Reel to Real

In this study, Bell Hooks talks back to films she has watched as a way to engage the pedagogy of cinema - the way film teaches its audience. Interested by the issues movies raise - the ways cinema depicts race, sex, and class, this work not only brings together Hooks' essays on films such as "Paris is Burning" or the infamous "Whose Pussy Is It" essay about Spike Lee's "She's Gotta Have It", but also work on "Pulp Fiction", "Crooklyn" and "Waiting to Exhale". The author also examines the world of independent cinema. Here, conversations with filmmakers Charles Burnett, Julie Dash and Arthur Jaffa are linked with critical essays, including a piece on Larry Clark's "Kids", to show the radical possibility of cinema - that it can function subversively, as much as it functions to maintain the status quo.