Lauren Cramer is a scholar of Black art and culture who joined the Cinema Studies Institute in the Faculty of Arts & Science in September of 2019. Cramer’s research interests include hip-hop, Black visual culture, architectural theory and digital aesthetics.
Denise Ing of the Cinema Studies Institute spoke to Cramer about her research interests.
What is your background in cinema? What are your areas of specialization, and what drew you to those areas?
I took my first film class — a seminar on contemporary film theory — as an undergrad at Villanova University. I believe there was a registration error that allowed me to enroll in an advanced course because I was completely unprepared. I struggled the entire semester and, being a pretty competitive person, I decided I would not be beaten by cinema studies.
So, I went to Emory University for my MA in film and media studies and Georgia State University for my PhD in communication and moving image studies. After working with a lot of great scholars at these schools, I like to think that I won.
My research is on Blackness and aesthetics in Black popular culture. I am interested in the formal junctures where race and visual culture come together because these are the points where Blackness is made — and unmade.
Black visual culture, particularly Black popular culture, allows us to see the ways Blackness is excluded from the world while being an essential part of how we make sense of it; i.e. how we understand the past/future, human/nonhuman, etc. As a result, these images are also the places where we may see Blackness disrupting these paradigms.
I am particularly drawn to hip-hop because it is such an incredibly vibrant creative space. Hip-hop is always pushing the limits of what we think is appropriate and even what is good (see: “Mumble Rap”). Hip-hop also shares something with my favourite kind of scholarship: it draws attention to things that feel intuitive about race and culture that, maybe for that reason, are rarely stated explicitly.
What are your top three favourite films of all time? Why?
- Last Black Man in San Francisco, Directed by Joe Talbot, 2019
- Belly, Directed by Hype Williams, 1998
- Cool Runnings, Directed by Jon Turteltaub, 1993
This list says a lot about my taste in film. I don’t really tend to play favourites, so I am always open to adopting new films to my list of personal favourites — which is why it is not surprising that I included a film from 2019. I knew within the first 5 minutes that Last Black Man in San Francisco was going on that list. It is stunning!
When I do get attached to films, it is often to small moments, like the opening sequence in Belly, which is so visually and sonically exhilarating that it excuses DMX’s acting.
Finally, I learned to love film from parents who intuitively knew the importance of race and representation. They required the majority of films we rented from the video store each week — yes, video store — had Black actors in the lead roles. My Jamaican father was particularly supportive of repeat viewings of Cool Runnings, which means I can perform a key monologue from the film at any time.
What films are you looking forward to seeing in the future?
Queen & Slim (Melina Matsoukas, 2019) and Barry Jenkin’s adaptation of The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead.
Which is your favourite film festival?
I was very excited to experience TIFF this year and how the festival affects the entire city. As a graduate student I interned for the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival and it’s where I learned how film, specifically collective viewing, can bring a community together. It’s such a special event with an incredibly dedicated staff and team of volunteers. It will always have a special significance to me.
Tell us about your courses in 2019/20.
I taught Framing Cultural Geographies in the fall and I’m teaching In the Cut: Hip-Hop Cinema & Visual Culture in the winter.
In Framing Cultural Geographies, we considered the ways film and visual culture create space and spatial relationships inside and outside of narrative space. For example, consider the ways the subterranean space in Us (Jordan Peele, 2019) functions like a sci-fi national border that separates the people who can enjoy freedom and those whose labour supports that freedom.
We considered the ways cultural identities are created through spaces that are more imagined than real — i.e. the cowboy in the “wild west” — and how contemporary film and media can reimagine these spaces and identities — i.e. Walter White’s complicated masculinity in the desert of Breaking Bad.
In Hip-Hop Cinema & Visual Culture, we’ll explore the staggering numbers of cultural objects associated with hip-hop. Instead of labelling “good” and “bad” hip-hop, we’ll focus on how our assumptions about the genre reveal the complex cultural formations that determine how we understand issues like race, gender and value. We will shift the popular conversation about what hip-hop is — or what is should be — in order to address what its popularity, humour and style does.