film Q&As
FTV 113 – Examining the Auteur: Contemporary Directors
Final
While you may respond to these questions using paragraphs, there is no need to have thesis
statements. Make sure you answer all of the prompts within the question.
Questions 1 – 4 are 10 points each
1. In my interview with Professor Zeinabu Davis, she discussed her interpretation of the L.A.
Rebellion as being greater than the time frame listed by Dr. Allyson Field as well as the program
not being limited to people who attended UCLA. Professor Davis mentioned a director who she
feels follows in the tradition of the Rebellion directors even though this person did not attend
UCLA. Who is that director and mention at least one of the films she noted that make this person
a spiritual part of the Rebellion.
2. Professor Davis gave advice to those wanting to direct. What were her suggestions?
3. In my lecture on my chapter about Spike Lee and Tyler Perry, I noted that one director caused
me great ambivalence. Which director and why am I ambivalent towards him?
4. Though Spike Lee attended NYU film school, his works focus on aspects of blackness. In what
ways can his work be linked to the L. A. Rebellion and what do I, in my chapter on Lee and
Perry, argue is the reason for his not being associated with this group.
Questions 5 – 7 are 20 points each
5. Several articles and/or chapters we have read critique aspects of Lee’s films. Consider the
sexism in his fiction films such as School Daze (1988) and Malcolm X (1992) and then consider
his documentaries, 4 Little Girls (1997) and When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts
(2006). Would you argue that sexism is apparent in his documentaries? In addition to citing
authors, describe a scene or scenes in the films that supports your position. Your response needs
to cite at least four authors: Bambara, Wallace, Everett, hooks, Acham, Lubiano, Letort, and
Dyson.
6. Hollywood is an institution that has structural inequality. Using Harry Benshoff and Sean
Griffin discuss what factors operate in Hollywood to obscure and naturalize its structure and
inequality. Also examine the ways the industry deliberately makes choices regarding employment,
specifically in the director position, that exclude 72% of the population based on Los Angeles
county census data. Use Maryann Erigha and other writers in your analysis.
7. What are the themes (content and/or visuals) that are apparent in Ava DuVernay’s work? Are
these themes limited to her fictions films? Discuss at least four media from DuVernay and at least
two authors.
The point of this paper is to contextualize an aspect of your family life using concepts from
course readings and outside readings/sources.
Think of this paper as a way to describe a certain part of your family life to me using concepts
from the course. For example lets say that someone wanted to describe growing up in a single
parent household. There are many aspects of that experience that one could illuminate. So lets
say the person decides to describe that experience using the concepts of mass incarceration
and welfare policy. Now those 2 things seem like very big concepts but both of those things
could have a big impact on a single parent household. Here the family aspect would be the
single parent household and the concepts used to conceptualize it would be mass incarceration
and welfare policy. So the point of their essay would be to show me how those concepts
impacted their single parent household.
Possible Directions this Paper could go:
Direction 1
Thesis:
Clearly state what your family aspect / experience is.Ex. The familial experience that I am going
to talk about today is single parenthood.
Clearly state what concepts you are using to explain that experience. ( I cannot stress this
enough. It should be obvious what you are explaining to me and what concepts you are using to
do so). Ex. I am going to explore growing up in a single parent household through the lens of
mass incarceration and welfare policy.
Main Body
1. Describe single parenthood as it relates to your family (this plus the thesis could be half a
page)
2. Talk about how mass incarceration impacted your family( why, how, when, context is
powerful)-3 pages
3. Talk about welfare policy impacted your family( why, how, when, context is powerful)-3 pages
Conclusion- half a page
Direction 2
1. Thesis plus describing single parenthood (half a page)
2. Talk about particular aspects of single parenthood and incorporate elements of mass
incarceration and welfare policy throughout the paper as opposed to one after the other.-
6 pages
3. Conclusion- half a page
Tips:
-Using paragraph headers are allowed for this paper. It can help the reader know where your
paper is going and is helpful if your message gets off track for any reason.
-Google Scholar is great place to find outside articles to help explain your family
aspect/experience
-Remember not to try and explain your family aspect/experience with too many main concepts.
It will lessen the quality of your paper because 7 pages is not enough to go into many concepts
thoroughly. 1-2 concepts should be fine and 3 at the very most.
-This narrative essay is about a strong explanation, not a dramatic moment in the life of you and
your family. Do not think that you have to write about something that is intense or makes you
uncomfortable.
Introduction from:
Distinction:
A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
by Pierre Bourdieu
©1984
Introduction
You said it, my good knight! There ought to be laws to
protect the body of acquired knowledge.
Take one of our good pupils, for example: modest
and diligent, from his earliest grammar classes he’s
kept a little notebook full of phrases.
After hanging on the lips of his teachers for twenty
years, he’s managed to build up an intellectual stock in
trade; doesn’t it belong to him as if it were a house, or
money?
Paul Claudel, Le soulier de satin, Day III, Scene ii
There is an economy of cultural goods, but it has a specific logic. Sociology
endeavours to establish the conditions in which the consumers of cultural goods,
and their taste for them, are produced, and at the same time to describe the
different ways of appropriating such of these objects as are regarded at a
particular moment as works of art, and the social conditions of the constitution of
the mode of appropriation that is considered legitimate. But one cannot fully
understand cultural practices unless ‘culture’, in the restricted, normative sense of
ordinary usage, is brought back into ‘culture’ in the anthropological sense, and
the elaborated taste for the most refined objects is reconnected with the
elementary taste for the flavours of food.
Whereas the ideology of charisma regards taste in legitimate culture as a gift
of nature, scientific observation shows that cultural needs are the product of
upbringing and education: surveys establish that all cultural practices (museum
visits, concert-going, reading etc.), and preferences in literature, painting or
music, are closely linked to educational level (measured by qualifications or
length of schooling) and secondarily to social origin.1 The relative weight of
home background and of formal education (the effectiveness and duration of
which are closely dependent on social origin) varies according to the extent to
which the different cultural practices are recognized and taught by the
educational system, and the influence of social origin is strongest—other things
being equal—in ‘extra-curricular’ and avant-garde culture. To the socially
recognized hierarchy of the arts, and within each of them, of genres, schools or
periods, corresponds a social hierarchy of the consumers. This predisposes tastes
to function as markers of ‘class’. The manner in which culture has been acquired
lives on in the manner of using it: the importance attached to manners can be
1 Bourdieu et al., Un art moyen: essai sur les usages sociaux de la photographie (Paris,
Ed. de Minuit, 1965); P. Bourdieu and A. Darbel, L’Amour de l’art: les musées et leur
public (Paris, Ed. de Minuit, 1966).
2
understood once it is seen that it is these imponderables of practice which
distinguish the different—and ranked—modes of culture acquisition, early or
late, domestic or scholastic, and the classes of individuals which they
characterize (such as ‘pedants’ and mondains). Culture also has its titles of
nobility—awarded by the educational system—and its pedigrees, measured by
seniority in admission to the nobility.
The definition of cultural nobility is the stake in a struggle which has gone on
unceasingly, from the seventeenth century to the present day, between groups
differing in their ideas of culture and of the legitimate relation to culture and to
works of art, and therefore differing in the conditions of acquisition of which
these dispositions are the product2 Even in the classroom, the dominant definition
of the legitimate way of appropriating culture and works of art favours those who
have had early access to legitimate culture, in a cultured household, outside of
scholastic disciplines, since even within the educational system it devalues
scholarly knowledge and interpretation as ‘scholastic’ or even ‘pedantic’ in
favour of direct experience and simple delight.
The logic of what is sometimes called, in typically ‘pedantic’ language, the
‘reading’ of a work of art, offers an objective basis for this opposition.
Consumption is, in this case, a stage in a process of communication, that is, an
act of deciphering, decoding, which presupposes practical or explicit mastery of a
cipher or code. In a sense, one can say that the capacity to see (voir) is a function
of the knowledge (savoir), or concepts, that is, the words, that are available to
name visible things, and which are, as it were, programmes for perception. A
work of art has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses the cultural
competence, that is, the code, into which it is encoded. The conscious or
unconscious implementation of explicit or implicit schemes of perception and
appreciation which constitutes pictorial or musical culture is the hidden condition
for recognizing the styles characteristic of a period, a school or an author, and,
more generally, for the familiarity with the internal logic of works that aesthetic
enjoyment presupposes. A beholder who lacks the specific code feels lost in a
chaos of sounds and rhythms, colours and lines, without rhyme or reason. Not
having learnt to adopt the adequate disposition, he stops short at what Erwin
Panofsky calls the ‘sensible properties’, perceiving a skin as downy or lace-work
2 The word disposition seems particularly suited to express what is covered by the
concept of habitus (defined as a system of dispositions)—used later in this chapter. It
expresses first the result of an organizing action, with a meaning close to that of words
such as structure; it also designates a way of being, a habitual state (especially of the
body) and, in particular, a predisposition, tendency, propensity or inclination. [The
semantic cluster of ‘disposition’ is rather wider in French than in English, but as this
note—translated literally—shows, the equivalence is adequate. Translator.] P. Bourdieu,
Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, Cambridge UJniversity Press, 1977), p. 214,
n. 1.
3
as delicate, or at the emotional resonances aroused by these properties, referring
to ‘austere’ colours or a ‘joyful’ melody. He cannot move from the ‘primary
stratum of the meaning we can grasp on the basis of our ordinary experience’ to
the ‘stratum of secondary meanings’, i.e., the ‘level of the meaning of what is
signified’, unless he possesses the concepts which go beyond the sensible
properties and which identify the specifically stylistic properties of the work.3
Thus the encounter with a work of art is not ‘love at first sight’ as is generally
supposed, and the act of empathy, Einfühlung, which is the art-lover’s pleasure,
presupposes an act of cognition, a decoding operation, which implies the
implementation of a cognitive acquirement, a cultural code.4
This typically intellectualist theory of artistic perception directly contradicts
the experience of the art-lovers closest to the legitimate definition; acquisition of
legitimate culture by insensible familiarization within the family circle tends to
favour an enchanted experience of culture which implies forgetting the
acquisition.5 The ‘eye’ is a product of history reproduced by education. This is
true of the mode of artistic perception now accepted as legitimate, that is, the
aesthetic disposition, the capacity to consider in and for themselves, as form
rather than function, not only the works designated for such apprehension, i.e.,
legitimate works of art, but everything in the world, including cultural objects
which are not yet consecrated—such as, at one time, primitive arts, or, nowadays,
3 E. Panofsky, ‘Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance
Art’, Meaning in the Visual Arts (New York, Doubleday, 1955), p. 28.
4 It will be seen that this internalized code called culture functions as cultural capital
owing to the fact that, being unequally distributed, it secures profits of distinction.
5 The sense of familiarity in no way excludes the ethnocentric misunderstanding which
results from applying the wrong code. Thus, Michael Baxandall’s work in historical
ethnology enables us to measure all that separates the perceptual schemes that now tend
to be applied to Quattrocento paintings and those which their immediate addressees
applied. The ‘moral and spiritual eye’ of Quattrocento man, that is, the set of cognitive
and evaluative dispositions which were the basis of his perception of the world and his
perception of pictorial representation of the world, differs radically from the ‘pure’ gaze
(purified, first of all, of reference to economic value) with which the modern cultivated
spectator looks at works of art. As the contracts show, the clients of Filippo Lippi,
Domenico Ghirlandaio or Piero della Francesca were concerned to get ‘value for money’.
They approached works of art with the mercantile dispositions of a businessman who can
calculate quantities and prices at a glance, and they applied some surprising criteria of
appreciation, such as the expense of the colours, which sets gold and ultramarine at the
top of the hierarchy. The artists, who shared this world view, were led to include
arithmetical and geometrical devices in their compositions so as to flatter this taste for
measurement and calculation; and they tended to exhibit the technical virtuosity which, in
this context, is the most visible evidence of the quantity and quality of the labour
provided; M. Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in
the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1972).
4
popular photography or kitsch—and natural objects. The ‘pure’ gaze is a
historical invention linked to the emergence of an autonomous field of artistic
production, that is, a field capable of imposing its own norms on both the
production and the consumption of its products.6 An art which, like all Post-
Impressionist painting, is the product of an artistic intention which asserts the
primacy of the mode of representation over the object of representation demands
categorically an attention to form which previous art only demanded
conditionally.
The pure intention of the artist is that of a producer who aims to be
autonomous, that is, entirely the master of his product, who tends to reject not
only the ‘programmes’ imposed a priori by scholars and scribes, but also—
following the old hierarchy of doing and saying—the interpretations
superimposed a posteriori on his work. The production of an ‘open work’,
intrinsically and deliberately polysemic, can thus be understood as the final stage
in the conquest of artistic autonomy by poets and, following in their footsteps, by
painters, who had long been reliant on writers and their work of ‘showing’ and
‘illustrating’. To assert the autonomy of production is to give primacy to that of
which the artist is master, i.e., form, manner, style, rather than the ‘subject’, the
external referent, which involves subordination to functions even if only the most
elementary one, that of representing, signifying, saying something. It also means
a refusal to recognize any necessity other than that inscribed in the specific
tradition of the artistic discipline in question: the shift from an art which imitates
nature to an art which imitates art, deriving from its own history the exclusive
source of its experiments and even of its breaks with tradition. An art which ever
increasingly contains reference to its own history demands to be perceived
historically; it asks to be referred not to an external referent, the represented or
designated ‘reality’, but to the universe of past and present works of art. Like
artistic production, in that it is generated in a field, aesthetic perception is
necessarily historical, inasmuch as it is differential, relational, attentive to the
deviations (écarts) which make styles. Like the so-called naive painter who,
operating outside the held and its specific traditions remains external to the
history of the art, the ‘naive’ spectator cannot attain a specific grasp of works of
art which only have meaning—or value—in relation to the specific history of an
artistic tradition. The aesthetic disposition demanded by the products of a highly
autonomous field of production is inseparable from a specific cultural
competence. This historical culture functions as a principle of pertinence which
enables one to identify, among the elements offered to the gaze, all the distinctive
features and only these, by referring them, consciously or unconsciously, to the
6 See P. Bourdieu, ‘Le marché des biens symboliques’, L’Anneé Sociologique, 22 (1973),
49 126; and ‘Outline of a Sociological Theory of Art Perception’, International Social
Science Journal, 20 (Winter 1968), 589-612.
