Marking Whiteness, Unmarking Blackness: Listening and Looking in Alice Diop’s <i>Vers la tendresse</i> and Amandine Gay’s <i>Ouvrir la voix</i>
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As an industry and art form that traffics in the visual, cinema has in the past few years become one of the most public arenas in France where the debate on race and representation plays out. With the spotlight on Mati Diop as the first Black woman filmmaker to win a major award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019, the publication of Noire n’est pas mon métier (Paris: Seuil, 2018), an edited volume initiated by Aïssa Maïga that contained the testimonies of sixteen Black actresses working in France, and associations such as 50/50 × 2020 and Les Cinéastes non-alignées advocating for gender parity across the film profession, the historic absence of on-screen representations of and made by people of colour, and especially women of colour, is palpable.1 In fact, since 2010, nearly a dozen films directed by Afro-French women have been released, many addressing explicitly how Blackness plays out in a country historically reluctant to address ‘race’ as a salient social category.2 These films are often celebrated as steps towards a more inclusive representational landscape; however, as Peggy Phelan points out, if increased visibility can be leveraged for increased social power, it also comes with ‘the usual traps of visibility: surveillance, fetishism, voyeurism, and sometimes, death’.3 Such traps of visibility are especially acute for people of colour in France, for whom the overall under-representation in the media is coupled with an over-representation in stereotypical, often pejorative, roles. In fact, ‘Images of Afropean women’, Johanna Montlouis-Gabriel states incisively, ‘have long been usurped to further a colonial agenda, whether in cinema or film.’4 It is a representational landscape, as Nathalie Etoké argues, that imagines Black lives narrowly, with sparse room for empathetic engagement.5
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it