ABSTRACT
The preceding chapters argued that an exclusive consideration of subjectmatter in documentary or plot and characterization in fiction films provides a distorted account of their ethical ramifications. Chapter 2 investigated the ethical implications of the concept of ‘positive representation’ and showed how progressive intentions may be bolstered or compromised by style, generic positioning and ideological context. Turning from representations of gendered and dissident sexual identities to explorations of cultural identity and neocolonial power, this chapter pursues a parallel critical agenda, reflecting the cross-fertilization between studies of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and other axes of difference in cinema. Within film studies, questions of identity have primarily been conceptualized in political terms; research has focused on how cinema perpetuates or challenges the unequal distribution of resources and power between dominant and oppressed or marginalized constituencies. This chapter explores some of the ethical premises which undergird these political considerations. Though analysis of two films which adopt different perspectives on postcolonial injustice and responsibility, I examine the role that cinematic mechanisms of identification
and filmic codes such as point of view play in naturalizing or critically exposing relations of mastery and domination between self and other. I argue that it is as much through the manner in which films negotiate the narrative, stylistic and generic conventions of dominant forms of cinema as through the moral agendas which explicitly drive them that they repeat or resist the violence of colonialism’s failure to contend ethically with alterity.