5
universe of possible alternatives. This mastery is, for the most part, acquired
simply by contact with works of art—that is, through an implicit learning
analogous to that which makes it possible to recognize familiar faces without
explicit rules or criteria—and it generally remains at a practical level; it is what
makes it possible to identify styles, i.e., modes of expression characteristic of a
period, a civilization or a school, without having to distinguish clearly, or state
explicitly, the features which constitute their originality. Everything seems to
suggest that even among professional valuers, the criteria which define the
stylistic properties of the ‘typical works’ on which all their judgements are based
usually remain implicit.
The pure gaze implies a break with the ordinary attitude towards the world,
which, given the conditions in which it is performed, is also a social separation.
Orteya y Gasset can be believed when he attributes to modern art a systematic
refusal of all that is ‘human’, i.e., generic, common—as opposed to distinctive, or
distinguished—namely, the passions, emotions and feelings which ‘ordinary’
people invest in their ‘ordinary’ lives. It is as if the ‘popular aesthetic’ (the
quotation marks are there to indicate that this is an aesthetic ‘in itself’ not ‘for
itself’) were based on the affirmation of the continuity between art and life,
which implies the subordination of form to function. This is seen clearly in the
case of the novel and especially the theatre, where the working-class audience
refuses any sort of formal experimentation and all the effects which, by
introducing a distance from the accepted conventions (as regards scenery, plot
etc.), tend to distance the spectator, preventing him from getting involved and
fully identifying with the characters (I am thinking of Brechtian ‘alienation’ or
the disruption of plot in the nouveau roman). In contrast to the detachment and
disinterestedness which aesthetic theory regards as the only way of recognizing
the work of art for what it is, i.e., autonomous, selbständig, the ‘popular
aesthetic’ ignores or refuses the refusal of ‘facile’ involvement and ‘vulgar’
enjoyment, a refusal which is the basis of the taste for formal experiment. And
popular judgements of paintings or photographs spring from an ‘aesthetic’ (in
fact it is an ethos) which is the exact opposite of the Kantian aesthetic. Whereas,
in order to grasp the specificity of the aesthetic judgement, Kant strove to
distinguish that which pleases from that which gratifies and, more generally, to
distinguish disinterestedness, the sole guarantor of the specifically aesthetic
quality of contemplation, from the interest of reason which defines the Good,
working-class people expect every image to explicitly perform a function, if only
that of a sign, and their judgements make reference, often explicitly, to the norms
of morality or agreeableness. Whether rejecting or praising, their appreciation
always has an ethical basis.
Popular taste applies the schemes of the ethos, which pertain in the ordinary
circumstances of life, to legitimate works of art, and so performs a systematic
reduction of the things of art to the things of life. The very seriousness (or
6
naivety) which this taste invests in fictions and representations demonstrates a
contrario that pure taste performs a suspension of ‘naive’ involvement which is
one dimension of a ‘quasi-ludic’ relationship with the necessities of the world.
Intellectuals could be said to believe in the representation—literature, theatre,
painting—more than in the things represented, whereas the people chiefly expect
representations and the conventions which govern them to allow them to believe
‘naively’ in the things represented. The pure aesthetic is rooted in an ethic, or
rather, an ethos of elective distance from the necessities of the natural and social
world, which may take the form of moral agnosticism (visible when ethical
transgression becomes an artistic parti pris) or of an aestheticism which presents
the aesthetic disposition as a universally valid principle and takes the bourgeois
denial of the social world to its limit. The detachment of the pure gaze cannot be
dissociated from a general disposition towards the world which is the paradoxical
product of conditioning by negative economic necessities—a life of ease—that
tends to induce an active distance from necessity.
Although art obviously offers the greatest scope to the aesthetic disposition,
there is no area of practice in which the aim of purifying, refining and
sublimating primary needs and impulses cannot assert itself, no area in which the
stylization of life, that is, the primacy of forms over function, of manner over
matter, does not produce the same effects. And nothing is more distinctive, more
distinguished, than the capacity to confer aesthetic status on objects that are banal
or even ‘common’ (because the ‘common’ people make them their own,
especially for aesthetic purposes), or the ability to apply the principles of a ‘pure’
aesthetic to the most everyday choices of everyday life, e.g., in cooking, clothing
or decoration, completely reversing the popular disposition which annexes
aesthetics to ethics.
In fact, through the economic and social conditions which they presuppose,
the different ways of relating to realities and fictions, of believing in fictions and
the realities they simulate, with more or less distance and detachment, are very
closely linked to the different possible positions in social space and,
consequently, bound up with the systems of dispositions (habitus) characteristic
of the different classes and class fractions. Taste classifies, and it classifies the
classifier. Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish
themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the
distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective
classifications is expressed or betrayed. And statistical analysis does indeed show
that oppositions similar in structure to those found in cultural practices also
appear in eating habits. The antithesis between quantity and quality, substance
and form, corresponds to the opposition—linked to different distances from
necessity—between the taste of necessity, which favours the most ‘filling’ and
most economical foods, and the taste of liberty or luxury—which shifts the
7
emphasis to the manner (of presenting, serving, eating etc.) and tends to use
stylized forms to deny function.
The science of taste and of cultural consumption begins with a transgression
that is in no way aesthetic: it has to abolish the sacred frontier which makes
legitimate culture a separate universe, in order to discover the intelligible
relations which unite apparently incommensurable ‘choices’, such as preferences
in music and food, painting and sport, literature and hairstyle. This barbarous
reintegration of aesthetic consumption into the world of ordinary consumption
abolishes the opposition, which has been the basis of high aesthetics since Kant,
between the ‘taste of sense’ and the ‘taste of reflection’, and between facile
pleasure, pleasure reduced to a pleasure of the senses, and pure pleasure, pleasure
purified of pleasure, which is predisposed to become a symbol of moral
excellence and a measure of the capacity for sublimation which defines the truly
human man. The culture which results from this magical division is sacred.
Cultural consecration does indeed confer on the objects, persons and situations it
touches, a sort of ontological promotion akin to a transubstantiation. Proof
enough of this is found in the two following quotations, which might almost have
been written for the delight of the sociologist:
‘What struck me most is this: nothing could be obscene on the stage of our
premier theatre, and the ballerinas of the Opera, even as naked dancers, sylphs,
sprites or Bacchae, retain an inviolable purity.’7
‘There are obscene postures: the stimulated intercourse which offends the
eye. Clearly, it is impossible to approve, although the interpolation of such
gestures in dance routines does give them a symbolic and aesthetic quality which
is absent from the intimate scenes the cinema daily flaunts before its spectators’
eyes . . . As for the nude scene, what can one say, except that it is brief and
theatrically not very effective? I will not say it is chaste or innocent, for nothing
commercial can be so described. Let us say it is not shocking, and that the chief
objection is that it serves as a box-office gimmick. . . . In Hair, the nakedness
fails to be symbolic.’8
The denial of lower, coarse, vulgar, venal, servile—in a word, natural—
enjoyment, which constitutes the sacred sphere of culture, implies an affirmation
of the superiority of those who can be satisfied with the sublimated, refined,
disinterested, gratuitous, distinguished pleasures forever closed to the profane.
That is why art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and
deliberately or not, to fulfil a social function of legitimating social differences.
Translated by Richard Nice
7 O. Merlin, ‘Mlle. Thibon dans la vision de Marguerite’, Le Monde, 9 December 1965.
8 F. Chenique, ‘Hair est-il immoral?’ Le Monde, 28 January 1970.
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Consumed by images
Author: Bell Hooks
Date: Feb. 1, 1993
From: Artforum International(Vol. 31, Issue 6)
Publisher: Artforum International Magazine, Inc.
Document Type: Article
Length: 2,265 words
Abstract:
The film version of ‘Malcolm X’ is described as watered-down interpretation of the novel. Director Spike Lee is seen to have been
pressured to create a film that would not offend the white majority. Thus, Malcolm is portrayed as less militant and devoid of familial
and social ties. In the tradition of Hollywood movies, Malcolm is the solitary protagonist. Other stereotypes surface in the movie such
as women being either virgins or prostitutes.
Full Text:
bell hooks on Spike Lee’s Malcolm X
Shortly after the assassination at the Audubon Ballroom, Bayard Rustin predicted that “white America, not the Negro people, will
determine Malcolm X’s fate in history.” At the time, the statement seemed ludicrous: white America appeared to have no “use” for
Malcolm–not even a changed Malcolm, no longer advocating racial separatism. Today, it has found a use for him. In a field of
representation that has always remained a plantation culture where black images are concerned, Malcolm X has been turned into a
commodity.
Politically progressive black folks and our allies in struggle recognize that the power of Malcolm X’s thought is threatened when
market forces objectify, commodify, and sell his image and ideas. Understanding the power of mass-media images to determine how
we see ourselves and how we act, Malcolm himself admonished black folks never to accept images created for them by someone
else. It is always better, he said, to form the habit of learning how to see things for yourself. The message is not that black folks
should interrogate the images white folks produce, while passively consuming images constructed by black folks; we should look
critically at all images. Malcolm encouraged the development of a critical black gaze, one that would confront, challenge, interrogate.
Yet both in the academy and on the street, black admirers of Spike Lee have sought to discredit any voice not unequivocally
celebratory of his film Malcolm X. Black critics of the movie risk being seen as traitors to the race, or as personally hostile to Spike.
(Lee himself tends to be quick to denounce his critics.) Filmmaker Marlon Riggs, among others, has warned that such silencing
prevents the development of black cultural criticism. His comments are worth quoting at length:
At one forum, Spike Lee was asked several questions by a number of people, myself included, about his representations in his
movies. The audience went wild with hysterical outbursts to “shut up,” “sit down,” “make your own goddamn movies,” “who are you,
this man is doing . . . positive work, why should you be criticizing him?” . . . even when it is clear that the critique is trying to empower
and trying to heal certain wounds within our communities, there is not any space within our culture to constructively critique. There is
an effort simply to shut people up in order to reify these gods, if you will, who have delivered some image of us which seems to affirm
our existence in this world. As if they make up for the lack, but in fact they don’t. They can become part of the hegemony.(1)
This is certainly true of Spike Lee. Despite continuing hype that depicts him as an outsider struggling against the white movie-industry
establishment, Lee is by now an insider, able, say, to force Warner to hire him as director of Malcolm X instead of the white filmmaker
initially chosen. The folks at Warner were likely unmoved by Spike’s narrow identity politics–his insistence that for a white man to
make the film would be “wrong with a capital W.” Rather, they recognized that his presence would draw the bigger crossover
audience, and thus ensure the movie’s financial success.
Committed to megasuccess himself, Lee had to create a work that would address a predominantly white audience. Ironically, then,
his film had to resemble other epic Hollywood dramas, especially fictive biographies such as JFK. There is nothing visual in Malcolm
X to indicate that a white director could not have made it. This seems especially tragic since Lee’s brilliance has surfaced most when
he has combined aspects of real events with fictive dramas, as in Do the Right Thing, providing insightful representations of
blackness that emerge from familiarity and have never before been seen on screen.
To appeal to a crossover audience, Lee concentrates on the part of Malcolm’s story that most easily fits Hollywood’s stereotypical
representations of black life. Even while he was making the film, critics like Amiri Baraka were concerned that he would focus on
Malcolm’s years as a hustler, to entertain white audiences. This early insight has proven astute: the character Lee devises has more
in common with Steven Spielberg’s representation of Mister in The Color Purple than with real-life descriptions of Malcolm X. In
“Blues for Mr. Spielberg,” Michele Wallace writes, “There’s a gap between what blacks would like to see in movies about themselves
and what whites in Hollywood are willing to produce. Instead of serious men and women encountering consequential dilemmas, we’re
almost always minstrels, more than a little ridiculous.”(2) The comment could equally describe the first half of Malcolm X, with its
dance-hall and barbershop scenes. Prophetically, Wallace continues, “I suspect that blacks who wish to make their presence known
in American movies will have to seek some middle ground between the stern seriousness of black liberation and the tap dances of
Mr. Bojangles and Aunt Jemima.” Clearly this is the middle ground that Lee tries to negotiate in Malcolm X.
Lee’s own presence in the film, as Malcolm’s friend Shorty, intensifies the sense of spectacle. It sometimes seems as though he were
competing for attention with Denzel Washington as Malcolm, upstaging him with comic antics. Washington had been cast before Lee
joined the project. A box-office draw, he never stops being Denzel; his real-life persona as everybody’s-nice-guy makes it impossible
for him to convey the seriousness and intensity of a black man consumed with rage. In casting Washington, the white producers were
already making Malcolm less militant, more open, so that white audiences could identify with him.
Once the part of the movie depicting Malcolm’s youth is over, the remainder is a skeletal, imagistic outline of his later political
changes. None of his powerful critiques of capitalism and colonialism is dramatized. Also, Lee has not explained why he showed a
fictional prison inmate leading Malcolm to Islam instead of Malcolm’s own brother and sister (as Malcolm describes in his
autobiography). Indeed, Malcolm’s character is constructed throughout as without family, though members of his family were always
present in his life. Presenting Malcolm as a symbolic orphan, Lee erases his complex relations with black women–his mother, his
sister–making it appear that the only women important to him were his sexual partners. The effect of excising Malcolm’s engagement
with family and community is to cast him as the lone hero, reinscribing him within a venerable Hollywood tradition.
Again, although Malcolm’s widow, Betty Shabazz, told Lee that she and Malcolm did not argue (the Nation of Islam deemed
obedience paramount in a wife), the film shows her “reading” him in the same bitchified way that Lee’s previous black women
characters talk to their mates. Certain stock, stereotypical, sexist images of both black and white women emerge in the move–they
are either virgins or whores, madonnas or prostitutes. But that, after all, is Hollywood. Perhaps Lee could not portray Malcolm’s sister
Ella because Hollywood has not yet created a visual space in which a politically progressive black woman can be imagined.
It is equally true that there is no place for black male militant rage in Hollywood. Finally, it is Malcolm’s militancy that the film erases.
