Event

Eleni Palis

A Cinema of Reparations: Narrative Filmmaking and the Reparative Mode

This work-in-progress reads across political rhetoric, public discourse, and literary theory to consider a “reparative mode” in American feature filmmaking. While Black activists and intellectuals, from Queen Mother Audley Moore in 1963 to Ta-Nehisi Coates in 2014, have long advocated for and persuasively elaborated “the case for reparations,” renewed interest in reparations recently culminated in Congress’ 2019 and 2022 H.R.40 bill hearings, considering “The Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act.” In related, film studies-specific developments, recent scholarship calls for reparative pedagogies in film and media studies curricula (Usha Iyer writing in Feminist Media Histories, 2022) and for reparations in film and television production and distribution (Aymar Jean Chrisian, Khadijah Costley White in JCMS, 2020). This paper combines recent public, political discourse with Eve Sedgwick’s theorization of a “reparative critical practice,” a relational stance to temporality, narratology, intimacy, and contingency.

Reading Rea Tajiri’s History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige (1991) alongside the success of 1988 Civil Liberties Act, granting redress, reparations, and national apology to Japanese-Americans interned during World War II, offers a paradigm for reparative cinemas. The reparative relationality and temporal intimacy between Tajiri’s film and American feature film archives encapsulates what I call the reparative mode. History and Memory offers more provocation than prescription—as Kathy Masaoka testified at the 2022 H.R.40 hearings, “it was important for Japanese Americans to determine our own path toward redress and reparations, and we fully stand behind the Black community as they determine their own path forward.” With this in mind, I consider Nia DaCosta’s Candyman (2021) as a most recent example of the capacious and contingent reparative mode in contemporary American film.

Eleni Palis is an assistant professor of English and Cinema Studies at the University of Tennessee. She is the author of Classical Projections: The Practice and Politics of Film Quotation (Oxford UP, 2022). Her work has also appeared in Screen, The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (Cinema Journal), Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, and [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies.