Do the Right Thing.
O meu orientador de doutoramento, Murray Smith, Professor Catedrático de Estudos Fílmicos da Universidade de Kent, apresenta a conferência “In and Out of Character” no dia 14 de Novembro, às 18h30, no Auditório IV da FLUC. É uma grande honra recebê-lo na Universidade de Coimbra.
De modo a preparar o evento, serão projectados previamente dois filmes dirigidos por Spike Lee: Do the Right Thing (Não Dês Bronca, 1989) e Clockers (Passadores, 1995), nos dias 4 e 11 de Novembro, às 17h, na Sala 13 da FLUC. Aqui fica o resumo da conferência, em inglês:
In the preface to Philosophy, Black Film, Film Noir, Dan Flory writes of the “rat’s nest of beliefs” that underpin our viewing and experience of any film–and especially those films that engage with the history and politics of race. This is an apt image for a domain which is indeed enormously complex, messy, and not a little uncomfortable to confront. In this paper I focus on three questions, of increasing generality, posed by Philosophy, Black Film, Film Noir. The first and most particular of these questions: is Flory right to say that Sal (in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing) a racist? My second question kicks the debate up one level and asks: how does the figure of the “sympathetic racist” — exemplified by Sal and by Rocco in Lee’s Clockers, and on Flory’s account, a central device in these films — work rhetorically? Finally I turn to the first of the three terms in the title of Flory’s book, by asking: can we regard these films as engaging in a kind of philosophy?