Lee seems primarily fascinated not by Malcolm the political revolutionary–not by critique of racism in conjunction with imperialism and
colonialism, and certainly not by the critique of capitalism–but by Malcolm’s early view of racism as a masculinist phallocentric power-
struggle between white and black men. Thus the film’s major moment of political resistance is the episode in which Malcolm
galvanizes Nation of Islam men in a face-off with white men around the issue of police brutality, scenes in which he is portrayed as a
Hitler-type leader, ruling with a leather-clad iron fist. Deflecting attention away from the righteous resistance that catalyzed the
confrontation, the film makes it appear that all this is a “dick thing”; yet another shoot-out at the OK Corral. But that, too, is Hollywood,
and Hollywood at its best, for this is one of the movie’s more powerful sections.
Lee insists that there is no revisionism here. Boasting that his film will “teach,” educating folks about history, he asserts, “I want our
people to be all fired up for this. To get inspired by it. This is not just some regular bullshit Hollywood movie. This is life and death
we’re dealing with, this is a mindset, this is what Black people in America have come through.”(3) To ensure that Malcolm X would
not be a “regular bullshit Hollywood movie” Lee could have insisted on accuracy. Many who see his film do not know the “true story”;
his misrepresentations could permanently distort their understanding.
Lee’s conflict is his desire to make a drama that would both convey the spirit and integrity of Malcolm’s life and work and compete
with–mirror–Hollywood epics made by white male directors (his mentors). As the film’s coda, stirring documentary footage,
compelling testimony, and then South African schoolchildren and Nelson Mandela show that Malcolm’s legacy has global impact; yet
Malcolm X as militant black revolutionary has by this time been erased–consumed by images. The Malcolm we see at the film’s end
is alone, suicidal, maybe even losing his mind. Richard Dyer has analyzed how Hollywood renders the black image powerless: “Black
people’s qualities could be praised to the skies, but they must not be shown to be effective qualities active in the world. . . . they must
not be shown to do anything, except perhaps to be destructive in a random sort of way.”(4) So Lee’s final images of Malcolm suggest
it is foolhardy and naive to think there can be meaningful political revolution–to think that truth and justice will prevail.
In no way subversive, Malcolm X reinscribes the black image within a colonizing framework. But, like other bad movies with powerful
subjects, it touches the hearts and minds of folks who bring their own meanings to it, connecting it with their own experience. Young
black folks can brag of the way the fictional Malcolm confronts white folks, even as young white folks leave the theater relieved to see
that Malcolm was a good guy. Lee’s movie follows the renewed interest in Malcolm generated by hip-hop, contemporary cultural
criticism, and various forms of militant activism. These voices are needed resistance against today’s commodifications of Malcolm,
and against the renewed attacks on him in the mass media, which are now bombarding us with the notion that ultimately he had no
heroic dimension. For example, though Malcolm lets any reader of his autobiography know that during his hustling days he did
“unspeakable” acts (the nature of which might be guessed by anyone familiar with street culture), his biographer Bruce Perry
assumes that to name these acts is to expose Malcolm as a fraud.(5) No doubt Perry’s book shocked many who need to believe their
icons are saints, but nothing he revealed diminishes Malcolm’s work to advance the global liberation of black people from white
supremacy. Elsewhere, magazines that rarely focus on black life, like The New Yorker, have also run anti-Malcolm pieces. The
December Harpers has an article by black scholar Gerald Early; when black folks denounce Malcolm they usually gain credibility in
the white press.
Significantly, Lee makes no connection between Malcolm’s personal rage at racism and his compassionate devotion to alleviating
black people’s suffering. Malcolm X does not compel empathetic experience of the pain and sorrow of black life in white culture;
there’s nothing that would help folks understand the necessity of rage and resistance, nothing that would let them see why, after
working all day, Malcolm would walk the streets thinking “about what terrible things have been done to our people here in the United
States.” The beating of Rodney King, shown at the start of the film, is a graphic reminder of those “terrible things,” but is quickly
displaced by the minstrel show. Thus does Malcolm X seduce us to forget the brutal realities that created black militancy.
As Michele Wallace warns, there is no place in Hollywood movies for the “seriousness of black liberation.” Lee’s film is no exception.
It does not compel us to confront, challenge, and change. It encourages us to weep but not to fight. To take liberation seriously we
must take seriously the reality of black suffering. Ultimately, it is this reality the film denies.
1. Marlon Riggs, quoted in Kalamu ya Salaam, “Interview: Marlon Riggs,” Black Film Review 7 no. 3, p. 5.
2. Michele Wallace, “Blues for Mr. Spielberg,” Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory, New York: Verso, 1990, p. 75.
3. Spike Lee with Ralph Wiley, By Any Means Necessary: The Trials and Tribulations of the Making of Malcolm X, New York:
Hyperion, 1992, p. 68.
4. Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, New York: St. Martin’s, 1986, p. 90.
5. Bruce Perry, Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America, Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1991.
bell hooks is a feminist cultural critic and theorist who lives in New York and is a professor of women’s studies at Oberlin College,
Ohio. Later this spring she will publish a longer version of this piece in Zeta.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1993 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hooks, Bell. “Consumed by images.” Artforum International, Feb. 1993, p. 5+. Gale Academic Onefile, https://link-gale-
com.libproxy.csudh.edu/apps/doc/A14376653/AONE?u=csudh&sid=AONE&xid=5a99a855. Accessed 27 Jan. 2020.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A14376653
Society for Cinema & Media Studies
Keeping the Black in Media Production: One L.A. Rebellion Filmmaker’s Notes
Author(s): Zeinabu irene Davis
Source: Cinema Journal, Vol. 53, No. 4 (Summer 2014), pp. 157-161
Published by: University of Texas Press on behalf of the Society for Cinema & Media
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Cinema Journal 53 i No. 4 ! Summer 2014
roles have to become ubiquitous for that wider spectrum to even occur in the first place.
When can we lift the burden of representation, as it were, so that we can ask different
questions of the black female roles we do see? My extension of the future text offers
but one way to explore those questions and to create new ones. Since like me, I bet you
are tired of expecting the same of black women on-screen and constantly not getting it.
If we consider Minaj, Washington, and Perry as future texts, and if we also uti-
lize future texts as a reading strategy with which to interrogate black media artifacts,
perhaps we can reconsider the ideological underpinnings the three figures manifest.
In doing so, we can get beyond hackneyed debates about whether any of their screen
images are “helping or hurting” black popular culture, and we can more fully discern
the nuances of how black media representations continue to recycle and recirculate
the disparities between black male and female subjectivities. Perhaps such a strategy
will remind us to put the question of black women back into investigations of black
popular culture.
Keeping the Black in Media
Production: One L.A. Rebellion
Filmmaker’s Notes
by Zeinabu irene Davis
I who came group am a began out member of of critically the the of first UCLA the acclaimed sustained L.A. film school Rebellion Black movement with filmmakers group an in agenda. the of and United filmmakers We media are States a artists small who by
came out of the UCLA film school with an agenda. We are a small
group of critically acclaimed Black filmmakers and media artists
who began the first sustained movement in the United States by
a collective of minority filmmakers aiming to reimagine the media
production processes. Our goal was and is to represent, reflect on,
and enrich the day-to-day lives of people in our own communities.
Although we are of very diverse origins and conflicting ideas, we share
a common desire to create an alternative to the dominant American
mode of cinema. Generally speaking, the hope of the group is to real-
ize a cinema of informed, relevant, and unfettered Black expression
and the means to bypass the restrictive apparatus of distribution and
exhibition to create a viable, alternative delivery system that will sus-
tain the ongoing work of Black cinema artists.
What does the Black mean in Black contemporary media produc-
tion? For me, it means creating and preserving Black life, culture, and
history. It means continuing to create and engage in oppositional me-
dia practice, but it also means supporting those who choose to make
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Cinema Journal 53 I No. 4 I Summer 2014
work within more mainstream models such as American broadcast television and film.
As Stuart Hall states, “The point is not simply that, since our racial differences do not
constitute all of us, we are always different, negotiating different kinds of differences –
of gender, of sexuality, of class. . . . We are always in negotiation, not with a single set
of oppositions that place us always in the same relation to others, but with a series of
different positionalities.”1 1 am a filmmaker, professor, wife, and mother – all of these
“positionalities” influence my choices and decisions, and they inform the “Black” in
my life.
My current work-in-progress, a feature-length documentary, Spirits of Rebellion : Black
Cinema at UCLA , observes the lives and work of the L.A. Rebellion filmmakers. Head-
lined by Juke Dash, Charles Burnett, Jamaa Fanaka, Haile Gerima, Billy Woodberry,
Figure 1. Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, 1979).
Barbara McCullough, Ben
Caldwell, Carroll Parro tt
Blue, Alile Sharon Larkin,
and Larry Clark, the L.A.
Rebellion filmmakers collec-
tively imagined and created
a Black cinema against the
conventions of Hollywood
and blaxploitation films
(Figure 1). They did this by
attending to the quiet mo-
ments of everyday life in
their communities and by
paying homage to the dig-
nity of their characters.
For the most part, ours is an oppositional cinema that tried to create its own style,
approach, and aesthetic – an aesthetic that was informed by a rigorous study of other
relevant cinematic approaches. Traditions as divergent as Italian neorealism, Brazilian
cinema nova , African cinema, Cuban cinema, and various other “third” cinema prac-
tices have influenced our media making. Our narrative work might be characterized
by a style that privileges the duration of a shot – holding an image long after an action
has been completed to inscribe the beauty of the character or moment. Our style can
also mean using a group of people as a symbol for an idea, rather than the story of an
individual protagonist. Our cinema celebrates African diaspora culture by incorporat-
ing pan-African music, clothing, dance, and spiritual practices.
As one of the younger members of the L.A. Rebellion, I know most of the people
who came through the program from the late 1970s through 1990. I have always
been one of the members who traveled between the filmmaking world and academia
fairly easily. In the past ten years, my work has been in documentary – not because
that is what I wanted to do, but because it has been what I can get funded. There is
hardly any funding for narrative filmmaking now, certainly not the kind that I want
1 Stuart Hall, “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?,” in Black Popular Culture: A Project by Michele Wallace,
ed. Gina Dent (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), 30-31.
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Cinema Journal 53 ! No. 4 I Summer 2014
to do – the kind that plays with and bends genre: documentary, narrative, and experi-
mental all within the same film. The 1990s were the death knell of most public funding
of the arts, especially the cinematic arts. There are no more National Endowment for
the Arts regional seed or American Film Institute grants that fund anything other than
social issue documentaries. Yet many of us still find ways to make media; we might not
be in the mall cinemas, but we are still making work and getting it to audiences via the
Internet or through traditional audience screenings in theaters.
The pacing of contemporary Black oppositional cinema, especially that of the L.A.
Rebellion filmmakers, is different from mainstream cinema. Generally, the narrative
films by the L.A. Rebellion filmmakers have a slower pace and pay more attention to
small details, such as the way a person holds a cup, or embracing silences between the
characters. Action or quick editing may be limited. That’s not what we do best, and
that’s not how we see the world. Quiet moments need to be discovered and explored.
I trust that my audience is intelligent and will work with me. Thinking about this
audience is extremely important to the way I conceive, produce, and distribute my
work and that of others. My ideal audience is a concentric circle that constantly ex-
pands – first, Black women at its core; then Black people of all generations and gender
orientations; and then others.
My primary subject matter will almost always be Black – I see too few representa-
tions of Black people who look like myself in mainstream media. Precious few televi-
sion shows exist with Black families – comedic or dramatic. My husband and I are
raising two girls, ages twelve and seven. It would be wonderful to have a Black family
show like The Cosby Show (NBC, 1984-1992) to watch as a family. Hell, I’d even have
us sit and watch reruns of Everybody Hates Chris (UPN, 2005-2006; CW, 2006-2009)
these days, but these series are not being produced now. Although I am not sorry to see
it go, even Tyler Perry’s House of Payne (TBS, 2006-2012) has completed its run, and
his new shows are not quite family comedies.
All I can manage these days are frank and open discussions with my children on
why the Black character Zuri from the Disney Channel’s Jessie (Disney, 201 1-) series
is not a good character to emulate. Her smart-aleckiness will get you some evil mama
stares from me, and if you misbehave like she does, you will be punished by losing
privileges or having an intimate date with the belt.
Film is a powerful art form. As a Black filmmaker, I know it can be both entertain-
ment and education. As a filmmaker mom, my children know that we will and must
talk about the media we see. We go see movies together when we can. For example,
my oldest has seen Lee Daniels’s The Butler (2013), and we used the film as an op-
portunity for discussions of civil rights history. It is empowering for her as a young
woman to see how young people were the catalysts for much of the change that
happened in the movement. But that is not enough. It means explaining to her the
history of the Black Panthers and letting her know that The Butler’s depiction was not
quite accurate. Keeping the “Black” in media production and practice means expos-
ing both my children and my students to real people in the movement, reading and
watching movies about the unsung heroes and heroines, like the Black Panthers, Ella
Baker, Ruby Bridges, and many others who have been ignored or misrepresented in
mainstream discourse.
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Cinema Journal 53 I No. 4 ! Summer 2014
Putting the “Black” in Black popular culture as a mother and professor means
explaining and arguing with my children and students about mass media representa-
tions of Blackness. For example, I love Bruno Mars, and I let my girls listen to him. But
“Gorilla” (2013) works my last nerve. “Ooh I got a body full of liquor / with a cocaine
kicker / and I’m feeling like I’m thirty feet tall” are not ideal lyrics for a seven-year-old
to belt out. The song also insinuates that making love between humans is the same as
sex between gorillas. As much as I wish we were post-racial, many people still construct
Black people as savage apes. I do not want young Black men to think that they need to
have the savage virility of gorillas! I’m still old school enough to want Otis Redding’s
“Try a Little Tenderness” (1966) to be the anthem of relationships in my girls’ lives.
The only way I can address my anger and concern with “Gorilla” is to explain why
I have problems with it to the girls. I can no longer monitor what they see and listen
to all the time – I’m not with them twenty-four hours a day. For media education to
be effective, it has to be employed as a natural, everyday occurrence. What I can do is
teach them to be able to stand on their own and explain to their friends why the song
is problematic. We also expose them to alternatives. Janelle Monáe performed as the
opening act for Bruno Mars a few years ago. Both Mars and Monáe had new albums
come out this year. My girls and I will listen to both, but we make comparisons and
decide whose music and videos will be more lasting and interesting years from now.
