This book compares the original version of the screenplay of the film Bamboozled (2000) with the Italian dubbed text, offering an analysis of forty-four compliments and forty-four insults. In order to provide a comparative study of the expressive speech acts in both versions, the book includes all the examples of such language use in the film. After a brief presentation of the main linguistic features of African American English and a short introduction to audiovisual language and to the relevance of audiovisual translation in the field of Translation Studies, every speech act in both versions is thoroughly analysed and commented upon. The contrastive analysis of the original and the dubbed version demonstrates that the most noteworthy discrepancies between the scripts are due to the transposition of lingua-cultural elements. Because of the constraints of the target language itself, several references to the African American community and heritage are omitted in the Italian text. Moreover, while the illocutionary force of dubbed utterances often coincides with the original, slang expressions and sub-standard linguistic traits are almost always weakened or neutralized.
Shelton Jackson «Spike» Lee is one of the most culturally influential and provocative film directors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Bringing together seminal writings - from classic scholarship to new research - this book focuses on this revolutionary film auteur and cultural provocateur to explore contemporary questions around issues of race, politics, sexuality, gender roles, filmmaking, commercialism, celebrity, and the role of media in public discourse. Situating Lee as an important contributor to a variety of American discourses, the book highlights his commitment to exploring issues of relevance to the Black community. His work demands that his audiences take inventory of his and their understandings of the complexities of race relations, the often deleterious influence of media messages, the long term legacy of racism, the liberating effects of sexual freedom, the controversies that arise from colorism, the separatist nature of classism, and the cultural contributions and triumphs of historical figures. This book seeks to stimulate continued debate by examining the complexities in Lee's various sociopolitical claims and their ideological impacts.
This study explores African-American identity through film, drawing from Spike Lee's cinematic production of X (1992) and Bamboozled (2000). The study brings attention to how African-American identity is negotiated in communicative interactions. In doing so, the study proposes an alternative rhetorical and cultural approach to the nuances of African-American identity. Using contemporary theories from Ronald Jackson, Mark McPhail, Cornel West, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Eric Watts, the researcher explores the dynamics of human interaction: the manifestations of power, perception, essentialist thinking, and how these in turn penetrate through language in our understanding of others. This study makes critical arguments concerning the strategic positioning of language for purposes of understanding culture and difference. More importantly, it rearticulates black identity, making an argument for its complexities, which are other than historical and factual. It argues that black identity needs to be examined in terms of a more critical and culturally appropriate rhetoric.
Spike Lee's challenging film Bamboozled (2000) is often read as a surface level satire of blackface minstrelsy. Careful analysis, however, gives way to a complex and nuanced study of the history of black performance. This book analyzes the work of five men, minstrel performer Bert Williams, director Oscar Micheaux, writer Ralph Ellison, painter Michael Ray Charles, and director Spike Lee, all through the lens of this misunderstood film. Equal parts biography and cultural analysis, this book examines the intersections of these five artists and Bamboozled, and investigates their shared legacy of resistance against misrepresentation.
Since his first feature movie, She's Gotta Have It (1986), gave him critical and commercial success, Spike Lee has challenged audiences with one controversial film after another. Lee has made a broad range of movies, including documentaries (4 Little Girls), musicals (School Daze), crime dramas (Clockers), biopics (Malcolm X).
Nicolas Roeg is one of the most distinctive and influential film-makers of his generation. The generation of film-makers who define contemporary movie-making - Danny Boyle, Kevin Macdonald ( The Last King of Scotland), Christopher Nolan ( The Dark Knight), James Marsh ( Man on Wire), and Guillermo Del Toro ( Pan's Labyrinth), all acknowledge their debt to the work of Nicolas Roeg. Roeg began as a cameraman, working for such masters as Francois Truffaut and David Lean. His explosive debut as a director with Performance, established an approach to film-making that was unconventional and ever-changing, creating works such as Don't Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Bad Timing, Insignificance, and, more recently, Puffball. Having now reached eighty years of age, Roeg has decided to pass on to the next generations, the wealth of wisdom and experience he has garnered over fifty years of film-making.
In 1990, Tommy Davidson burst onto the scene in the Emmy Award-winning show In Living Color, a pioneering sketch comedy show, featuring a multi-racial cast of actors and dancers who spoke to an underrepresented new generation created by Hip Hop Nation. A story of black excellence, in this revealing memoir, Tommy shares his unique perspective on making it in Hollywood, being an integral part of television history, on fame and family, and on living a life that has never been black and white—just funny and true . . . Abandoned as an infant on the streets of Greenville, Mississippi, and rescued by a loving white family, Tommy Davidson spent most of his childhood unaware that he was different from his brother and sister. All that changed as he came of age in a society of racial barriers—ones that he was soon to help break. On a fledgling network, Tommy joined the cast of In Living Color, alongside other relative newcomers including Jim Carrey, Rosie Perez, Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Lopez—all united by an ingenious throng of Wayans siblings (Keenen, Damon, Kim, Shawn, and Marlon), poised to break new ground. Now Tommy gives readers the never-before-told behind-the-scenes story of the first show born of the Hip Hop Nation: from its incredible rise, to his own creation of such unforgettable characters as Sweet Tooth Jones and dead-on impressions of Sammy Davis, Jr., Michael Jackson, M.C. Hammer and Sugar Ray Leonard, and appearing in such classic sketches as “Homie The Clown,” the “Hey Mon, family,” and the unforgettable “Ugly Woman,” through guest-star skirmishes (and black eyes) to backstage tensions and the eventual fall of this pop-culture touchstone. He reveals his own nascent career on the stand-up circuit with Adam Sandler, Jerry Seinfeld, Louie Anderson and performing with Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor, as well as reflections on working with Spike Lee, Halle Berry, Sam Jackson, Chris Rock and Jada Pinkett Smith. And he also shares his very personal story of living with—and being inspired and empowered by—two distinct family histories. Told with humor and hard-won honesty by a singular voice whose family and friendships help him navigate a life of personal and professional highs and lows, Living in Color is a bracing, illuminating, and remarkable success story. An homage to the groundbreaking series In Living Color was featured in Bruno Mars’s music video for his hit song Finesse, a remixed collaboration with Cardi B. It was a loving tribute that exemplified the sustained cultural impact of the show, and now 90s kids can dig into their nostalgia through this humorous memoir of one of its stars!
Spike Lee's films have raised a multitude of questions about cinema, from attempts to outline the nature, or "essence," of a black cinematic aesthetics, to a revisioning of American film as a whole. They have sparked critical inquiries into the nature of genres, the role of the auteur, and the mechanics of an active text and an oppositional spectatorship. They have asked us to reconsider spectatorial pleasure; to revel in their polyphonic visual and aural fields. They consider not only race, but also the often blurred interconnections among race, gender, sexuality, and class. In short, they have encouraged, and, in some cases, forced us to interact with what's on screen and, perhaps more importantly, with each other, whether it be in the theater, the caf, the classroom, or the street corner. Taken together, the essays in The Spike Lee Reader will spark dialogue and encourage a continuing consideration of the depth and complexity of Spike Lee's career. Contributors include Christine Acham, Toni Cade Bambara, Mark D. Cunningham, Anna Everett, Krin Gabbard, Ed Guerrero, bell hooks, Michele Wallace and many others.
