Resisting the Norm: The Possibility of Revolutionary Black Cinema

Abstract

This thesis does an in-depth analysis of Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You in order to examine whether a Black revolutionary cinema has emerged in Hollywood. His film is invaluable in understanding the depiction of contemporary aesthetics in Black cinema as it is highly racial and politically charged. It also offers a way forward for Black cinema, perhaps even a revolutionary Black cinema, in its fusion of politics, style and narrative, as well as in its dismantling of generic boundaries. The thesis is broken down into three chapters. The first chapter will lay down the methodological blueprint that will ground the analysis of Riley's film. The literary genre of the fable will be adopted as it gives us an understanding of how Boots Riley activates fantastical elements in order to bring the film's moral message to the audience. The reading of Tzvetan Todorov’s The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, will supply the functions of the fantastical and in addition, so too will Rosemary Jackson’s Fantasy: Literature of Subversion to see the relationship between fantasy and the political in a social context. V.F. Perkins’s book Film as Film, will provide formal and aesthetic methodology when it comes to discussing the language of film.The second will be dedicated to the the historical and social context of the film in question. In regards to the film industry, Maryann Erigha has thoroughly examined how Hollywood’s fixation on profit has created a thinly veiled racial line where Black filmmakers are unable to gain proper access to significant financial backing for their films. The role of Hollywood and Blackness, which, as an example, can be depicted through its historical context, using Ed Guerrero’s book, Framing Blackness, which presents an analysis of the language Hollywood narrative has constructed in order to mediate certain fundamental political mechanics through racist imagery. By doing so, it will broaden our understanding of how Black aesthetics and culture came to be and how it appears in contemporary films.Chapter three will address the films analysis, Sorry to Bother You and how it aligns with the methodology previously outlined. The film is blatant in its confrontation towards its viewer of the contemporary zeitgeist that thrives in the United States, such as capitalism, race and class which brings forth the question whether Black revolutionary cinema has emerged?