Right now, Janelle is winning, hands down!
So we know that style is important to our work in Black media production. Under-
standing and having a mastery over mainstream conventions is good and important.
But for me as a media maker and an artist, I still want to push those conventions a
bit and add more. Some pieces might be experimental, as are some of the works of
Cauleen Smith: her wonderful and provocative gallery installation videos that push
the limits of audio and visuals – The Grid and Remote Viewing (both 2010); Portia Cobb’s
Don’t Hurry Back (1996) and her collaborative dance and video-photo piece with Ferne
Caulker, The Sweetgrass Project (2013); Phillip Mallory Jones’s new and exciting im-
mersive graphic novel Bronzeville Etudes and Riffs (20 1 3); and Kevin Everson’s award-
winning experimental documentary Quality Control (201 1).2 Other Black media works
might be just a little off-center in terms of aesthetics, just because we still want that
broad audience.
Black media production has to go beyond merely producing work. It also means
using whatever means necessary to get the films, videos, installations, and web episodes
to the people. I am a founding member of the Black Film Society of San Diego. We
are a small group of film lovers who want to see more films by Black people. It means
doing crowdsourcing screenings where we get a large group of people together to see
a Black film that didn’t make it to the theaters in San Diego. It is a lot of work, and we
only get the film for one night, but it serves as an intervention. And we get to see great
films.
2 For more information on the experimental videos and installations of Cauleen Smith, see her work on Vimeo (http://
vimeo.com/kellygabron/videos). For more information on Portia Cobb’s photography and videos, see her work on
Vimeo (http://vimeo.com/user4431044/videos). For more information on the work of Philip Mallory Jones, see his
website, at http://www.philipmalloryjones.com. For more information on the work of Kevin Jerome Everson, see his
website (http://people.virginia.edu/~ke5d/).
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Cinema Journal 53 I No. 4 i Summer 2014
Film-making, as a Black filmmaker, means not just making the films but also doing
the important and necessary work of engaging with a live audience whenever pos-
sible. It is essential to have a question-and-answer discussion period with an audience.
During these sessions we have the opportunity for elders to testify and exchange oral
histories. We get to hear possible solutions to problems that the characters faced in the
film. We get youth to articulate and tantalize our minds with new possibilities and ways
of seeing and creating. We get to talk and engage and not hide behind our comput-
ers and phones. As a filmmaker, I get fed from these discussions. I learn, and I try to
incorporate what has been said in future work. The audience and I determine, as a
collective, what Black means today in all its messy, problematic but yet wonderful ways.
Film or media in a general sense is so important to Black popular culture because
it can indeed encompass all those things that Hall suggests are important elements of
Black popular culture. Using style, music, and the body as a canvas, Black independent
filmmakers play with these three elements in various ways. I am thinking of the won-
derfully odd visual compositions of Ava Duvernay’s Venus Vs. (2013) by our beloved
camera wizards Arthur Jafa and Hans Charles. Of music expressed through the form
of ragtime by Reginald R. Robinson and African drumming by Atiba Jali in my own
feature film Compensation (1999). Of the body as a canvas in Pariah (201 1), by Dee Rees;
Fruitvale Station (2013), by Ryan Coogler; and most certainly Mother of George (2013), by
Andrew Dosunmu. Maybe the L.A. Rebellion filmmakers have influenced these film-
makers, or maybe they have not. The important thing to recognize and understand is
that a path and a legacy of Black independent film have been laid. Clearly, a Black film
legacy lives on in the United States, be it an initial response to racism, to Micheaux’s
Within Our Gates (1920), or even to Madame C.J. Walker’s hair products films: these
early works, no matter how disparate, both reflected and influenced Black popular
culture. We are still doing this today. *
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- Contents
- Issue Table of Contents
p. 157
p. 158
p. 159
p. 160
p. 161
Cinema Journal, Vol. 53, No. 4 (Summer 2014) pp. 1-188
Front Matter
Looking for Satellites [pp. 1-2]
Sony and Local-Language Productions: Conglomerate Hollywood’s Strategy of Flexible Localization for the Global Film Market [pp. 3-27]
A Cinema of Revolt: Black Wave Revolution and Dušan Makavejev’s Politics of Disgust [pp. 28-52]
Life, Love, and Programming: The Culture and Politics of “WALL-E” and Pixar Computer Animation [pp. 53-75]
In the Realm of the Senses: Sensory Realism, Speed, and Hong Kong Martial Arts Cinema [pp. 76-97]
Unpacking a Punch: Transduction and the Sound of Combat Foley in Fight Club [pp. 98-120]
IN FOCUS: African American Caucus
Introduction: When and Where We Enter [pp. 121-127]
Black Film, New Media Industries, and BAMMs (Black American Media Moguls) in the Digital Media Ecology [pp. 128-133]
“Who’s ‘We,’White Man?” Scholarship, Teaching, and Identity Politics in African American Media Studies [pp. 134-140]
No Getting around the Black [pp. 140-146]
Whose “Black Film” Is This? The Pragmatics and Pathos of Black Film Scholarship [pp. 146-150]
Black Women On-Screen as Future Texts: A New Look at Black Pop Culture Representations [pp. 150-157]
Keeping the Black in Media Production: One L.A. Rebellion Filmmaker’s Notes [pp. 157-161]
Contributors [pp. 162-163]
BOOK REVIEWS: African American Caucus
Review: untitled [pp. 164-168]
Review: untitled [pp. 168-173]
Review: untitled [pp. 173-177]
Review: untitled [pp. 178-183]
Review: untitled [pp. 183-187]
Contributors [pp. 188-188]
Back Matter
PAULINE KAEL
Circles and Squares
In 1957, in the Paris monthly “Cahiers du Cinema99 Frangois Truffaut
proposed for the magazine a “politique des auteurs”—a policy of focussing criticism
primarily upon directors, and specifically upon certain chosen directors whose
individuality of style qualified them, in the eyes of the Cahiers “team” as
“auteurs99—creators in the personal sense we accept for other arts. This doctrine
galvanized the “Cahiers99 polemicists, and lent some of the impetus which helped
Truffaut, Godard, and many other young men break through as film-makers
(and aspiring “auteurs99). in the years since then, the doctrine
has gained adherents in England9 chiefly around the magazine “Movie 99 and to some
extent in the United States, through the “New York Film Bulletin99 and
“Film Culture.99 In its homeland the politique has led to many peculiar judgments,
especially of American film-makers: it is Samuel Fuller, Nicholas Ray, and Otto
Preminger who figure as the gods of this new pantheon. The results upon export
are turning out to be even more peculiar on occasion. The time seems ripe,
therefore, for a direct examination of the Anglo-Saxon version of the “politique des
auteurs.99 Is it, in fact, a new and stimulating approach to films, which ought to
displace the tradition of criticism developed by the “Sequence99 and “Sight &
Sound99 writers? Pauline Kael offers a resounding negative view; and we anticipate
in our next issue a rejoinder by Andrew Sarris, in whose writings the politique
has had its most extended and thoughtful American presentation.
J O Y S A N D SARRIS
” . . . the first premise of the auteur theory is the
technical competence of a director as a criterion
of value. . . . The second premise of the auteur
theory is the distinguishable personality of the
director as a criterion of value. . . . The third and
ultimate premise of the auteur theory is concerned
with interior meaning, the ultimate glory of the
cinema as an art. Interior meaning is extrapolated
from the tension between a director’s personality
and his material.”
—Andrew Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory
in 1962,” Film Culture, Winter 62/3
“Sometimes a great deal of corn must be
husked to yield a few kernels of internal
meaning. I recently saw Every Night at
Eight, one of the many maddeningly rou-
tine films Raoul Walsh has directed in his
long career. This 1935 effort featured
George Raft, Alice Faye, Frances Langford
and Patsy Kelly in one of those familiar
plots about radio shows of the period. The
film keeps moving along in the pleasantly
unpretentious manner one would expect of
Walsh until one incongruously intense scene
with George Raft thrashing about in his
: CIRCLES A N D S Q U A R E S ——• 13:
sleep, revealing his inner fears in mumbling
dream talk. The girl he loves comes into
the room in the midst of his unconscious
avowals of feeling, and listens sympatheti-
cally. This unusual scene was later ampli-
fied in High Sierra with Humphrey Bogart
and Ida Lupino. The point is that one of the
screen’s most virile directors employed an
essentially feminine narrative device to
dramatize the emotional vulnerability of
his heroes. If I had not been aware of
Walsh in Every Night at Eight, the crucial
link to High Sierra would have passed un-
noticed. Such are the joys of the auteur
theory.” Sarris, ibid.
Perhaps a little more corn should be husked;
perhaps, for example, we can husk away the
word “internal” (is “internal meaning” any
different from “meaning”?). W e might ask
why the link is “crucial”? Is it because the
device was “incongruously intense” in Every
Night at Eight and so demonstrated a try for
something deeper on Walsh’s part? But if his
merit is his “pleasantly unpretentious manner”
(which is to say, I suppose, that, recognizing
the limitations of the script, he wasn’t trying
to do much) then the incongruous device was
probably a misconceived attempt that dis-
turbed the manner—like a bad playwright in-
terrupting a comedy scene because he cannot
resist the opportunity to tug at your heart-
strings. WTe might also ask why this narrative
device is “essentially feminine”: is it more fem-
inine than masculine to be asleep, or to talk
in one’s sleep, or to reveal feelings? Or, pos-
sibly, does Sarris regard the device as feminine
because the listening woman becomes a sym-
pathetic figure and emotional understanding is,
in this “virile” context, assumed to be essen-
tially feminine? Perhaps only if one accepts the
narrow notions of virility so common in our
action films can this sequence be seen as
“essentially feminine,” and it is amusing that
a critic can both support these cliches of the
male world and be so happy when they are
violated.
This is how we might quibble with a differ-
ent kind of critic but we would never get any-
where with Sarris if we tried to examine what
he is saying sentence by sentence.
So let us ask, what is the meaning of the
passage? Sarris has noticed that in High Sierra
(not a very good movie) Raoul Walsh repeated
an uninteresting and obvious device that he
had earlier used in a worse movie. And for
some inexplicable reason, Sarris concludes that
he would not have had this joy of discovery
without the auteur theory.
But in every art form, critics traditionally
notice and point out the way the artists bor-
row from themselves (as well as from others)
and how the same devices, techniques, and
themes reappear in their work. This is obvious
in listening to music, seeing plays, reading
novels, watching actors, etc.; we take it for
granted that this is how we perceive the devel-
opment or the decline of an artist (and it may
be necessary to point out to auteur critics that
repetition without development is decline).
When you see Hitchock’s Saboteur there is no
doubt that he drew heavily and clumsily from
The 39 Steps, and when you see North by
Northwest you can see that he is once again
toying with the ingredients of The 39 Steps —
and apparently having a good time with them.
Would Sarris not notice the repetition in the
Walsh films without the auteur theory? Or
shall we take the more cynical view that with-
out some commitment to Walsh as an auteur,
he probably wouldn’t be spending his time
looking at these movies?
If we may be permitted a literary analogy,
we can visualize Sarris researching in the
archives of The Saturday Evening Post, tracing
the development of Clarence Budington Kel-
land, who, by the application of something like
the auteur theory, would emerge as a much
more important writer than Dostoyevsky; for
in Kelland’s case Sarris’ three circles, the three
premises of the auteur theory, have been con-
sistently congruent. Kelland is technically com-
petent (everi “pleasantly unpretentious”), no
writer has a more “distinguishable personality,”
and if “interior meaning” is what can be extrap-
olated from, say Hatari! or Advise and Con-
sent or What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
1 4 : CIRCLES A N D S Q U A R E S ——• 14:
then surely Kelland’s stories with their attempts
to force a bit of character and humor into the
familiar plot outlines are loaded with it. Poor
misguided Dostoyevsky, too full of what he
has to say to bother with “technical compe-
tence,” tackling important themes in each
work (surely the worst crime in the auteur
book) and with his almost incredible unity of
personality and material leaving you nothing
to extrapolate from, he’ll never make it. If
the editors of Movie ranked authors the way
they do directors, Dostoyevsky would prob-
ably be in that almost untouchable category
of the “ambitious.”
It should be pointed out that Sams’ defense
of the auteur theory is based not only on
aesthetics but on a rather odd pragmatic state-
ment: “Thus to argue against the auteur theory
in America is to assume that we have anyone
of Bazin’s sensibility and dedication to provide
an alternative, and we simply don’t.” Which I
take to mean that the auteur theory is neces-
sary in the absence of a critic who wouldn’t
need it. This is a new approach to aesthetics,
and I hope Sarris’ humility does not camou-
flage his double-edged argument. If his aesthet-
ics is based on expediency, then it may be ex-
pedient to point out that it takes extraordinary
intelligence and discrimination and taste to
use any theory in the arts, and that without
those qualities, a theory becomes a rigid
formula (which is indeed what is happening
among auteur critics). The greatness of critics
like Bazin in France and Agee in America may
have something to do with their using their
full range of intelligence and intuition, rather
than relying on formulas. Criticism is an art,
not a science, and a critic who follows rules
will fail in one of his most important functions:
perceiving what is original and important in
new work and helping others to see.
” T H E O U T E R C I R C L E ”
” . . . the first premise of the auteur theory is
the technical competence of a director as a
criterion of value.”
This seems less the premise of a theory than
a commonplace of judgment, as Sarris himself
indicates when he paraphrases it as, “A great
director has to be at least a good director.”
But this commonplace, though it sounds rea-
sonable and basic, is a shaky premise: some-
times the greatest artists in a medium by-pass
or violate the simple technical competence that
is so necessary for hacks. For example, it is
doubtful if Antonioni could handle a routine
directorial assignment of the type at which
John Sturges is so proficient ( E s c a p e from Fort
Bravo or Bad Day at Black Rock), but surely
Antonioni’s VAvventura is the work of a great
director. And the greatness of a director like
Cocteau has nothing to do with mere technical
competence: his greatness is in being able to
achieve his own personal expression and style.
And just as there were writers like Melville
or Dreiser who triumphed over various kinds
of technical incompetence, and who were, as
artists, incomparably greater than the facile
technicians of their day, a new great film direc-
tor may appear whose very greatness is in his
struggling toward grandeur or in massive ac-
cumulation of detail. An artist who is not a
good technician can indeed create new stand-
ards, because standards of technical compe-
tence are based on comparisons with work
already done.
