WRT 105: Unit 2 Assignment-- Representations of Global Poverty in Film &quot;Before [Ophelia had] met Paul, Haiti had seemed merely vivid--terrible and strange. . . Now she had someone to translate Haiti to her. In the process Paul laid out a comprehensive theory of poverty, of a world designed by the elites of all nations to serve their own ends, the pieces of the design enshrined in ideologies, which erased the histories of how things came to be as they were. And he knew the details of Haiti, a catastrophe covered with the fingerprints of the Western powers, most of all those of France and the United States.&quot; ~Tracy Kidder, <a href="/keyword/mountains-beyond-mountains/" >mountains beyond mountains</a> (73) &quot;Film does not reflect or even record reality; like any other medium of representation it constructs and `represents' its pictures of reality by way of the codes, conventions, myths, and ideologies of its culture as well as by way of the specific signifying practices of the medium. Just as film works on the meaning systems of culture--to renew, reproduce, or review them--it is also produced by those meaning systems.&quot; ~Graeme Turner, Film as Social Practice IV (1789) &quot;Poverty: a human condition characterized by the sustained or chronic deprivation of the resources, capabilities, choices, security and power necessary for the enjoyment of an adequate standard of living and other civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights.&quot; ~United Nations' definition of poverty It is something of a commonplace to claim that movies are appealing precisely because Suggested Texts: they provide viewers with an escape from Selected Photographs of Walker Evans and the real world, a twohour respite from the Sebastiao Salgado mundane realities of our everyday routines. Maggie Anderson's &quot;Among Elms and According to this theory, films transport Maples, Morgantown, West Virginia, viewers to other times and places, releasing August, 1935&quot; (in CEw/T) us from the present by allowing us to Susan Bordo's &quot;Braveheart, Babe, and the identify with characters other than Contemporary Body&quot; (in CEw/T) ourselves, operating in sometimes familiar Diana George's &quot;Changing the Face of but more often unfamiliar environments. Poverty&quot; (in CEw/T) Certainly these utopian appeals are what keep us coming back and the box office David Levi Strauss's &quot;The Epiphany of the booming. But if movies are tickets out of Other&quot; (in CEw/T) reality, it is also clear that the world of film Anna Deavere Smith's &quot;Broken Sentences: is simultaneously always engaged with the Women in Prison Tell Their Stories real. Even the most fantastical films--think anime or postapocalyptic scifi movies, for instance--are to some extent still a vision or commentary on the landscapes we currently inhabit (in both a geographical and social sense). Further--as Graeme Turner argues in the above epigraph--these representations, both real and imagined, serve to influence the ways in which we construct our understanding of the world around us. Over the course of the next six weeks, we'll be exploring and analyzing the ways in which impoverished individuals and communities are represented in contemporary film. For example, what happens when one of the world's wealthiest industries, stocked with some of the world's wealthiest individuals, attempts to represent the global underclass? Undoubtedly, the politics of such representations are rife with tension and complexity--who gets represented, and how, and by whom. For the Unit 2 assignment, I would like you to select one of the fictional featurelength films on the suggested viewing list and explore how that film takes on the subject of poverty in overt or implicit ways. Because poverty is a dynamic term, we'll be discussing and debating what we mean when we use the word and how we distinguish between different kinds of poverty--abject, absolute, relative, individual, communal, domestic, national, transnational--in the real world as well as in the imagined worlds of our respective films. We'll be analyzing what these films seem to be saying about the kind of poverty that is being represented, and what the films imply about the production of and potential solutions for poverty. Who is poverty associated with? What is it linked to? For instance, in John Singleton's Boyz N the Hood (1991) Furious Styles drives his son Tre and Tre's best friend Ricky to Compton where, standing in front of a dilapidated billboard that reads &quot;Cash for your home,&quot; he lectures the boys (and many of the local residents) about the impact gentrification is having on the welfare of those residents, adopting a black nationalist perspective and arguing for community controlled and owned businesses as a solution to the poverty and violence of South Central Los Angeles. What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993), on the other hand, seems to trace the relative poverty (and eroding local culture) of the rural Midwestern town of Endora to the introduction of national chain businesses, such as the fictional &quot;Foodland&quot; and &quot;Burger Barn.&quot; In addition to practicing methods of analysis throughout the unit, we will be reading and discussing a handful of essays on the politics of representation and film interpretation, as well as reading a few examples of film criticism. In keeping with our emphasis on research practices, we will also spend time navigating through and learning to utilize the Syracuse University Library databases, in order to find academic essays relevant to each of your topics. I am also requiring that each of you use two sources in this paper, one of which should be a scholarly article or booklength work obtained from the library. In addition, we will spend some time reviewing MLA guidelines and the integration of secondary sources into a work of critical analysis. Here are some questions you'll want to consider as you screen your film, develop your claims and write: Who are the poor in the imagined world of the film? Are the characters coded in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, etc. as well as class? How do they reflect their real counterparts? How are the complexities of those people being brought to light? How are they being eroded, erased, or simplified? How does the film create a definition of &quot;...