Nicholas Forster
is a writer and Lecturer in African American Studies and Film & Media Studies at Yale University. He is currently writing a biography of the actor-director-writer Bill Gunn. He has has been published in outlets including The Village Voice, Film Quarterly, and Shadow and Act.
The process of identification is at the heart of Gilberto Perez’s posthumously published book The Eloquent Screen: A Rhetoric of Film. Perez writes that audiences identify with more than characters, “we identify with an action, a situation, an emotion, a motive, an interest, a point of view, something the character represents.”