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Media is white. The majority of people making decisions about media, from executives to directors, are white. The people who star in splashy summer movies, who play the lead roles on television cop dramas, who make music played on Top 40 radio, and who write books featured on The New York Times’ bestseller list are primarily white. One simply has to turn on the television to find white people: they are everywhere, and they are everything in media.

As a multicultural Latina, I constantly wonder what a white media landscape means for the way I interact with the world around me. Cultural Theorist Stuart Hall, whose work I read in college, posited that not only does media reflect the world around it, it also helps to create the world. And what world does a white media landscape create? One of the effects that I have experienced is invisibility in media, especially in television.

Strictly Come Dancing topped Saturday primetime television last night (October 25), according to overnight figures.

The BBC One dancing competition averaged 9.52m (42.9%) from 6.30pm, enjoying a peak of 10.38m (45.9%) at 7.45pm.

ITV's The X Factor managed 7.22m (31.6%) from 8pm, with a further 281k (1.4%) on +1. Movies Week had a peak of 7.79m (33%) at 8.15pm.

Doctor Who episode 'In the Forest of the Night' was watched by 5.03m (21.6%) on BBC One. It was followed by Casualty, which continued with 4.02m (18.1%).

BBC Two's Restoring England's Heritage had 806k (3.7%) from 7pm, with a Dad's Army repeat and Qi Xl earning 1.68m (7.2%) and 1.13m (5%) respectively.

ITV's The Chase took 3.07m (13.9%) in the 7pm hour, and The Jonathan Ross Show drew 2.53m (14.9%) from 10.10pm.

On Channel 4, Walking Through History was seen by 891k (3.8%) in the 8pm hour. An airing of the Reese Witherspoon movie This Means War attracted 846k (4.2%) afterwards.

Channel 5's live boxing between...

One film of importance that we have definitely been writing about of late is John Akomfrah’s documentary The Stuart Hall Project, about the famous Jamaican/British intellectual and cultural theorist who passed away just last month.The film made it’s premiere at last year’s Sundance Film Festival and was reviewed for us by Zeba Blay (Here). The film is more than a simple A to Z documentary, or, as Tambay recently said about it, "Antinuclear campaigner, New Left activist and founding father of Cultural Studies, this documentary interweaves 70 years of Stuart Hall’s film, radio and television appearances, and material from his private archive to document a memorable life and...

Stuart Hall, the Jamaican academic, cultural theorist and sociologist who lived and worked in the UK, died earlier this month, February 10, after years battling health problems, including a recent kidney failure, which required a transplant, forcing him to retire from public life. A year before his death, a feature documentary by British/Ghanaian filmmaker John Akomfrah, titled The Stuart Hall Project, premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, and continues to travel the film festival/film screening series circuit. The documentary interweaves 70 years of Stuart Hall’s film, radio and television appearances, and material from his private archive, to document a...

March 8-10, Harvard Film Archive will present a series of films and conversation with British/Ghanaian experimental filmmaker John Akomfrah and and his partner and producer, Lina Gopaul. Hfa will screen five films over the three-day event, including The Last Angel of History, Memory 451, his 1986 debut film Handsworth Songs, Peripeteia, and his 2013 Sundance documentary on intellectual Stuart Hall, The Stuart Hall Project.  Says Hfa, "Akomfrah has become a cinematic counterpart to such commentators of and contributors to the culture of the Black diaspora as Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Greg Tate and Henry Louis Gates. In doing so, he has continued to mine the...

Influential cultural theorist, campaigner and founding editor of the New Left Review

When the writer and academic Richard Hoggart founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University in 1964, he invited Stuart Hall, who has died aged 82, to join him as its first research fellow. Four years later Hall became acting director and, in 1972, director. Cultural studies was then a minority pursuit: half a century on it is everywhere, generating a wealth of significant work even if, in its institutionalised form, it can include intellectual positions that Hall could never endorse.

The foundations of cultural studies lay in an insistence on taking popular, low-status cultural forms seriously and tracing the interweaving threads of culture, power and politics. Its interdisciplinary perspectives drew on literary theory, linguistics and cultural anthropology in order to analyse subjects as diverse as youth sub-cultures, popular media and gendered and ethnic identities – thus creating something of a model,...

Stuart Hall, the so-called 'godfather of multiculturalism' changed Britain for the better even while he showed us the ugly truth about our racist society

"The very notion of Great Britain's 'greatness' is bound up with empire," Stuart Hall once wrote. "Euro-scepticism and Little Englander nationalism could hardly survive if people understood whose sugar flowed through English blood and rotted English teeth."

For the Jamaican-born intellectual, who was one of the Windrush generation, – the first large-scale immigration of West Indians to the capital after world war two – that rottenness was unmissable. Hall came to that rotten land with its in-part slave-generated wealth from Kingston in 1951 as a Rhodes scholar to study at Oxford. "Three months at Oxford persuaded me that it was not my home," he told the Guardian in 2012. "I'm not English and I never will be. The life I have lived is one of partial displacement. I came to...

