physical/discursive violence

There is a shift from Osucha to Dyer (primarily a chronological shift?), in which white womanhood moves from something to be guarded from public view to something to be gazed at in its spiritually transcendent glow on film. This is perhaps a product of the increasing commodification of every aspect of everything. Black bodies were, as Osucha points out, always already commodities, and deprived of individual character in representation (although I think her argument would have been strengthened by at least a brief discussion about photographs of lynchings, which were commonly used as postcards). For Dyer, the lack of individuation continues into modern cinema, at least in lighting techniques. Stage light reflects off of dark skin, emphasizing materiality.

So even as more and more is available to be taken up as commodity, there are (at least) two different kinds of commodifications of woman: white: spiritual, glowing, individual, sacred, coveted; black: material, general, available, used.

White man is the implicit and explicit viewer, coveter, user; historically he has been the primary producer of these films.

I guess I’m confused about what we’re supposed to do with this. We’ve uncovered the way a particular medium is produced by and reproduces hierarchical categories of race (eg that the very possibility of creating these categories is predicated on a system of power, the same system of power that it helps reproduce). I’m wondering whether there’s an implication in these articles that doing something to change how movies are filmed, maybe totally revolutionize film chemistry, would do something substantive (what does this mean, I know) to change conditions of racism.

The Black Panthers arguably tried to hijack these mediums to create a different, liberatory schema of race; it kept the same boundaries but redefined their relationship, albeit reinforcing the masculine character of a subject in this schema. Their new black subject was commodified and made object. Commodification destroyed the Black Panthers discursively, but it was Cointelpro that murdered many of its leaders and tore the organization apart from the inside.

So we need to connect race and its reproduction through institutions like the cinema and the census - representational institutions (in two different senses) - with physical, material institutions of violence, to understand how race operates.
Maybe my question is to what extent can we draw this distinction, but we can’t ask this question until we understand how institutions of physical violence operate.