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Slant's Ed Gonzalez's article "Barack Obama: A Story of Race and Politics"

From the article:

" "I turned away, embarrassed for her, irritated with the people around me." Those are Obama's words, about his mother and the crowd at the revival theater, but they could just as easily be mine, describing what I often feel whenever I see predominantly white audiences swoon for obscene films like Crash, Blood Diamond, and Under the Same Moon, wishing they could see how those films pander to white prejudices by condescending to non-white experience, and how that's a symbiotic relationship worth affronting."

Read the rest here.

Thanks House Next Door for the link.

::

And let me add something to this discussion and say that there is a lot of experiences that "white" humans and "non-white" humans have in common; so much so that artists should not be afraid to write about or film characters who do not look like them or belong to a different "race". When a unique human character is created it is possible to rise above racial stereotypes in a film.
Actually, a lot of our (meaning human, world wide) other art forms; storytelling, music, literature have, for decades and perhaps centuries, presented the world with multi-dimensional, fully human, non-stereotypical images of people who belong to different groups; in that sense American cinema is probably now in the "early days" of reflecting diversity (of personalities, etc.) within minority/"non-white" populations. Independent film has contributed heavily to this development; with John Cassavetes's Shadows, Spike Lee movies, Jim Jarmusch movies, and works by many other filmmakers who began or stayed outside of Hollywood.

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Introduce us to your favorite painters & paintings.

There's a PBS (i think) show on French painters right now. Other, older, forms of art, & the people who made them, can be inspirational & useful for filmmakers I think. I've learned a lot from indie rock (some aesthetic stuff, lots of bidness stuff), maybe I can learn stuff from painting too. So in July & August I am going to blog about painters & I would like you to comment & tell us about your favorite painters & other interesting stuff about painting. Painting is thousands of years old. Filmmaking is a little over 100 years old. US Indie filmmaking as we know it is perhaps a little over 50 years old (w/ the beginning somewhere around the time when the Cassavetes generation got its inspiration/started work). Us new indie filmmakers - the digital/web/DIY generation, can probably learn a lot by taking a look at/getting to know, painting & other older art forms. I'll start w/ Edward Hopper . Here's page w/ a lot of info on him. His most famou...

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