Reparations and reparative justice become increasingly common buzz words in American public life. These ideas extend from law, legal proceedings, and theories of justice to education, public memory, and literary theory. They also build on a much longer history of Black, Indigenous, immigrant, and other minoritized intellectuals’ advocacy and activism. When it comes to contemporary American media, how might reparations or reparative justice manifest on-screen? In this talk, cinema studies expert Eleni Palis discusses how film remakes—films that reboot or re-imagine a preexisting film—offer “re-visions” of film history, using Nia DaCosta’s Candyman (2021) as an example of a recent “reparative remake.” 

About the Speaker: 

Eleni Palis is an assistant professor of English and Cinema Studies at the University of Tennessee. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of the book Classical Projections: The Practice and Politics of Film Quotation (Oxford University Press, 2022). Her work has also appeared in Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, Screen, The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (Cinema Journal), and [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies. An article on Jordan Peele’s film authorship is forthcoming from Film Quarterly.