Just as new work in other arts is often
attacked because it violates the accepted stand-
ards and thus seems crude and ugly and in-
coherent, great new directors are very likely
to be condemned precisely on the grounds that
they’re not even good directors, that they don’t
know their “business.” Which, in some cases,
is true, but does it matter when that “business”
has little to do with what they want to express
in films? It may even be a hindrance, leading
them to banal slickness, instead of discovery
of their own methods. For some, at least,
Cocteau may be right: “The only technique
worth having is the technique you invent for
yourself.” The director must be judged on the
basis of what he produces — his films — and
if he can make great films without knowing the
standard methods, without the usual craftsman-
ship of the “good director,” then that is the
: CIRCLES A N D S Q U A R E S — — •
way he works. I would amend Sams’ premise
to “In works of a lesser rank, technical com-
petence can help to redeem the weaknesses of
the material.” In fact it seems to be precisely
this category that the auteur critics are most
interested in — the routine material that a good
craftsman can make into a fast and enjoyable
movie. What, however, makes the auteur critics
so incomprehensible, is not their preference for
works of this category (in this they merely
follow the lead of children who also prefer
simple action films and westerns and horror
films to works that make demands on their un-
derstanding) but their truly astonishing in-
ability to exercise taste and judgment within
their area of preference. Movie-going kids are,
I think, much more reliable guides to this kind
of movie than the auteur critics: every kid
I’ve talked to knows that Henry Hatha way’s
North to Alaska was a surprisingly funny,
entertaining movie and Hatari! (classified as a
“masterpiece” by half the Cahiers Conseil des
Dix, Peter Bogdanovich, and others) was a
terrible bore.
” T H E M I D D L E C I R C L E ”
” . . . the second premise of the auteur theory
is the distinguishable personality of the
director as a criterion of value.”
Up to this point there has really been no
theory, and now, when Sarris begins to work
on his foundation, the entire edifice of civilized
standards of taste collapses while he’s tacking
down his floorboards. Traditionally, in any art,
the personalities of all those involved in a pro-
duction have been a factor in judgment, but
that the distinguishability of personality should
in itself be a criterion of value completely con-
fuses normal judgment. The smell of a skunk
is more distinguishable than the perfume of
a rose; does that make it better? Hitchcock’s
personality is certainly more distinguishable in
Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, Vertigo,
than Carol Reed’s in The Stars Look Down,
Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol, The Third
Man, An Outcast of the Islands, if for no other
1 5 :
reason than because Hitchcock repeats while
Reed tackles new subject matter. But how does
this distinguishable personality function as a
criterion for judging the works? We recognize
the hands of Carn6 and Pr^vert in Le Jour se
Leve, but that is not what makes it a beautiful
film; we can just as easily recognize their
hands in Quai des Brumes—which is not such
a good film. We can recognize that Le Plaisir
and The Earrings of Madame De are both the
work of Ophuls, but Le Plaisir is not a great
film, and Madame De is.
Often the works in which we are most aware
of the personality of the director are his worst
films—when he falls back on the devices he has
already done to death. When a famous direc-
tor makes a good movie, we look at the movie,
we don’t think about the director’s personality;
when he makes a stinker we notice his familiar
touches because there’s not much else to watch.
When Preminger makes an expert, entertaining
whodunit like Laura, we don’t look for his
personality (it has become part of the texture
of the film); when he makes an atrocity like
Whirlpool, there’s plenty of time to look for
his “personality” — if that’s your idea of a
good time.
It could even be argued, I think, that Hitch-
cock’s uniformity, his mastery of tricks, and
his cleverness at getting audiences to respond
according to his calculations — the feedback
he wants and gets from them — reveal not so
much a personal style as a personal theory of
audience psychology, that his methods and
approach are not those of an artist but a presti-
digitator. The auteur critics respond just as
Hitchcock expects the gullible to respond. This
is not so surprising — often the works auteur
critics call masterpieces are ones that seem to
reveal the contempt of the director for the
audience.
It’s hard to believe that Sarris seriously at-
tempts to apply “the distinguishable personal-
ity of the director as a criterion of value” be-
cause when this premise becomes troublesome,
he just tries to brazen his way out of difficul-
ties. For example, now that John Huston’s
1 6 CIRCLES A N D S Q U A R E S =
work has gone flat* Sarris casually dismisses
him with: “Huston is virtually a forgotten man
with a few actors’ classics behind him< . ."
If The Maltese Falcon, perhaps the most high-
style thriller ever made in America, a film
Huston both wrote and directed, is not a direc-
tor's film, what is? And if the distinguishable
personality of the director is a criterion of
value, then how can Sarries dismiss the Huston
who comes through so unmistakably in The
Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The African
Queen, or Beat the Devil, or even in a muddled
Huston film like Key Largo? If these are actors'
movies, then what on earth is a director's
movie?
Isn’t the auteur theory a hindrance to clear
judgment of Huston’s movies and of his career?
Disregarding the theory, we see some fine film
achievements and we perceive a remarkably
distinctive directorial talent; we also see inter-
vals of weak, half-hearted assignments like
Across the Pacific and In This Our Life. Then,
after Moulin Rouge, except for the blessing of
Beat the Devil, we see a career that splutters
out in ambitious failures like Moby Dick and
confused projects like The Roots of Heaven
and The Misfits, and strictly commercial proj-
ects like Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison. And this
kind of career seems more characteristic of film
history, especially in the United States, than
the ripening development and final mastery
envisaged by the auteur theory — a theory
that makes it almost de rigeur to regard Hitch-
cock’s American films as superior to his early
English films. Is Huston’s career so different,
say, from Fritz Lang’s? How is it that Huston’s
early good — almost great — work, must be
*And, by the way, the turning point came, I
think, not with Moby Dick, as Sarris indicates, but
much earlier, with Moulin Rouge. This may not
be so apparent to auteur critics concerned primar-
ily with style and individual touches, because
what was shocking about Moulin Rouge was that
the content was sentimental mush. But critics who
accept even the worst of Minnelli probably
wouldn’t have been bothered by the fact that
Moulin Rouge was soft in the center, it had so
many fancy touches at the edges.
rejected along with his mediocre recent work,
but Fritz Lang, being sanctified as an auteur,
has his bad recent work praised along with his
good? Employing more usual norms, if you
respect the Fritz Lang who made M and You
Only Live Once, if you enjoy the excesses of
style and the magnificent absurdities of a film
like Metropolis, then it is only good sense to
reject the ugly stupidity of The Tiger of
Eschnapur botch. It is an insult to an artist to
praise his bad work along with his good; it
indicates that you are incapable of judging
either.
A few years ago, a friend who reviewed
Jean Renoir’s University of California produc-
tion of his play Carola, hailed it as “a work of
genius.” When I asked my friend how he could
so describe this very unfortunate play, he said,
“Why, of course, it’s a work of genius. Renoir’s
a genius, so anything he does is a work of
genius.” This could almost be a capsule version
of the auteur theory (just substitute Hatari!
for Carola) and in this reductio ad absurdum,
viewing a work is superfluous, as the judgment
is a priori. It’s like buying clothes by the label:
this is Dior, so it’s good. (This is not so far
from the way the auteur critics work, either).
Sarris doesn’t even play his own game with
any decent attention to the rules: it is as ab-
surd to praise Lang’s recent bad work as to
dismiss Huston’s early good work; surely it
would be more consistent if he also tried to
make a case for Huston’s bad pictures? That
would be more consistent than devising a
category called “actors’ classics” to explain
his good pictures away. If The Maltese Falcon
and The Treasure of Sierra Madre are actors’
classics, then what makes Hawks’ To Have
and Have Not and The Big Sleep (which were
obviously tailored to the personalities of Bogart
and Bacall) the work of an auteur?
Sarris believes that what makes an auteur is
“an elan of the soul.” (This critical language
is barbarous. Where else should elan come
from? It’s like saying “a digestion of the
stomach.” A film critic need not be a theoreti-
cian, but it is necessary that he know how to
use words. This might, indeed, be a first pre-
mise for a theory.) Those who have this elan
presumably have it forever and their films re-
veal the “organic unity” of the directors’
careers; and those who don’t have it — well,
they can only make “actors’ classics.” It’s
ironic that a critic trying to establish simple
“objective” rules as a guide for critics who he
thinks aren’t gifted enough to use taste and in-
telligence, ends up — where, actually, he began
— with a theory based on mystical insight.
This might really make demands on the auteur
critics if they did not simply take the easy way
out by arbitrary decisions of who’s got “it” and
who hasn’t. Their decisions are not merely not
based on their theory; their decisions are
beyond criticism. It’s like a woman’s telling us
that she feels a certain dress does something
for her: her feeling has about as much to do
with critical judgment as the auteur critics
feeling that Minnelli has “it,” but Huston
never had “it.”
Even if a girl had plenty of “it,” she wasn’t
expected to keep it forever. But this “elan” is
not supposed to be affected by the vicissitudes
of fortune, the industrial conditions of movie-
making, the turmoil of a country, or the health
of a director. Indeed, Sarris says, “If directors
and other artists cannot be wrenched from their
historical environments, aesthetics is reduced
to a subordinate branch of ethnography.” May
I suggest that if, in order to judge movies, the
auteur critics must wrench the directors from
their historical environments (which is, to put
it mildly, impossible) so that they can concen-
trate on the detection of that “elan,” they are
reducing aesthetics to a form of idiocy. Elan
as the permanent attribute Sarris posits can
only be explained in terms of a cult of per-
sonality. May I suggest that a more meaning-
ful description of elan is what a man feels when
he is working at the height of his powers —
and what we respond to in works of art with
the excited cry of “This time, he’s really done
it” or “This shows what he could do when he
got the chance” or “He’s found his style” or
“I never realized he had it in him to do any-
thing so good,” etc., a response to his joy in
creativity.
Sarris experiences “joy” when he recognizes
a pathetic little link between two Raoul Walsh
pictures (he never does explain whether the
discovery makes him think the pictures are any
better) but he wants to see artists in a pristine
state — their essences, perhaps? — separated
from all the life that has formed them and to
which they try to give expression.
” T H E I N N E R C I R C L E ”
“The third and ultimate premise of the
auteur theory is concerned with interior
meaning, the ultimate glory of the cinema as
an art. Interior meaning is extrapolated from
the tension between a director’s personality
and his material.”
This is a remarkable formulation: it is the
opposite of what we have always taken for
granted in the arts, that the artist expresses
himself in the unity of form and content. What
Sarris believes to be “the ultimate glory of the
cinema as an art” is what has generally been
considered the frustrations of a man working
against the given material. Fantastic as this
formulation is, it does something that the first
two premises didn’t do: it clarifies the interests
of the auteur critics. If we have been puzzled
because the auteur critics seemed so deeply in-
volved, even dedicated, in becoming connois-
seurs of trash, now we can see by this theoreti-
cal formulation that trash is indeed their chosen
province of film.
Their ideal auteur is the man who signs a
long-term contract, directs any script that’s
handed to him, and expresses himself by shov-
ing bits of style up the crevasses of the plots.
If his “style” is in conflict with the story line
or subject matter, so much the better — more
chance for tension. Now we can see why there
has been so much use of the term “personality”
in this aesthetics (the term which seems so in-
adequate when discussing the art of Griffith or
Renoir or Murnau or Dreyer) — a routine, com-
mercial movie can sure use a little “personal-
ity.”
Now that we have reached the inner circle
(the bull’s eye turns out to be an empty socket)
we can see why the shoddiest films are often
: 1 8 = = = = = = = =
praised the most. Subject matter is irrelevant
(so long as it isn’t treated sensitively — which
is bad) and will quickly be disposed of by
auteur critics who know that the smart direc-
tor isn’t responsible for that anyway; they’ll
get on to the important subject — his mise-en-
scene. The director who fights to do something
he cares about is a square. Now we can at least
begin to understand why there was such con-
tempt toward Huston for what was, in its way,
a rather extraordinary effort — the Moby Dick
that failed; why Movie considers Roger Cor-
man a better director than Fred Zinnemann
and ranks Joseph Losey next to God, why Bog-
danovich, Mekas, and Sams give their highest
critical ratings to What Ever Happened to
Baby Jane? (mighty big crevasses there). If
Carol Reed had made only movies like The
Man Between — in which he obviously worked
to try to make something out of a rag-bag of
worn-out bits of material — he might be con-
sidered “brilliant” too. (But this is doubtful:
although even the worst Reed is superior to
Aldrich’s Baby Jane, Reed would probably be
detected, and rejected, as a man interested in
substance rather than sensationalism.)
I am angry, but am I unjust? Here’s Sarris:
“A Cukor who works with all sorts of projects
has a more developed abstract style than a
Bergman who is free to develop his own scripts.
Not that Bergman lacks personality, but his
work has declined with the depletion of his
ideas largely because his technique never
equaled his sensibility. Joseph L. Mankiewicz
and Billy Wilder are other examples of writer-
directors without adequate technical mastery.
By contrast, Douglas Sirk and Otto Preminger
have moved up the scale because their miscel-
laneous projects reveal a stylistic consistency.”
How neat it all is—Bergman’s “work has de-
clined with the depletion of’his ideas largely be-
cause his technique never equaled his sensibili-
ty.” But what on earth does that mean? How
did Sarris perceive Bergman’s sensibility except
through his technique? Is Sarris saying what he
seems to be saying, that if Bergman had devel-
oped more “technique,” his work wouldn’t be
dependent on his ideas? I’m afraid this is what
— CIRCLES A N D SQUARES
he means, and that when he refers to Cukor’s
“more developed abstract style” he means by
“abstract” something unrelated to ideas, a
technique not dependent on the content of the
films. This is curiously reminiscent of a view
common enough in the business world, that it’s
better not to get too involved, too personally
interested in business problems, or they take
over your life; and besides, you don’t function
as well when you’ve lost your objectivity. But
this is the opposite of how an artist works. His
technique, his style, is determined by his range
of involvements, and his preference for certain
themes. Cukor’s style is no more abstract (!)
than Bergman’s: Cukor has a range of subject
matter that he can handle and when he gets
a good script within his range (like The Phila-
delphia Story or Pat and Mike) he does a
good job; but he is at an immense artistic dis-
advantage, compared with Bergman, because
he is dependent on the ideas of so many (and
often bad) scriptwriters anii on material which
is often alien to his talents. It’s amusing (and/
or depressing) to see the way auteur critics
tend to downgrade writer-directors — who are
in the best position to use the film medium for
personal expression.
