Content area
Full Text
Abstract
In 2005, fashion photographer and music video director David LaChapelle released his first feature-length documentary, Rize, which documents the lives of black youth in inner-city Los Angeles who created the urban dance subculture of "clowning" and "krumping." Although critics hailed the film as visually and emotionally spectacular, this paper argues that the film treads a fine line between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation of black authenticity and culture. By offering some of the ethical choices and challenges LaChapelle faced in his re-presentation of the Other, this paper presents a critical reading of his decisions that bury hegemonic codes of oppression below the surface of an otherwise seemingly emancipatory narrative. Only through a close textual analysis does LaChapelle reveal himself as an arbiter of black urban street culture. Further, he also utilizes a number of highly structured formal codes to create a problematic spectacle of the black dancing body that overly sexualizes in a way that invokes hook's (1992) notion of "eating the Other." This paper concludes by criticizing LaChapelle's tendency toward black appropriation and his failure to politicize the social and economic structures responsible for the systemic oppression facing his documentary's subjects.
In 2005, fashion photographer David LaChapelle released Rize, a feature-length documentary about the inner-city Los Angeles dance movements of "clowning" and "krumping." The prestige-press lauded Rize as "a celebration" (Scott, 2005), a spectacular "visual miracle," and "unexpected knockout" (Travers, 2005). Many popular film critics praised Rize for revealing "another side" of South Central L.A., where young people use the art of dance to "rise" out of their social hardships. Most commonly, the film received accolades for its uplifting message. A review in the Washington Post, for example, noted: "That in disenfranchised communities beset by multiple blights of poverty, drugs and gang violence, there have always been stubborn, heroic artistic responses. This is simply one of the most dramatic and one of the most inspiring" (Harrington, 2005, p. WE37). In qualifying their admiration, critics commonly referred to the story as a "feel-good" movie about "hope sprouting where there should be none" (Burr, 2005, par. 1). Clowning and krumping were repeatedly treated as "salvational subcultures" (Harrington, p. WE37) that have "provided young African-Americans-most stranded in the war zones of South Central-a path away...