Reclaiming the Screen: through bell hooks’ book, ‘Reel to Real’
“Movies make magic. They change things. They take real and make it into something else right before our very eyes” , bell hooks. One of the most central concepts towards an understanding of the lived experiences of marginalized communities is agency. For marginalized women – like Black women in the United States – agency is the ability to resist structures that deprive them of their subjecthood. For bell hooks, cinema is one of the most powerful institutions that shapes imagination. In Reel to Real (1996), she argues that films do not simply “reflect” reality; rather, they produce social meaning about race and gender. This transforms cinema into a political space instead of merely an artistic one. Representation, Power, and the Foundations of Agency Mainstream cinema is one of the most powerful ideological systems in contemporary culture. Movies teach audiences how to interpret race, gender, desire, and power. F...