Sarris does some pretty fast shuffling with
Huston and Bergman; why doesn’t he just come
out and admit that writer-directors are dis-
qualified by his third premise? They can’t
arrive at that “interior meaning, the ultimate
glory of the cinema” because a writer-director
has no tension between his personality and his
material, so there’s nothing for the auteur critic
to extrapolate from.
What is all this nonsense about extrapolat-
ing “interior” meaning from the tension be-
tween a director’s personality and his material?
A competent commercial director generally
does the best he can with what he’s got to work
with. Where is the “tension”? And if you can
locate some, what kind of meaning could you
draw out of it except that the director’s having
a bad time with lousy material or material he
doesn’t like? Or maybe he’s trying to speed
up the damned production so he can do some-
thing else that he has some hopes for? Are
: CIRCLES A N D S Q U A R E S ——• 19:
these critics honestly (and futilely) looking for
“interior meanings” or is this just some form of
intellectual diddling that helps to sustain their
pride while they’re viewing silly movies? Where
is the tension in Howard Hawks’ films? When
he has good material, he’s capable of better
than good direction, as he demonstrates in
films like Twentieth Century, Bringing Up
Baby, His Girl Friday; and in To Have and
Have Not and The Big Sleep he demonstrates
that with help from the actors, he can jazz up
ridiculous scripts. But what “interior meaning”
can be extrapolated from an enjoyable, harm-
less, piece of kitsch like Only Angels Have
Wings; what can the auteur critics see in it
beyond the sex and glamor and fantasies of
the high-school boys’ universe — exactly what
the mass audience liked it for? And when
Hawks’ material and/or cast is dull and when
his heart isn’t in the production — when by the
auteur theory he should show his “personality,”
the result is something soggy like The Big Sky.
George Cukor’s modest statement, “Give me
a good script and I’ll be a hundred times better
as a director”* provides some notion of how a
director may experience the problem of the
given material. What can Cukor do with a
script like The Chapman Report but try to kid
it, to dress it up a bit, to show off the talents of
Jane Fonda and Claire Bloom and Glynis Johns,
and to give the total production a little flair
and craftsmanship. At best, he can make an
entertaining bad movie. A director with some-
thing like magical gifts can make a silk purse
*In another sense, it is perhaps immodest. I
would say, give Cukor a clever script with light,
witty dialogue, and he will know what to do with
it. But I wouldn’t expect more than glossy enter-
tainment. (It seems almost too obvious to mention
it, but can Sarris really discern the “distinguish-
able personality” of George Cukor and his “ab-
stract” style in films like Bhowani Junction, Les
Girls, The Actress, A Life of Her Own, The Model
and the Marriage Broker, Edward, My Son, A
Woman’s Face, Romeo and Juliet, A Double Life?
I wish I could put him to the test. I can only
suspect that many auteur critics would have a hard
time seeing those tell-tale traces of the beloved
in their works.)
out of a sow’s ear. But if he has it in him to do
more in life than make silk purses, the triumph
is minor — even if the purse is lined with gold.
Only by the use of the auteur theory does this
little victory become “ultimate glory.” For
some unexplained reason those travelling in
auteur circles believe that making that purse
out of a sow’s ear is an infinitely greater accom-
plishment than making a solid carrying case
out of a good piece of leather (as, for example,
a Zinnemann does with From Here to Eternity
or The Nuns Story).
I suppose we should be happy for Sirk and
Preminger, elevated up the glory “scale,” but
I suspect that the “stylistic consistency” of, say,
Preminger, could be a matter of his limitations,
and that the only way you could tell he made
some of his movies was that he used the same
players so often (Linda Darnell, Jeanne Crain,
Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, et al., gave his
movies the Preminger look). But the argument
is ludicrous anyway, because if Preminger
shows stylistic consistency with subject matter
as varied as Carmen Jones, Anatomy of a
Murder, and Advise and Consent, then by any
rational standards he should be attacked rather
than elevated. I don’t think these films are
stylistically consistent, nor do I think Preminger
is a great director — for the very simple reason
that his films are consistently superficial and
facile. (Advise and Consent—an auteur “master-
piece” — Ian Cameron, Paul Mayersberg, and
Mark Shivas of Movie and Jean Douchet of
Cahiers du Cinema rate it first on their ten
best lists of 1962 and Sarris gives it his top
rating—seems not so much Preminger-directed
as other-directed. That is to say, it seems calcu-
lated to provide what as many different groups
as possible want to see: there’s something for
the liberals, something for the conservatives,
something for the homosexuals, something for
the family, etc.) An editorial in Movie states:
“In order to enjoy Preminger’s films the specta-
tor must apply an unprejudiced intelligence; he
is constantly required to examine the quality
not only of the characters’ decisions but also of
his own reactions,” and “He presupposes an
intelligence active enough to allow the specta-
2 0 CIRCLES A N D S Q U A R E S =
tor to make connections, comparisons and judg-
ments.” May I suggest that this spectator would
have better things to do than the editors of
Movie who put out Preminger issues? They
may have, of course, the joys of discovering
links between Centennial Summer, Forever
Amber, That Lady in Ermine, and The
Thirteenth Letter, but I refuse to believe in
these ever-so-intellectual protestations. The
auteur critics aren’t a very convincing group.
I assume that Sards’ theory is not based on
his premises (the necessary causal relationships
are absent), but rather that the premises were
devised in a clumsy attempt to prop up the
“theory.” (It’s a good thing he stopped at
three: a few more circles and we’d really be
in hell, which might turn out to be the last
refinement of film tastes — Abbott and Costello
comedies, perhaps?) These critics work em-
L o n g L i v e t h e — e r — K i n g
“Two Weeks in Another Town is without a
doubt Minnelli’s best film to date and per-
haps the best thing he’ll ever do, for never
again will the coincidence arise of having
a piece of ‘respectable trash’ like Shaw’s
novel, and a director who respects trash.
The thing that makes Two Weeks great is
not the acting (Douglas as per usual is hor-
rendous; Robinson stupid, and Claire Trevor,
faintly interesting). Certainly not the story,
for the changes from the novel only make it
more banal. It is the fact that Minnelli has
taken something not fit for even the slightest
bit of serious critical attention, and turned
it into a film which demands exhaustive
visual analysis on one level and offers a
cinematic joy-ride on a more visceral level.
. . . Most of all it is a movie which does not
take itself seriously . . . full of beautiful shots
and startlingly poetic moments, all of which
would mean nothing unless placed in the
context of Minnelli’s background—a back-
ground that indicates, especially with Two
Weeks, that Minnelli is fast challenging
Douglas Sirk’s title as Hollywood’s ‘King of
Camp.’ ” -New York Film Bulletin, #45
barrassingly hard trying to give some semblance
of intellectual respectability to a preoccupation
with mindless, repetitious commercial products
— the kind of action movies that the restless,
rootless men who wander on 42nd Street and
in the Tenderloin of all our big cities have
always preferred just because they could re-
spond to them without thought. These movies
soak up your time. I would suggest that they
don’t serve a very different function for Sarris
or Bogdanovich or the young men of Movie —
even though they devise elaborate theories to
justify soaking up their time. An educated man
must have to work pretty hard to set his in-
tellectual horizons at the level of I Was a Male
War Bride (which, incidentally, wasn’t even a
good commercial movie).
“Interior meaning” seems to be what those
in the know know. It’s a mystique — and a
mistake. The auteur critics never tell us by
what divining rods they have discovered the
elan of a Minnelli or a Nicholas Ray or a Leo
McCarey. They’re not critics; they’re inside
dopesters. There must be another circle that
Sarris forgot to get to — the one where the
secrets are kept.
O U T S I D E T H E CIRCLES, or
W H A T IS A F I L M CRITIC?
I suspect that there’s some primitive form
of Platonism in the underbrush of Sarris’
aesthetics.* He says, for example, that “Bazin’s
greatness as a critic . . . rested in his disinter-
ested conception of the cinema as a universal
entity.” I don’t know what a “universal entity”
is, but I rather imagine Bazin’s stature as a
critic has less to do with “universals” than with
intelligence, knowledge, experience, sensitivity,
perceptions, fervor, imagination, dedication,
lucidity, etc. — the traditional qualities asso-
*This might help to explain such rather quaint
statements as: Bazin “was, if anything, generous
to a fault, seeking in every film some vestige of
the cinematic art”—as if cinema were not simply
the movies that have been made and are being
made, but some preexistent entity. If Bazin thought
in these terms, does Sarris go along with him?
: CIRCLES A N D SQUARES = = = = =
ciated with great critics. The role of the critic
is to help people see what is in the work, what
is in it that shouldn’t be, what is not in it that
could be. He is a good critic if he helps people
understand more about the work than they
could see for themselves; he is a great critic, if
by his understanding and feeling for the work,
by his passion, he can excite people so that
they want to experience more of the art that
is there, waiting to be seized. He is not neces-
sarily a bad critic if he makes errors in judg-
ment. (Infallible taste is inconceivable; what
could it be measured against?) He is a bad
critic if he does not awaken the curiosity, en-
large the interests and understanding of his
audience. The art of the critic is to transmit
his knowledge of and enthusiasm for art to
others.
I do not understand what goes on in the
mind of a critic who thinks a theory is what
his confreres need because they are not “great”
critics. Any honest man can perform the criti-
cal function to the limits of his tastes and
powers. I daresay that Bogdanovich and V. F.
Perkins and Rudi Franchi and Mark Shivas
and all the rest of the new breed of specialists
know more about movies than some people and
could serve at least a modest critical function
if they could remember that art is an expression
of human experience. If they are men of feel-
ing and intelligence, isn’t it time for them to
be a little ashamed of their “detailed criticism”
of movies like River of No Return?
I believe that we respond most and best to
work in any art form (and to other experience
as well) if we are pluralistic, flexible, relative
in our judgments, if we are eclectic. But this
does not mean a scrambling and confusion of
systems. Eclecticism is not the same as lack
of scruple; eclecticism is the selection of the
best standards and principles from various
systems of ideas. It requires more care, more
orderliness to be a pluralist than to apply a
single theory. Sarris, who thinks he is applying
a single theory, is too undisciplined to recog-
nize the conflicting implications of his argu-
ments. If he means to take a Platonic position,
then is it not necessary for him to tell us what
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = 21 :
his ideals of movies are and how various ex-
amples of film live up to or fail to meet his
ideals? And if there is an ideal to be achieved,
an objective standard, then what does elan
have to do with it? (The ideal could be
achieved by plodding hard work or by inspira-
tion or any other way; the method of achieving
the ideal would be as irrelevant as the “per-
sonality” of the creator.) As Sarris uses them,
vitalism and Platonism and pragmatism do not
support his auteur theory; they undermine it.
Those, like Sarris, who ask for objective
standards seem to want a theory of criticism
which makes the critic unnecessary. And he is
expendable if categories replace experience; a
critic with a single theory is like a gardener
who uses a lawn mower on everything that
grows. Their desire for a theory that will solve
all the riddles of creativity is in itself perhaps
an indication of their narrowness and con-
fusion; they’re like those puzzled, lost people
who inevitably approach one after a lecture
and ask, “But what is your basis for judging a
movie?” When one answers that new films are
judged in terms of how they extend our ex-
perience and give us pleasure, and that our
ways of judging how they do this are drawn
not only from older films but from other works
of art, and theories of art, that new films are
generally related to what is going on in the
other arts, that as wide a background as pos-
sible in literature, painting, music, philosophy,
political thought, etc., helps, that it is the wealth
and variety of what he has to bring to new
works that makes the critic’s reaction to them
valuable, the questioners are always unsatisfied.
They wanted a simple answer, a formula; if
they approached a chef they would probably
ask for the one magic recipe that could be fol-
lowed in all cooking.
And it is very difficult to explain to such
people that criticism is exciting just because
there is no formula to apply, just because you
must use everything you are and everything
you know that is relevant, and that film criti-
cism is particularly exciting just because of the
multiplicity of elements in film art.
This range of experience, and dependence
22 CIRCLES A N D SQUARES =
on experience, is pitifully absent from the
work of the auteur critics; they seem to view
movies, not merely in isolation from the other
arts, but in isolation even from their own ex-
perience. Those who become film specialists
early in life are often fixated on the period of
film during which they first began going to
movies, so it’s not too surprising that the Movie
group — just out of college and some still in
— are so devoted to the films of the ‘forties
and ‘fifties. But if they don’t widen their inter-
ests to include earlier work, how can they
evaluate films in anything like their historical
continuity, how can they perceive what is dis-
tinctive in films of the ‘forties? And if they
don’t have interests outside films, how can they
evaluate what goes on in films? Film aesthetics
as a distinct, specialized field is a bad joke:
the Movie group is like an intellectual club for
the intellectually handicapped. And when is
Sarris going to discover that aesthetics is indeed
a branch of ethnography; what does he think
it is – a sphere of its own, separate from the
study of man in his environment?
S O M E S P E C U L A T I O N S O N
T H E A P P E A L O F T H E A U T E U R T H E O R Y
If relatively sound, reasonably reliable judg-
ments were all that we wanted from film criti-
cism, then Sight and Sound might be con-
sidered a great magazine. It isn’t, it’s some-
thing far less – a good, dull, informative, well-
written, safe magazine, the best film magazine
in English, but it doesn’t satisfy desires for an
excitement of the senses. Its critics don’t often
outrage us, neither do they open much up for
us; its intellectual range is too narrow/ its
approach too professional. (If we recall an
article or review, it’s almost impossible to
remember which Peter or which Derek wrote
it.) Standards of quality are not enough, and
Sight and Sound tends to dampen enthusiasm.
Movie, by contrast, seems spirited: one feels
that these writers do, at least, love movies,
that they’re not condescending. But they too,’
perhaps even more so, are indistinguishable
read-alikes, united by fanaticism in a ludicrous
cause; and for a group that discounts content
and story, that believes the director is the
auteur of what gives the film value, they show
an inexplicable fondness — almost an obsession
— for detailing plot and quoting dialogue. With
all the zeal of youth serving an ideal, they
carefully reduce movies to trivia.
