NAPPTURAL HAIR

Don Imus called the Rutgers basketball team "nappy headed ho's" and this racist/sexist remark revealed, among other things, Mr. Imus' deployment of Western standards of beauty to legitimize his televised ridicule of African-American hair style and hair texture.

This short documentary, however, is not about Don Imus per se. Rather this film is based on the assumption that all societal notions of beauty are socially constructed and ,therefore, they can be contested, scrutinized, undermined, subverted, challenged, reformulated and recalibrated to better reflect the black and brown faces of the American melting pot.

From permed hair to afros, braids, corn rows and dred locks, this short documentary hopes to stimulate more inter-racial discussions about the aesthetics and politics of African-American hair style and hair texture.

In terms of ideological framework , this short film practices the concept of reflexivity of Jewish Soviet filmmaker Academy-Awards Dziga Vertov (Denis Kaufman) in his 1929 documentary MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA sharing his belief that dialectically exposing the audience to the physical presence of the camera apparatus, unconventional editing and the camera operator vis a vis continuity editing (e.g. master shot discipline, separation shots, parallel action, multi-angularity, familiar image, moving camera, slow disclosure, orchestration,) demystifies the glamour and magic of film in order offer a socialist decoding of society.

This a short doc film by American University-MFA student,R. Concepcion.

Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• blacks
• race
• hair
• african
• american
• afros
• racism
• whites
• marilyn
• monroe
• aretha
• franklin
• malcolm
• nina
• simone
• sarah
• vaughn

[Mizza31]

very interesting.

[sireeemul]

Could you explain your notion of reflexivity please?

[Ezu8T]

it's a bit hard to read the words in the begining...but this is really nice.