Pavlic, Edward
TR 9:35 AM
MLC 277
Spring 2022 Course Description
(NOTE: this course will include a required 3 hr screening session in FINE ARTS 400 to be held during an evening each week to be determined.)
“BLACK SOUNDS MATTER” examines the place of Black music strung between its role as witness to an unspeakable experience in American life (Baldwin 1951) and as conspirator in a medium designed to deliver fantasies to the viewer (Baldwin 1976). In this we find that the music in a kind of serial rebellion against the both the “paradoxical absolute” of the screen and the fantasy-delivery role of cinema. All these relationships, of course, vary from film to film and from era to era. In any or every case, we’ll trace the shifting roles of Black music as a voice in the script no one is “prepared to hear” and as witness to something often invisible in the films it serves. This is precisely why the whole matter of Black music in film matters.
James Baldwin:
(1951) It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story. It is a story which otherwise has yet to be told and which no American is prepared to hear. “Many Thousands Gone”
(1976) The distance between oneself—the audience—and a screen performer is an absolute:
a paradoxical absolute, masquerading as intimacy. . . That the movie star is an
“escape” personality indicates one of the irreducible dangers to which the moviegoer is exposed: the danger of surrendering to the corroboration of one’s fantasies as they are thrown back from the screen. The Devil Finds Work
Required Book
James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work
Recommended Books
Krin Gabbard, Jammin at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema
Michael Gillespie, Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film
Ed Sikov, Film Studies: An Introduction
Tim Corrigan and Patricia White, The Film Experience: An Introduction
Robert Sklar, Move-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies
Donald Bogle, Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood
Paul Rancière, The Intervals of Cinema
Films in include:
(1951) A Street Car Named Desire,
(1958) St. Louis Blues
(1954) Carmen Jones
(1959) Ascenseur pur l’échafaud
(1959) Shadows
(1961) Paris Blue
(1963) Nothing But A Man
(1966) A Man Called Adam
(1966) Blow Up
(1967) Sweet Love, Bitter
(1970) Les Stances a Sophie
(1974) Claudine
(1975) Killer of Sheep
(1972) Amazing Grace
(1975) Cornbread Earl and Me
(1986) She’s Gotta Have It
(1982) Losing Ground
(1986) Down By Law
(1984) Beat Street
(1989) Do the Right Thing
(1991) New Jack City
(1990) Paris is Burning
(1991) Daughters of the Dust
(1992) Just Another Girl on the IRT
(1991) Boyz N the Hood
(1992) Juice
(1993) Poetic Justice
(2002) Charlotte Sometimes
(2005) Hustle & Flow
(2009) Medicine for Melancholy
(2012) Restless City
(2016) Moonlight
(2018) The Last Black Man in San Francisco