Cultural Identity and Diaspora – Stuart Hall
- Identity:
- Individual Identity and Social Identity
- The dilemma of identity occurs when one is not sure where one belongs and where to place himself among others.
- Cultural identity is a shared identity of a community. They have a common history.
- There is nothing called true identity or an essential self for Hall, identities are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew through transformation and difference.
- First Cinema (Commercial Cinema):
- ‘First Cinema’ is a Hollywood production model that promulgates bourgeois values to a passive audience through escapist spectacles and individual characters.
- Second Cinema (Art Films):
- ‘Second Cinema’ is the European art film which rejects Hollywood conventions but is centered on the individual expression of the auteur (creative) director.
- Third Cinema (Special Purpose Cinema):
- Third Cinema rejects the views of cinema as a vehicle for personal expression appealing the masses by presenting the truth and inspiring revolutionary activities.
- They are made with a special purpose.
- Third cinema film can reflect a revolutionary atmosphere and deliver its message with confidence, convey the disillusionment of failed or coopted revolutions or express frustration with class, racial or gender oppression, colonial impulses from first world nations.
- It first started as a Latin American (South America) Film Movement in 1960.
- It decries neocolonialism, the capitalist system and Hollywood model of cinema as a mere entertainment business to make money.
- The term was coined by Argentine filmmakers Fernando Solonas and Octavio Getino in their manifesto flacia untercez cine (Towards a Third Film)
- The Hour of the Furnaces (Spanish: hora de los hornos) is a film (1968) directed by Octavio Getivo and Fernando Solanas.
- Caribbean Cinema:
- Caribbean Cinema is a chain of movie theatre in Puerto Rico as the Caribbean Island.
- Rockers is a 1978 Jamaican film by Theodoros Bafalonkos. Rockers was originally intended to be a documentary but blossomed into a full length feature showing the raggae culture at its peack. Raggae is an important form of music for Jamaica, it has also created an understanding of Jamaican lifestyle and culture for the rest of the world. It is a form of music for the masses in which their word can be heard and spoken. It is a way to celebrate their nationalism and life.
- This ‘New Cinema’ puts question on identity, identity as production which is never complete but always in process and it arises the issue of cultural identity. In this medium Blacks are represented as the new postcolonial subjects. Their identity is questioned by Hall.
- Theory of Ennunciation (declaration)
- Hall’s concern in the essay is with the representation of the cultural identity of the Afro-Caribean people in emerging Caribbean cinema and Black-British Cinema.
How does Hall problematise the concept of identity and representation with reference to the third cinema and Caribbean Cinema?
- 1st and 2nd para of text
- What is the third cinema?
- what is Carribean Cinema?