Sunday, 28 September 2014

Naming my characters

Throughout planning I have been naming the protagonist Black woman. However, I did not want this to be her name throughout the actual film.
In my film I shall use a lot of symbolism, for example the red lipstick that the protagonist applies. I used this idea to think of the name for my protagonist; Sapphire. I wanted the name of my protagonist to have an actual meaning behind it. Not only does the Sapphire gemstone come in shades of red, the name also has a racial background. I thought that this would tie in Tarantino's use of Blaxploitation perfectly, but subtly. 



"The Sapphire Caricature portrays black women as rude, loud, malicious, stubborn, and overbearing" By using this name for my film, it will subtly link in with my research question; Does Quentin Tarantino portray women as Macho? 



"It was not until the Amos 'n' Andy radio show that the characterisation of African American women as domineering, aggressive, and emasculating shrews became popularly associated with the name Sapphire. The show was conceived by Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, two white actors who portrayed the characters Amos Jones and Andy Brown by mimicking and mocking black behaviour and dialect. At its best, Amos 'n' Andy was a situational comedy; at its worse, it was an auditory minstrel show.2 The show, with a mostly-white cast, aired on the radio from 1928 to 1960, with intermittent interruptions. The television version of the show, with network television's first all-black cast, aired on CBS from 1951-53, with syndicated reruns from 1954 to 1966. It was removed, in large part, through the efforts of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People and the civil rights movement. Both as a radio show3 and television show, Amos 'n' Andy was extremely popular, and this was unfortunate for African Americans because it popularised racial caricatures of blacks. Americans learned that blacks were comical, not as actors but as a race." 


I have decided to call the drug dealer/man who gets shot Zi. I decided to call him this as I thought it was a tacky, drug dealer nickname that Tarantino may use.

The other characters, such as the parents in the memory scene and the women in the background of the bathroom scene, shall be nameless has they will not have dialog or be the main focus of the film.

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