It is not merely that the auteur theory dis-
torts experience (all theory does that, and helps
us to see more sharply for having done so) but
that it is an aesthetics which is fundamentally
anti-art. And this, I think, is the most serious
charge that can possibly be brought against an
aesthetics. The auteur theory, which probably
helped to liberate the energies of the French
critics, plays a very different role in England
and with the Film Culture and New York Film
Bulletin auteur critics in the United States —
an anti-intellectual, anti-art role.
The French auteur critics, rejecting the
socially conscious, problem pictures so dear to
the older generation of American critics, be-
came connoisseurs of values in American pic-
tures that Americans took for granted, and if
they were educated Americans, often held in
contempt. The French adored the American
gangsters, and the vitality, the strength, of
our action pictures — all those films in which
a couple of tough men slug it out for a girl,
after going through hell together in oil fields,
or building a railroad, or blazing a trail. In
one sense, the French were perfectly right —
these were often much more skilfully made and
far more interesting visually than the movies
with a message which Americans were so proud
of, considered so adult. Vulgar melodrama with
a fast pace can be much more exciting — and
more honest, too—than feeble, pretentious at-
tempts at drama —which usually meant just
putting “ideas” into melodrama, anyway.
Where the French went off was in finding
elaborate intellectual and psychological mean-
ings in these simple action films. (No doubt we
make some comparable mistakes in interpreting
French films.)
Like most swings of the critical pendulum,
the theory was a corrective, and it helped to
remind us of the energies and crude strength
and good humor that Europeans enjoyed in
: CIRCLES A N D SQUARES ——• 23:
our movies. The French saw something in our
movies that their own movies lacked; they ad-
mired it, and to some degree, they have taken
it over and used it in their own way (trium-
phantly in Breathless and Shoot the Piano
Player, not very successfully in their semi-
American thrillers). Our movies were a prod-
uct of American industry, and in a sense, it
was America itself that they loved in our
movies — our last frontiers, our robber-barons,
our naivete, our violence, our efficiency and
speed and technology, our bizarre combina-
tion of sentimentality and inhuman mechaniza-
tion.
But for us, the situation is different. It is
good for us to be reminded that our mass cul-
ture is not altogether poisonous in its effect
on other countries, but what is appealingly
exotic — “American” — for them is often in-
tolerable for us. The freeways of cities like
Los Angeles may seem mad and marvelous to
a foreign visitor; to us they are the nightmares
we spend our days in. The industrial products
of Hollywood that we grew up on are not
enough to satisfy our interests as adults. We
want a great deal more from our movies than
we get from the gangster carnage and the
John Ford westerns that Europeans adore. I
enjoy some movies by George Cukor and
Howard Hawks but I wouldn’t be much inter-
ested in the medium if that were all that movies
could be. We see many elements in foreign
films that our movies lack. We also see that
our films have lost the beauty and innocence
and individuality of the silent period, and the
sparkle and wit of the ‘thirties. There was no
special reason for the French critics, preoccu-
pied with their needs, to become sensitive to
ours. And it was not surprising that, in France,
where film directors work in circumstances
more comparable to those of a dramatist or a
composer, critics would become fixated on
American directors — not understanding how
confused and inextricable are the roles of the
front office, the producers, writers, editors, and
all the rest of them — even the marketing re-
search consultants who may pretest the draw-
ing powers of the story and stars — in Holly-
wood. For the French, the name of a director
was a guide on what American films to see:
if a director was associated with a certain type
of film that they liked; or if a director’s work
showed the speed and efficiency that they en-
joyed. I assume that anyone interested in
movies uses the director’s name as some sort
of guide, both positive and negative, even
though we recognize that at times he is little
more than a stage manager. For example, in
the ‘forties, my friends and I would keep an
eye out for the Robert Siodmak films and avoid
Irving Rapper films (except when they starred
Bette Davis whom we wanted to see even in
bad movies); I avoid Mervyn LeRoy films
(though I went to see Home Before Dark for
Jean Simmons’ performance); I wish I could
avoid Peter Glenville’s pictures but he uses
actors I want to see. It’s obvious that a director
like Don Siegel or Phil Karlson does a better
job with what he’s got to work with than Peter
Glenville, but that doesn’t mean there’s any
pressing need to go see every tawdry little
gangster picture Siegel or Karlson directs; and
perhaps if they tackled more difficult subjects
they wouldn’t do a better job than Glenville.
There is no rule or theory involved in any of
this, just simple discrimination; we judge the
man from his films and learn to predict a little
about his next films, we don’t judge the films
from the man.
But what has happened to the judgment of
the English and New York critics who have
taken over the auteur theory and used it to
erect a film aesthetics based on those commer-
cial movies that answered a need for the
French, but which are not merely ludicrously
inadequate to our needs, but are the results of
a system of production that places a hammer-
lock on American directors? And how can they,
with straight faces, probe for deep meanings in
these products? Even the kids they’re made for
know enough not to take them seriously. How
can these critics, sensible enough to deflate our
overblown message movies, reject the total
content of a work as unimportant and concen-
trate on signs of a director’s 4 personality” and
“interior meaning”? It’s understandable that
they’re trying to find movie art in the loopholes
of commercial production — it’s a harmless
hobby and we all play it now and then; what’s
incomprehensible is that they prefer their loop-
holes to unified film expression. If they weren’t
so determined to exalt products over works
that attempt to express human experience,
wouldn’t they have figured out that the mise-
en-scene which they seek out in these products,
the director’s personal style which comes
through despite the material, is only a mere
suggestion, a hint of what an artist can do when
he’s in control of the material, when the whole
film becomes expressive? Isn’t it obvious that
mise-en-scene and subject material — form and
content — can be judged separately only in bad
movies or trivial ones? It must be black comedy
for directors to read this new criticism and dis-
cover that films in which they felt trapped and
disgusted are now said to be their masterpieces.
It’s an aesthetics for 1984: failure is success.
I am too far from the English scene to guess
at motives, and far away also from New York,
but perhaps close enough to guess that the
Americans (consciously or unconsciously) are
making a kind of social comment: like the
pop artists, the New Realists with their comic
strips and Campbell’s Soup can paintings, they
are saying, “See what America is, this junk is
the fact of our lives. Art and avant-gardism are
phony; what isn’t any good, is good. Only
squares believe in art. The artifacts of industrial
civilization are the supreme truth, the supreme
joke.” This is a period when men who consider
themselves creative scoff at art and tradition.
It is perhaps no accident that in the same issue
of Film Culture with Sarris’ auteur theory there
is a lavishly illustrated spread on “The Perfect
Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez” — a
fairly close movie equivalent for that outsized
can of Campbell’s Soup. The editor, Jonas
Mekas, has his kind of social comment. This
is his approach to editing a film magazine:
“As long as the lucidly minded’ critics will
stay out, with all their ‘form,’ ‘content,’ ‘art,’
‘structure,’ ‘clarity,’ ‘importance’ — everything
will be all right, just keep them out. For the
new soul is still a bud, still going through its
most dangerous, most sensitive stage.” Doesn’t
exactly make one feel welcome, does it? I’m
sure I don’t know what the problem is: are
there so many “lucidly minded” critics in this
country (like Andrew Sarris?) that they must
be fought off? And aren’t these little “buds”
that have to be protected from critical judg-
ments the same little film-makers who are so
convinced of their importance that they can
scarely conceive of a five-minute film which
doesn’t end with what they, no doubt, regard
as the ultimate social comment: the mushroom
cloud rising. Those “buds” often behave more
like tough nuts.
Sarris with his love of commercial trash and
Mekas who writes of the “cul-de-sac of Western
culture” which is “stifling the spiritual life of
man” seem to have irreconcilable points of
view. Sarris with his joys in Raoul Walsh seems
a long way from Mekas, the spokesman for the
“independent filmakers” (who couldn’t worm
their way into Sarris’ outer circle). Mekas
makes statements like “The new artist, by
directing his ear inward, is beginning to catch
bits of man’s true vision.” (Dear Lon Chaney
Mekas, please get your ear out of your eye.
Mekas has at least one thjng in common with
good directors: he likes to dramatize.) But to
love trash and to feel that you are stifled by it
are perhaps very close positions. Does the man
who paints the can of Campbell’s Soup love it
or hate it? I think the answer is both: that he
is obsessed by it as a fact of our lives and a
symbol of America. When Mekas announces,
“I don’t want any part of the Big Art Game”
he comes even closer to Sarris. And doesn’t the
auteur theory fit nicely into the pages of an
“independent filmakers” journal when you
consider that the work of those film-makers
might compare very unfavorably with good
films, but can look fairly interesting when com-
pared with commercial products. It can even
look original to those who don’t know much
film history. The “independent filmakers,”
Lord knows, are already convinced about their
importance as the creative figures—the auteurs;
a theory which suggested the importance of
writing to film art might seriously damage their
: CIRCLES A N D S Q U A R E S ——• 25:
egos. They go even farther than the auteur
critics’ notion that the script is merely some-
thing to transcend: they often act as if anyone
who’s concerned with scripts is a square who
doesn’t dig film. (It’s obvious, of course, that
this aesthetic based on images and a Contempt
for words is a function of economics and
technology, and that as soon as a cheap, light-
weight 16mm camera with good synchronous
sound gets on the market, the independent
film-makers will develop a different aesthetic.)
The auteur theory, silly as it is, can neverthe-
less be a dangerous theory — not only because
it constricts the experience of the critics who
employ it, but because it offers nothing but
commercial goals to the young artists who may
be trying to do something in film. Movie with
its celebration of Samuel Fuller’s “brutality”
and the Mackie Mekas who “knows that every-
thing he has learned from his society about life
and death is false” give readers more of a
charge than they get from the limp pages of
Sight and Sound and this journal. This is not
intended to be a snide remark about Sight and
Sound and Film Quarterly: if they are not more
sensational, it is because they are attempting to
be responsible, to hoard the treasures of our
usable past. But they will be wiped off the
cinema landscape, if they can’t meet the blasts
of anti-art with some fire of their own.
The union of Mekas and Sarris may be
merely a marriage of convenience; but if it is
strong enough to withstand Sarris’ “Hello and
Goodbye to the New American Cinema” (in
The Village Voice, September 20, 1 9 6 2 ) , per-
haps the explanation lies in the many shared
attitudes of the Mekas group and the auteur
critics. Neither group, for example, is interested
in a balanced view of a film; Mekas says he
doesn’t believe in “negative criticism” and
the auteur critics (just like our grammar school
teachers) conceive of a review as “an apprecia-
tion.” The directors they reject are so far
beyond the pale that their films are not even
considered worth discussion. (Sarris who dis-
tributes zero ratings impartially to films as
varied as Yojimbo, The Manchurian Candidate,
and Billy Budd could hardly be expected to
take time off from his devotional exercises with
Raoul Walsh to explain why these films are
worthless.) Sarris, too, can resort to the lan-
guage of the hipster — “What is it the old jazz
man says of his art? If you gotta ask what it is,
it ain’t? Well, the cinema is like that.” This is
right at home in Film Culture, although Sarris
(to his everlasting credit) doesn’t employ the
accusatory, paranoid style of Mekas: “You
criticize our work from a purist, formalistic
and classicist point of view. But we say to you:
What’s the use of cinema if man’s soul goes
rotten?” The “you” is, I suppose, the same you
who figures in so much (bad) contemporary
prophetic, righteous poetry and prose, the
“you” who is responsible for the Bomb and
who, by some fantastically self-indulgent
thought processes, is turned into the enemy,
the critic. Mekas, the childlike, innocent, pure
Mekas, is not about to be caught by “the
tightening web of lies”; he refuses “to continue
the Big Lie of Culture.” I’m sure that, in this
scheme, any attempt at clear thinking imme-
diately places us in the enemy camp, turns us
B e w a r e of t h e Bull-Dozers . . .
“Granted that one must be ‘committed’ to
Welles to even like Arkadin, but once one
has made the commitment, there is no choice
but to call it a masterpiece.”
—New York Film Bulletin, #45
into the bomb-guilty “y°u>” a n d I am forced
to conclude that Mekas is not altogether wrong
—that if we believe in the necessity (not to
mention the beauty) of clear thinking, we are
indeed his enemy. I don’t know how it’s pos-
sible for anyone to criticize his work from a
“purist, formalistic and classicist point of view”
—the method would be too far from the object;
but can’t we ask Mekas: is man’s soul going
to be in better shape because your work is pro-
tected from criticism? How much nonsense
dare these men permit themselves? When Sar-
ris tells us, “If the auteur critics of the Fifties
had not scored so many coups of clairvoyance,
26 CIRCLES A N D SQUARES =
the auteur theory would not be worth dis-
cussing in the Sixties,” does he mean any more
than that he has taken over the fiats of the
auteur critics in the ‘fifties and goes on apply-
ing them in the ‘sixties? Does he seriously
regard his own Minnelli-worship as some sort
of objective verification of the critics who
praised Minnelli in the ‘fifties? If that’s his
concept of critical method, he might just as
well join forces with other writers in Film
Culture. In addition to Mekas (“Poets are sur-
rounding America, flanking it from all sides,”)
there is, for example, Ron Rice: “And the
beautiful part about it all is that you can, my
dear critics, scream protest to the skies, you’re
too late. The Musicians, Painters, Writers,
Poets and Film-Makers all fly in the same sky,
and know Exactly where It’s ‘AT’.” Rice knows
where he’s at about as much as Stan Brakhage
who says, “So the money vendors have begun
it again. To the catacombs then . . . ” In the
pages of Film Culture they escape from the
money changers in Jerusalem by going to the
catacombs in Rome. “Forget ideology,” Brak-
hage tells us, “for film unborn as it is has no
language and speaks like an aborigine.” We’re
all familiar with Brakhage’s passion for ob-
stetrics, but does being a primitive man mean
being a foetus? I don’t understand that unborn
aborigine talk, but I’m prepared to believe that
grunt by grunt, or squeal by squeal, it will be
as meaningful as most of Film Culture. I am
also prepared to believe that for Jonas Mekas,
culture is a “Big Lie.” And Sarris, looking for
another culture under those seats coated with
chewing gum, coming up now and then to an-
nounce a “discovery” like Joanne Dru, has he
found his spiritual home down there?
