moving-image media such as film and television but as a set of processes involved in the production and reproduction of social reality itself —Keeling describes how the cinematic structures racism, homophobia, and misogyny, and, in the process, denies viewers access to certain images and ways of knowing. She theorizes the black femme as a figure who, even when not explicitly represented within hegemonic cinematic formulations of raced and gendered subjectivities, nonetheless haunts those representations, threatening to disrupt them by making alternative social arrangements visible. Keeling draws on the thought of Frantz Fanon, Angela Davis, Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, and others in addition to Deleuze. She pursues the elusive figure of the black femme through Haile Gerima’s film Sankofa , images of women in the Black Panther Party, Pam Grier’s roles in the blaxploitation films of the early 1970s, F. Gary Gray’s film Set It Off , and Kasi Lemmons’s Eve’s Bayou .

Genres: Theory, Film, Feminism, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Race, Academia

224 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2007

About the author

Kara Keeling is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. Keeling is the author of The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (2007) and the co-editor (with Josh Kun) of a selection of writings about sound and American Studies entitled Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies, and (with Colin MacCabe and Cornel West) of European Pedigrees/African Contagions: Racist Traces and Other Writing, a selection of writings by the late James A. Snead.

Reviews

[Ayanna Dozier · Rating 5 out of 5]

Okay, so I checked this book out from the library and about halfway through it I decided to buy it. I knew it was a necessary purchase when I had dog-eared all of the pages halfway through. There are so many things that I admire about this book but for space I will state three examples.

1. Keeling delivers a firm and concrete theorization of Affect. Keeling does so by examining the work of Bergson and concludes that affect is when internally one feels something that is at odds with their bodily reaction. Affectivity, for Keeling, is the political work that is done when one extends that feeling to another being. She forms this understanding by reading Bergson with Deleuze with Gramsci with Fanon.

2. Keeling reads Deleuze in conversation with Fanon as the cinematic image that Deleuze defines in Cinema One can be expanded upon to examine the role of the Black onscreen (per Fanon) and then how that understanding can further be expanded to see and hear the invisible off-screen work of the role of the Black femme.

3. The Black femme, while Keeling doesn't deliver examples of explicit Black femmes per se, but rather offers a way in which we can read the body of a Black woman as femme for Black femmes can escape the heterosexual matrix that entraps the body of the Black woman in the cinematic frame. Keeling does this re-reading of sorts through Eve Bayou's and states that with the removal of the male, it allows these bodies to transcend representation and a heterosexual gaze that can limit the possibilities and interpretations of the body of the black woman.

[i. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kara Keeling’s The Witch’s Flight draws from and synthesizes the work of Deluze, Fanon, Spivak, and Gramsci to examine popular cinematic representations of Blackness. In exploring the cinematic—both in terms of popular film and in terms of the cinematic as applied to spectacular recorded performances and appearances, like the filmed Black Panther Party protests against the Milford Act—Keeling both draws out the “common sense” narratives being (re)produced within these films and examines how these cinematic representations offer alternative formations of “common sense” in some cases, and fugitive counternarratives in other cases. These fugitive readings ultimately find their subject in the figure of the Black femme, whose Black femme function “posits to a radical Elsewhere that is ‘outside homogenous space and time’ and that ‘does not belong to the order of the invisible’” (137).

Ultimately, Keeling’s analysis of the cinematic production of common sense, and the fugitive and unaccounted-for modes of alternative readings that resist liberal formations of chronological time—most embodied in the figure of the black femme—make visible the limits of the hegemonic project. Or, as Keeling writes: “…the black femme currently is a reminder that the set of what appears is never perfectly closed and that something different might appear therein at any instant whatever” (143).

[Tia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book difficult and confusing, but it’s clearly very smart and offers a lot of innovative and perceptive challenges to hegemonic discourses in Film Studies, particularly around visibility and legibility.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like others have written, the language of the book can be an obstruction. At times, particularly in its introduction, dense phrases and definitions tangle themselves across the page. The book, at its most problematic moments, reads like a dissertation by marshalling academic theories and citations to legitimize its own argument. Despite the book's appeal to using songs to structure its chapters, its language is firmly embedded in the academy, which will inevitably turn off many readers who don't want to struggle over some deeply complex sentences. However, as the book progresses, it gets better in terms of its writing. The intertwining of Deleuze and Gramsci to understand cinema and the ideological powers of its images is interesting. Perhaps most compelling is Keeling's reinterpretation of Franz Fanon to explore the power of the cinematic interval in relation to being (assumed) Black.

