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Two DA S H ’ S A N D K U R E I S H I ’ S R E B E L L I O U S M AG I C O R E E L S Contemporary ethnic- and postcolonialidenti fied magicorealist narratives represent a late-capitalist society that is characterized as being more and more unreal. French critics Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard have respectively identified this as a ‘‘society of the spectacle’’ or the ‘‘hyperreal’’ in which the ‘‘real’’ in the world out there is a grand theatrical performance that covers over the estranging effect of exploitation and oppression by capitalism on peoples around the world. If this is the case, then how might an ethnic- and postcolonial-identified magicorealism use its aesthetic components to guide its readers into an identification of this fact? Again, this is where it is important to distinguish the narrative fiction from the ‘‘real’’ hors texte. In ‘‘Theory and Film: Principles of Realism and Pleasure,’’ Colin MacCabe reminds us that film ‘‘does not reveal the real in a moment of transparency, but rather that film is constituted by a set of discourses which (in the positions allowed to subject and object) produce a certain reality’’ (). This chapter will focus on how film directors ‘‘produce a certain reality’’ in their magicoreels that expose and critique a globalizing late capitalism that turns real violence and oppression of the underclass worldwide into a spectacle. (I think here, for example, of the very real bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan and of the dramatic and sentimentalized productions of war performed by the United States and European nations to cover over their mass destruction of civilian populations . Closer to home there are those ‘‘real life’’ programs such as Cops that feed ‘‘live’’ footage of carchases and the beating and cuffing of ethnosocially identified criminals that cover over the social and political structures that maintain racial and class inequities.) The visual-based narrative form of cinema is inherently weighed down Tseng 2002.12.24 08:40 6758 Aldama / POSTETHNIC NARRATIVE CRITICISM / sheet 58 of 157 with a dense referentiality. The distance between the images projected and the audience’s reading and interpretation is much less than that of chirographic narrative. Of course, different film traditions use, abuse, and playfully de-form this inherently dense referentiality present in film. As I mentioned earlier, D. W. Griffith used the silver screen to uncritically reproduce the real racial stereotypes circulating in his day. Like D.W. Griffith, many mainstream directors today continue to use the genre to naturalize , for example, homophobic and racist ideologies. As Daniel Dayan informs , ‘‘if cinema consists in a series of shots which have been produced, selected, and ordered in a certain way, then these operations will serve, project, and realize a certain ideological position’’ (). Conversely, then, if a film is a series of selected shots that can serve ideological positions, then Dash and Kureishi/Frears can choose film-telling techniques and thematics to form a counter-hegemonic series of images. In Dash’s Daughters of the Dust () and Stephen Frears/Hanif Kureishi’s Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (), we see how magicoreels employ specific storytelling techniques —Dash’s invention of an unborn-child–identified camera-narrator and Kureishi/Frears’s parodic blend of theWest’s ‘‘other forms’’ with Indian film genres—to denaturalize those political forces that exist hors texte and that perform spectacular tricks to distract people from the harsh reality of today’s capital-imperialist oppression. Moreover, Dash and Kureishi/Frears invent magicoreels that destabilize audiences’ perception of reality and thereby denaturalize those networks of films that gel together and form a system of representation that primitivize the racial, gendered, and ethnic subject. Dash and Kureishi/Frears vitally engage with the ‘‘other forms’’ of cinema. Their magicoreels employ the mimesis-as-play tradition in film that uses self-reflexivity and parody to convey meaning. Not so unlike my earlier discussion of narrative fictions by Cervantes, Fielding, Machado de Assis, and so on, there is also an other tradition in cinema that Dash and Kureishi/Frears extend. In the late nineteenth century, at the same time that the French brothers Lumière set out to capture the ripples of reality by simply setting up their camera lens in front of people carrying on with theiroccupations in life, therewas Georges Méliès, who playfullyemployed the camera lens to call attention to the camera’s...

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