The Absent Native Body in Film and its Return

The Absent Native Body in Film and its Return

A talk by Cinema Studies alum Jacob Floyd
Friday, October 22 at 7:00 pm ET
Virtual Event on Zoom

Noting the prevalence of supernatural language used to describe the body in cinema, and especially to describe depictions of Native Americans in both fiction and documentary filmmaking, this presentation uses that language to explore the contradictory state of Native bodies in film history as being both absent and present. Summarizing the history of that present-absence, this presentation makes a case for the significance of contemporary Native filmmakers representing Native bodies on screen, especially in films that seek to recover Native bodies that have been rendered ghostly by film and settler colonial history.

Free and open to the public.

Jacob Floyd (Cinema Studies MA, 2010) is an assistant professor in Visual Studies at the University of Missouri. His research focuses on Indigenous media, particularly self-representation, the representation of history, and ways media is used to preserve language and culture. Other research interests include film history, film publicity and intertexts, race and representation, horror, The Simpsons, and B movies. A citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, he is also a documentary filmmaker whose work examines Native American history and archival images.