Roxy’s Reviews > Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies > Status Update

bell hooks speaks beautifully about “influential” filmmaking. We often define legacy via quantity and grandeur — but the work of an artists who made one film can have a bigger cultural and artistic impression than someone who has made 20.

hooks uses Charles Burnett’s “Killers of Sheep” (1977) as an example of a modest but influential piece that’s had a rippling effect across (independent) film

Chapter 16: interview w/ Camille Billops

> manipulation of Black stories via wardrobe and backdrops; leaning into “sleazy” aesthetics
> document everything about your life presently and do so extensively. Print it on the best paper you can. It is proof you / all of these people and things existed in a point in time — see so you cannot repeat
> film is constructed — it’s not the same as revealing truth

Chapter 13

“Minor interventions [of stereotypes]…occur rarely.”

hooks urges for the support of independent cinema. With only conventional frameworks, we can never know a full experience. We need artists that reject Hollywood commercialism’s “unfeathered imaginations.” She basically says we need a more holistic variety of Black filmmakers — not just more Spike Lee copycats lol

bell hooks tears Larry Clark a new one in her essay on Kids (1995) (“Kids: Transgressive Subjects: Reactionary Film”). Some defend the film’s cultural impact since it was one of the earlier depictions of how HIV/AIDS affects heterosexual people. It would’ve been interesting to hear a response geared toward that, but still potent.

Crooklyn (1994) is my favorite of the mentioned films so far