There are many great insights in the book. The unpacking of the Black Revolutionary Woman during the late 1960s in regards to the Black Panthers to the reinscription and taming of this figure by Blaxploitation films is innovative. I applaud the desire to read Blackness and politics beyond simply representational. Yet, overall, the book provides an overall close-reading of a series of films and other televisual objects, which can only go so far. I would argue that the production practices and other material practices would be equally useful to explore regarding resistance, which is at times implied in Chapter Four on Black Revolutionary Women but never investigated. Ultimately, the book is arguing about the Black Femme as a figure haunting the screen as potential disruption but most often reinscribed back into dominant frameworks or common sense, to use the Gramscian term that Keeling employs. Worth the read. But be prepared for a certain challenge.

[Katie · Rating 2 out of 5]

The reviews of this book are excellent, so I had high hopes when I started reading. However, I'm about 1/3 of the way through, and while I feel like the author has an important and valid point to make, the author's writing style incites a struggle. For example, in chp 4, the author uses the phrase "technological cinematic machines" rather than just saying "television". Why make it so complicated? I've read many books by authors who have critiqued other books or documentaries. I also studied documentary film in university classes. Usually, a reader can get a good sense of the plot, as well as the original writer's point, just from the critique; yet, in this case, I just keep thinking I'd much rather read the books or watch the films she discusses and skip her comments altogether, which is what I've decided to do rather than finish the book. Perhaps I'll take another look at it in the future.

[Camille · Rating 3 out of 5]

Either I didn't understand this book or it was poorly written. My hunch is it mostly column B and not column A. There were a few good ideas here around Deleuze's cinematic, and the butch-femme binary being an extreme adoption of hegemonic gender roles for practical purposes of socioeconomic survival, buuuut my mind wasn't like blown or anything. It was, however, a good reminder to go back and look at Eve's Bayou again. Good flick that.

[Laurel Schuster · Rating 5 out of 5]

plenty of deleuzobabble but still readable! a history of making black femme lesbians earth-shatteringly seeable in cinematic images. comes with soundtrack!

[Dunya Nadar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kara Keeling's The Witch's Flight sustains an intellectual engagement as a means to spoil, ruin, or disrupt the linear narrative of hegemonic 'common sense'—we are asked to engage the cinematic representations of the black femme as a counter-narrative and counter sense-making strategy. In setting up her 'theoretical scaffolding,' Keeling "generates the witch's flight, because the witch—the black femme I desire and pursue throughout this study—takes her raison d'etre from the very mechanisms and conditions that sustain the cinematic, even as her existence is part of a collective will to destroy it"(10). In Set it Off, Keeling argues that the "black femme's femininity is made visible insofar as she serves as the currency that secures Cleo's masculinity" (119). Cleo dies in a dramatic scene that valorizes her bravery and her resistance to (white) power structures embodied in the police state. The film silences the black femme and the only way we know how she feels in the end is seeing her watch the televised death scene with tears streaming down her face. The sole survivor of the four women is Stony who escapes with all the bank robbery money; her survival is contingent on her leaving LA, leaving home, her anonymity being exemplified by her hair cut. She now is almost bald. Her tears, at the close of the film, exemplify sadness and triumph over all the socially inscribed violence in her life.

The sad truth is that the L-Word seems more violent and vile in its portrayal of butch-femme identities in comparison to any of the other cinematic examples Keeling analyzes. This Showtime series needs some serious intersectional analyses. The portrayal of women of color, transgender identities, bisexuality are so off the mark. Keeling rightly sees Kit, Pam Greer, as the only person, the femme, the heterosexual foil to the group of lesbian friends, as the only one challenging the show's hetero-normative precepts (114-117). If this is the present or the future, let's definitely go back.

BOTTOM LINE:
This is an amazing book especially if you are interested in theorizing the cinematic from an intersectional analysis.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

Situated within performance studies, Keeling combines aspects from multiple theorists (Bergson, Deleuze, Gramsci, Fanon) to provide a powerhouse theoretical foundation for her pursuit to trace the presence, absence, and quotidian resistance of the black femme in American cinema, building upon the belief that the cinematic does not reflect or represent reality, but is a constructive part of reality, as well as notions of blackness, gender, sexuality, and power.

[Mendi]

yay Kara!

[Mills College Library]

791.43652 K263 2007

[homoness · Rating 3 out of 5]

starts out really strong and then just deteriorates...