This project hopes to explore the relationship between race as embodied discourse (using Hall’s phrasing) and the deployment of whiteness by visual apparatuses such as the standardization of filmic conventions. This project hopes to ask, what would it mean to think and represent whiteness not as a neutral or invisible category, but rather as one produced within a register of visuality that holds whiteness as fixed and central? Working with Dyer’s analysis of the filmic apparatus as an organization of light that privileged whiteness, we are interested in the historical reproduction of whiteness as neutral as well as its current role in the realm of niche marketing and film production. We want to interrogate the status of whiteness within contemporary film and to what extent whiteness is reproduced and constructed.
One idea that we find particularly useful is Dyer’s notion of the glow; that “idealized white women are bathed in and permeated by light. It streams through them and falls on them from above. In short, they glow” (122). If the screen functions as a visual skin to project and cover over its represented subjects, then can whiteness be portrayed beyond light? How does this ‘glow’ relate and bind skin to screen? Through the structure of the vanishing point, we hope to depict this glow as an external effect rather than an internalized embodiment. Drawing from the framing of the vanishing point found in filmic composition of slaughterhouses or its use within the horror genre, the vanishing point or ‘white spot’ can be seen as a locus of disappearing through which the body may be circulated and made public. We want to examine several horror films and films depicting slaughterhouses with the goal of using their editing techniques as a way to frame the otherwise invisible construction of whiteness. By reframing whiteness as represented in contemporary cinema, we hope to enframe the technology of whiteness as an organization of light and bodies.
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