The Great Beauty | About Time | Riddick | Ain't Them Bodies Saints | Museum Hours | Pieta | The Stuart Hall Project | The Great Hip Hop Hoax | No One Lives | More Than Honey | Jadoo | Any Day Now

The Great Beauty (15)

(Paolo Sorrentino, 2013, Ita/Fra) Toni Servillo, Carlo Verdone, Sabrina Ferilli, 141 mins

Sorrentino proves himself a worthy successor to Fellini here, tracking modern Roman decadence with staggering exuberance and an eye for the stylishly surreal. Filling the Marcello Mastroianni role is Servillo's world-weary writer and socialite, who stalks the city's elite demi-monde of hedonistic parties, pretentious art, cynical grotesques and faded glories – but finds reveries and regrets around every corner.

About Time (12A)

(Richard Curtis, 2013, UK) Domhnall Gleeson, Rachel McAdams. 123 mins

A sci-fi element reinvigorates Curtis's trademarked romcom formula, but there's still a feeling of deja vu to this middle-class love story, in which Gleeson uses his inherited time-travelling powers to woo McAdams – albeit at a cost.

★★★☆☆ John Akomfrah's documentary about leading cultural theorist Stuart Hall offers a vivid portrait of the Jamaican-born academic, who was at the centre of the New Left movement. Exploring this integral figure, The Stuart Hall Project (2013) dexterously employs the use of archive footage, reminding us of the man's contribution to the shaping of modern British society. Today, Hall's prominence has diminished, even if his theories haven't. For those of us who aren't old enough to remember, it's almost a revelation to learn that he once was a frequent figure on our television screens, discussing issues of gender, race and identity.

Throughout the 1980s and 90s, Hall was more commonly seen on the high-brow shows. This being the case, Akomfrah's considered documentary reminds those who lived through the same era, as well as introducing a new generation to this enigmatic man and his impact in what is undeniably a fitting, although perhaps a touch too reverential,...

British/Ghanaian filmmaker John Akomfrah's Stuart Hall feature documentary made its World Premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, under the title The Stuart Hall Project. It makes it UK theatrical premiere tomorrow, while we here in the USA wait for a similar opportunity. Ahead of its UK theatrical debut, the British Film Institute (BFI) has released a brand-new trailer for the film, featuring the music of Miles Davis (also on the film's soundtrack, and is of influence on the film's subject).  The moody trailer is embedded below. Hall is a Jamaican cultural theorist and sociologist who has lived and worked in the UK since 1951. He was...

Upstream Colour | One Direction: This Is Us 3D | The Way Way Back | Pain & Gain | You're Next | Bonjour Tristesse | Plein Soleil | Hammer Of The Gods | Satyagraha

Upstream Colour (12A)

(Shane Carruth, 2013, Us) Amy Seimetz, Shane Carruth, Andrew Sensenig. 96 mins

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The Primer director delivers another Us indie brainteaser that will leave minds blown and chins comprehensively scratched. A young woman who has been kidnapped, exposed to a parasite and robbed meets a man who seems to have endured the same horror. What any of that has to do with the maggots that possess psychedelic properties, or the sound recordist and his obsession with pigs, is anyone's guess. The mysteries endure long after the credits roll, and Carruth's direction is spellbinding enough to keep you puzzling over them – just about.

One Direction: This Is Us 3D (PG)

(Morgan Spurlock, 2013, Us) 92 mins

From third place in...

From 50s migrant to 80s Thatcher critic, the cultural theorist has long led the debate on race and politics. A new film charts his life and his decades-long influence on the culture of modern Britain

As the Labour party prepares for another round of soul-searching next month about the left's place in modern Britain, it could do worse than organise a pre-conference screening of John Akomfrah's wonderful documentary The Stuart Hall Project.

It would be perverse to suggest that Professor Stuart Hall, 81, has been a neglected figure in British cultural life over the last six decades. He was a founding editor of the hugely influential New Left Review in 1958 and the co-creator of the first cultural studies programme (at Birmingham University in 1964). He has been the most prominent of black British intellectuals since the 1960s, a prominent figure of the Open University and among the most trenchant critics of Thatcherism.

British/Ghanaian filmmaker John Akomfrah's Stuart Hall feature documentary made its World Premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, under the title The Stuart Hall Project, and will next screen at the Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival, its Caribbean premiere. Hall is a Jamaican cultural theorist and sociologist who has lived and worked in the UK since 1951. He was President of the British Sociological Association from 1995-1997. His reume is certainly much more broader than that, and Akomfrah's documentary will fill in the blanks. Here's how its described: Antinuclear campaigner, New Left activist and founding father of...

Above: Le joli mai (1963).

Around about June every year, for several days, a large documentary festival spreads across a cluster of venues in the centre of Sheffield, engulfing the city's main arthouse, The Showroom, and several local theatres, odeons, libraries, and small pubs. The people of Sheffield were affable, generally. Street vendors set-up outside the screening rooms, so there'd regularly be smoke in the air. There was an outdoor screen on Howard Street—at the foot of a grassy hill and against the muraled wall of a pub we saw Ben Rivers' Two Years at Sea (2012) and Wim Wenders' Pina (2011)—and another in the underbelly of a grand, art deco library, where I bummed tickets to see Martha Shane and Lana Wilson's After Tiller (a producer for the film took pity, since I had not booked in advance).

So perhaps it's hardly surprising that the festival itself...