Can "we all" get along? Social difference, the future, and Strange Days

Camera Obscura

Volumn 17, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 155-188

  Berrettini, Mark ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NORTHERN COLORADO   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950233990     PISSN: 02705346     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/02705346-17-2_50-155     Document Type: Review

References (28)

1. In Gavin Smith's "Momentum and Design," Film Comment 31.5 (1995), Bigelow explains that the camera used for the SQUID clips is "a modified Steadicam that gives you the fluidity of Steadicam but the realism of handheld, without the limitations of either" (50).
2. In More Than Night Film Noir in Us Contexts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998),James Naremore makes an interesting but underdeveloped corollary point in his discussion of technological advancements in cinematography in relation to film noir since the 1970s. He states that "it should be noted that most of the best-known 'neo-noirs' contain spectacular tracking shots made possible by Steadicams or other new technologies." Naremore mentions the opening sequence of Strange Days as an example but does not explore why film noir more than other genres exploits these technologies (302 n. 29).
3. The Matrix (dir. the Wachowski Brothers, US, 1999),
4. Until the End of the World (dir. Wim Wenders, France/Germany/ Australia/US, 1991).
5. This transformation of SQUID's usage within the film can be described by a concept that Constance Penley, in The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989),
6. names "tech noir," a term that she derives from the name of a nightclub appearing in The Terminator (dir. James Cameron, US, 1984).
7. The Lady from Shanghai (dir. Orson Welles, US, 1948),
8. Blade Runner (dir. Ridley Scott, US, 1982),
9. Jade (dir. William Friedkin, US, 1995).
10. For a discussion of the role that bars play in classic film noir, see Vivian Sobchack's "Lounge Time: Postwar Crises and the Chronotope of Film Noir," in Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 129-70.
11. In "Reality Bytes: Andrew Hultkrans Talks with Kathryn Bigelow," Artforum, November 1995, Hultkrans invokes a namesake for Lenny when he states that "Strange Days gives us a damaged antihero, Lenny Nero, who is fiddling - jacking off, or in, as the case may be - while L.A. burns" (80).
12. Reported on All Things Considered, National Public Radio, 24 February 1999.
13. Also, Howard G. Chua-Eoan in "Beneath the Surface," Time, 22 June 1998, writes that "in Jasper, people still wonder about the suicide a few years back of a popular black high school football plaver who dated a white girl. People ask, though without evidence, Did he really hang himself, or was he lynched?" (34).
14. Phillip Brian Harper, Are We Not Men? Masculine Anxiety and the Problem, of African-American Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 143.
15. For discussions that complicate the representation of "black looters" versus "Asian shopkeepers," see Rosa Linda Fregoso, The Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993);
16. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, "The L.A./U.S. Race 'Riot' and Politics," in Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising, ed. Robert Goodings-Williams (New York: Routledge, 1993), 97-114,
17. Elaine H. Kim, "Home Is Where the Han Is: A Korean-American Perspective on the Los Angeles Upheavals," in Goodings-Williams, Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising, 215-35.
18. In "King TV," Sasha Torres makes a corollary point about Rodney King himself. She writes that "the video [of King's beating], and the wider televisual flow through which it circulated, placed King as a stand-in for the 'invisible' or at least unvideotaped victims of police murder in L.A. and elsewhere" (Living Color: Race and Television in the United States [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998], 158).
19. Bill Nichols, "The Trials and Tribulations of Rodney King," in Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 17-42.
20. Frank P. Tomasulo presents a similar assessment of Holliday's videotape, though with more concern for history, historiography, and truth, in " 'I'll See It When I Believe It': Rodney King and the Prison-House of Video," in The Persistence of History, ed. Vivian Sobchack (New York: Routledge, 1996), 69-88.
21. Judith Butler, "Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia," in Goodings-Williams, Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising, 15.
22. Sharon Willis writes in High Contrast: Race and Gender in Contemporary Hollywood Film (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997) that "Angela Bassett's [character] in Strange Days. is alertly conscious of her racialized and gendered position, but she is not on account of them pinned down to do additional representational work" (188).
23. B. Ruby Rich, "Dumb Lugs and Femmes Fatales," Sight and Sound 5.11 (1995):6.
24. Gay and straight seem to be a subtextual dichotomy in this film with regard to Mace. In Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1998), Yvonne Tasker writes about Mace as a "'masculine' woman" who moves toward " 'feminine' attire and a heterosexual relationship at the end of the film" (87).
25. Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre, and the Action Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1993), 156.
26. Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 128.
27. Ed Guerrero, "A Circus of Dreams and Lies: The Black Film Wave at Middle Age," in The New American Cinema, ed. Jon Lewis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 333.
28. Tasker, Working Girls, 85.