Reviews

The Witch's Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense by Kara Keeling

ralowe's review against another edition

5.0

i've been saving this book for a while. it really feels necessary to remark how incredible the amount of beautiful labor and dedication is in evidence in the machinery of kara keeling's thought. she never offers terms without extensive consideration of what must be done to allow for the most possibilities. it's awe-inspiring how generous she is. she's very cautious to never short change concepts in the discourses of race, class, gender, etc. an example of this would be in the term "lesbian"ќ: in critical theory one would just let the word float but then she insists on presenting the intent in her meaning of the term. there are touches of these contingency-defining efforts throughout the book, leaving all her language completely free of universals. she is very rigorous around her usage of "common sense,"ќ and throughout the book we see its useful and not-so-useful facets explored. the book is ostensibly about cinema, but it uses its essays on various works to show how cinema and its images invade our investments in life. her ideas on the apparatus of labor gives films value and her speculations on how to imagine subverting these techniques should be required reading for all cultural producers.

poenaestante's review against another edition

3.0

Either I didn't understand this book or it was poorly written. My hunch is it mostly column B and not column A. There were a few good ideas here around Deleuze's cinematic, and the butch-femme binary being an extreme adoption of hegemonic gender roles for practical purposes of socioeconomic survival, buuuut my mind wasn't like blown or anything. It was, however, a good reminder to go back and look at Eve's Bayou again. Good flick that.

tiaelisabeth's review against another edition

4.0

I found this book difficult and confusing, but it’s clearly very smart and offers a lot of innovative and perceptive challenges to hegemonic discourses in Film Studies, particularly around visibility and legibility.