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bell hooks: Cultural Criticism and Transformation
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"Being enlightened witnesses means becoming critically vigilant about the world we live in."
In this persuasive and passionate documentary critique, English professor bell hooks (who writes her name in lower case letters) reveals the racist and anti-feminist messages woven into widely varying samples of popular culture. Her commentary is punctuated with excerpts from music videos, feature films, and television news coverage. The OJ Simpson trial, Spike Lee, and "Hoop Dreams" all come up for analysis. The film is divided into two parts. In part one, hooks lays out the theoretical foundations of her work, arguing that film imagery and media representations are deliberately crafted to convey messages that support and reinforce the authority of powerful white males at the expense of women and people of color. In part two, she demonstrates how to recognize and counterbalance the "white supremacist, capitalist patriarchal values" reflected in popular media and public debate. hooks asserts that students need to learn how to identify the divisive messages about race, gender, class and privilege embedded in popular media in order to become active agents of change within the culture.
Recommended for college-level sociology and communications classes and community groups working to change media misrepresentations of gender and ethnic differences.
66 minutes.
©1997. The Media Education Foundation
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