Isn’t the anti-art attitude of the auteur critics
both in England and here, implicit also in their
peculiar emphasis on virility? (Walsh is, for
Sarris, “one of the screen’s most virile directors.”
In Movie we discover: “When one talks about
the heroes of Red River, or Rio Bravo, or
Hatari! one is talking about Hawks himself.
. . . Finally everything that can be said in pre-
senting Hawks boils down to one simple state-
ment: here is a man.”) I don’t think critics
would use terms like “virile” or “masculine” to
describe artists like Dreyer or Renoir; there is
something too limited about describing them
this way (just as when we describe a woman as
sensitive and feminine, we are indicating her
special nature). We might describe Kipling as
a virile writer but who would think of calling
Shakespeare a virile writer? But for the auteur
critics calling a director virile is the highest
praise because, I suggest, it is some kind of
assurance that he is not trying to express him-
self in an art form, but treats movie-making as
a professional job. (Movie: Hawks “makes the
very best adventure films because he is at one
with his heroes. . . . Only Raoul Walsh is as
deeply an adventurer as Hawks. . . . Hawks’
heroes are all professionals doing jobs —
scientists, sheriffs, cattlemen, big game hunters:
real professionals who know their capabilities.
. . . They know exactly what they can do with
the available resources, expecting of others
only what they know can be given.”) The
auteur critics are so enthralled with their
narcissistic male fantasies (Movie: “Because
Hawks’ films and their heroes are so genuinely
mature, they don’t need to announce the fact
for all to hear”) that they seem unable to
relinquish their schoolboy notions of human
experience. (If there are any female practi-
tioners of auteur criticism, I have not yet dis-
covered them.) Can we conclude that, in Eng-
land and the United States, the auteur theory
is an attempt by adult males to justify staying
inside the small range of experience of their
boyhood and adolescence — that period when
masculinity looked so great and important but
art was something talked about by poseurs and
phonies and sensitive-feminine types? And is
it perhaps also their way of making a comment
on our civilization by the suggestion that trash
is the true film art? I ask; I do not know.
Pierre Bourdieu
Introduction to Distinction
Pierre Bourdieu
Taste or how cultural goods such as art are consumed is a “product of upbringing and education.” (1)
Not only taste, but according to research (surveys) “all cultural practices (museum visits, concert-going, reading, etc) and preferences in literature, painting or music, are closely linked to educational level (measured by qualifications or length of schooling and secondarily to social origin.” (1)
Pierre Bourdieu
There is a social hierarchy of arts as well as a social hierarchy of those who consume them.
Taste serve are markers of class. Consider the importance of manners.
Pierre Bourdieu
“Even in the classroom, the dominant definition of the legitimate way of appropriating culture and works of art favours those who have had early access to legitimate culture…” (2)
Thus when students who do not know these codes attempt to learn music or other topics, they can feel lost.
Pierre Bourdieu
Bourdieu notes how the concept of “love at first sight” regarding art is manufactured. “The ‘eye’ is a product of history reproduced by education.” (3)
He unpacks how culture is an internalized code that “functions as cultural capital.” Cultural capital is unevenly distributed and “secures profits of distinction.” (3)
Pierre Bourdieu
Similar to the “eye,” the “pure” gaze is an historical invention. (4) Pure gaze desires to break from what is ordinary and this is social separation. It is a means that people use to establish hierarchies of taste and position.
“Art and cultural consumption” validate social differences. (7)
Michele Wallace
“Spike Lee and Black Women”
Michele Wallace
Michele Wallace builds upon Toni Cade Bambara’s critique of Lee’s sexism. She demonstrates how Greg Tate’s celebration of She Gotta Have It (1986) does not acknowledge any of its gender problems and sexism. She notes that within Tate’s framework, “women emerged only as also-rans in this numerous lists of who’s getting it right.” (24)
She views Melvin Van Pebbles as a problem because of his film, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971).
Michele Wallace
Wallace’s examines She’s and feels that “Nola seems less a character than a dark continent to be explored and conquered. Although she addresses the camera directly, her language seems inane and self-canceling.” (26)
Nonetheless, she still was eager to see what Lee would do next.
Michele Wallace
Wallace argues that the women in the film “take no apparent interest in either politics or culture except as passive consumers.” This is similar to Bambara’s view of the females in the film.
Wallace posits that the options for Black women in the dance sequence, Scarlett O’Hara or Mammy are actually “neither/nor.” (27)
Michele Wallace
Wallace observes when she saw the film, she felt the audience read the female characters based on colorism; the Gamma Rays were celebrated while the Jigaboos were ridiculed.
She mentions the rape as a “dastardly deed” and how Jane is tricked; this is in contrast to Bambara.
Wallace has a provocative question about Lee’s characters from She’s to Daze, “are we interpret his progress from playing ‘the man who makes her laugh to playing the rapist by popular demand?” (29)
Reconstituting the Image
Author(s):
Valerie Smith
Source: Callaloo, No. 37 (Autumn, 1988), pp. 709-719
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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RECONSTITUTING
THE IMAGE
Valerie Smith
Editor’s Note: In January, 1987, Valerie Smith was curator for an exhibition at the Whitney Museum
of American Art entitled “The Black Woman Independent: Representing Race and Gender,” a pro-
gram of films and videotapes by black women directors. Most of the films discussed in this essay
were included in that show.
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Four Women by Julie Dash. Courtesy of Black Filmmaker
Foundation.
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RECONSTITUTING THE IMAGE
The Emergent Black Woman Director
By Valerie Smith
Although the origins of black American independent cinema can be traced back to
the second decade of this century, black women entered the ranks of independent
directors and producers much more recently. Madeline Anderson’s 1970 documen-
tary, I am Somebody, about a strike of hospital workers in Charleston, South Carolina,
is arguably the earliest, easily accessible film by a black woman. Only during the late
1970s and early ’80s did black women emerge as filmmakers in anything like significant
numbers. And as Amy Taubin suggests, that first wave may already be over: cutbacks
in support for the arts during the Reagan years may well have been responsible for
the dearth of films and videotapes by black women since 1982.1
Black women independents share with the broader community of radical filmmak-
ers a problematic relation to mainstream, realist cinematic practice. Realist filmmakers
and video artists manipulate the use of the camera and their techniques of editing,
lighting, and synchronization in ways that create the illusion that cinema is like life,
may indeed be the same as life. In contrast, avant garde and many third world and
feminist film and video artists resist the convention of cinematic realism precisely be-
cause these practices conceal the artificiality of the filmmaking process, implying that
narrative relations, and thus social relations, are inevitable, that circumstances are as
they should be. As Ann Kaplan has written, the very techniques that create the illusion
of visual continuity “smooth over possible contradictions, incoherences, and erup-
tions that might reflect a reality far less ordered, coherent, or continuous than Holly-
wood wants to admit or to know.”2 Because the industry has been dominated by mem-
bers of a white male power structure, it is therefore not surprising that the conventions
of the realist films they developed and recapitulated would valorize their class and
political interests. Thus many experimental and feminist film and video artists argue
that to tell new stories from new perspectives one must resist the conventions of realist
cinema.
The ideological content of these conservative cinematic techniques notwithstand-
ing, most black women independents tend to explore the formal possibilities of realism
instead of experimenting with more daring modes. They may choose to work within
the realist form because it is more accessible to a broad audience; or they may work
in this mode because of the financial constraints under which they labor. It is important
to emphasize, however, that the prevailing notion that only technical experimentation
counts as “experimental” constructs a false dichotomy between form and content. A
realist work which centers on a non-traditional perspective might rightfully be called
experimental in its own way.
Largely because of budgetary constraints, black women directors, like most inde-
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CALLALOO
pendents, have been drawn primarily to the documentary mode of filmmaking. Non-
fiction forms may also have attracted these directors because they provide an oppor-
tunity for inscribing the untold accounts of black public and private figures in the
historical record. On the one hand, works such as Ayoka Chenzira’s Syvilla: They Dance
to Her Drum (1979); Michelle Parkerson’s … But Then, She’s Betty Carter (1980) and
Gotta Make This Journey: Sweet Honey in the Rock (1983); and Carroll Parrott Blue’s Var-
nette’s World: A Study of a Young Artist (1979) and Conversations with Roy De Carava (1983),
for example, both examine and preserve the lives and work of the visual and per-
forming artists who constitute their respective subjects, installing them more securely
in a space generally denied them in public media. A Mother is a Mother (1982) by Lyn
Blum and Cynthia Ealey, Fannie’s Film (1981) by Fronza Woods, and Suzanne, Suzanne
(1982) by James Hatch and Camille Billops, on the other hand, provide the opportunity
for “ordinary” women-unwed mothers, a domestic worker, and an abused mother
and daughter, respectively-to tell their own stories. In the feminist tradition, this
latter group of directors presents the accounts of the kinds of women whose stories
mainstream media have trivialized or ignored.
At least two of this latter group of documentarians employ the stories of their sub-
jects to problematize the thematic assumptions and stylistic conventions of realist film-
making. Fannie’s Film comments subtly upon both the exploitation and the creativity
of the black domestic worker, granting her both narrative and visual authority. A short
documentary about Mrs. Fannie Drayton, a black woman who cleans a Manhattan
dance and exercise studio, Fannie’s Film takes the form of an interview, located in the
voiceover, between the filmmaker and the subject. Shots of Mrs. Drayton working
alternate with shots of the dancers working out. This visual play on words comments
implicitly and insistently on the nature of the labor upon which the dancers’ work
rests.
The placement of Mrs. Drayton’s remarks in a voiceover grants her a measure of
transcendent power within the film; her words frame the images we see before us.
Moreover, Woods’s questions allow Mrs. Drayton the opportunity to record her own
history, her life outside the dance studio, and her complex relation to her work. In
contrast to the persistent stereotype of the black maid whose existence is deeply bound
up with the concerns of the lives of the people for whom she works, Mrs. Drayton
does not sentimentalize her relation to the people who use the studio. She feels no
need to collapse her private and her work lives.
The visuals of the film similarly revise the prevailing conception of domestic work.
The cinematographer frames her shots and chooses her angles to capture the grace of
the dancers’ forms; likewise, her shots of Mrs. Drayton’s movements and the space
she cleans portray her artistry. A lingering shot of Mrs. Drayton’s heels rising up out
of her slipper, for instance, suggests a comparison between her flexibility and the
dancers’. The film begins and ends with a slow motion shot of Mrs. Drayton cleaning
a window or a two-way mirror. Her great sweeping gestures here too possess a quality
of gracefulness that testifies to the work she does.
As Fannie’s Film revises the narrative of the black woman’s relation to domestic
work, Suzanne, Suzanne dismantles the touchstones of the traditional nuclear family
to examine the nature of the repression of the mother’s and daughter’s voices in pa-
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CALLALOO
triarchy. Suzanne, Suzanne tells the story of the abuse that Billops’s sister Billie and
Billie’s daughter Suzanne suffered at the hands of George “Brownie” Browning, their
late respective husband and father. Early in the film, we see photographs from the
family album and footage from Bell and Howell home movies. Pictures of Brownie
smiling, embracing his children; footage of the family off to church in their Sunday
best; a photograph of the dead Brownie lying in repose in his open casket-all establish
the family in familiar middle-class respectability. These pieces of documentary evi-
dence thus memorialize a picture-perfect family, one whose history might be recon-
structed out of the photographic record of public events: holiday celebrations, deaths,
possibly births, weddings, and so on.
The story that Suzanne, Suzanne tells, however, is largely a critique of the potentially
destructive nature of the middle-class nuclear family; the narrative of the film thus
works to dismantle the image of the ideal family created by these documents. Indeed,
the inclusion of these photographs and footage in the film calls into question the very
status of such materials as evidence. However much one might desire to read pho-
tographic images as denotative – signs of what really existed – they too are fictive con-
structs; like the techniques of cinematic or literary realism, they represent a body of
conventions that enshrine particular ideological positions. The shot of the Browning
family going off to church, then, represents more the popular image of the ostensibly
religious nuclear middle-class family -the family that stays together because it prays
together-than it does the felt experience of their domestic situation.
Inasmuch as the film exposes the family story concealed beneath the veneer of pho-
tographs and home movies, it more generally seeks out alternative meanings and
accounts. Billops and Hatch had intended to make a film about Suzanne’s battle
against drug addiction. But during the course of their interviews, the story of her and
her mother’s experiences of abuse emerged. The film that was to situate Suzanne as
a recovered addict thus became additionally, if not instead, an exploration of the suf-
fering to which women are vulnerable in the nuclear family.
The pivotal scenes, in which Suzanne poses a series of questions to which Billie
responds, occur in a darkened sound stage where only the two women are visible,
shot from mid-chest up, both facing the camera. This sound stage provides an alter-
native to the domestic spaces in which the rest of the film takes place -spaces that
enshrine the past history of family relations. In this alternative location, the relation-
ship between mother and daughter is altered dramatically.
In an interview, Billops has said that Hatch provided Suzanne with a list of questions
to ask her mother in these scenes. These may well be the questions with which Suz-
anne begins: “Do you love me?” “Do you remember Death Row?” “Why didn’t you
stop Daddy from beating me?”3 By providing Suzanne with these questions, Hatch
and Billops allow her to assume the role of interviewer. But at some point, Billops
says, Suzanne began to ask her own questions, assuming the role of both interviewer
and director. Presumably, Suzanne’s questions are those that become increasingly
probing: “Did Daddy beat you from the beginning?” “Was it the same as being on
Death Row?” “Would you like to know what it was like for me?” and so on. Up until
this point in the film, the family members have been remarkably compliant, answering
the questions that are asked of them. But here Billie insists on telling her own story.
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_________ _ CALLALOO –
When Suzanne asks, for instance, if she’d like to know what it was like to wait on
Death Row, Billie doesn’t really respond to her, but rather explains both to herself and
to her daughter why she would retreat into the shower whenever her husband came
home.
The staging of these scenes, and the sheer emotional power of Suzanne’s questions
and Billie’s responses, bestows upon them a quality of authenticity, as if the com-
munication that occurs in these sequences is somehow more real than that which takes
place in the rest of the film. The very fact that the film exists within a frame that calls
“the real” into question, however, renders problematic such a determination. How-
ever, these scenes in the sound stage minimally suggest that in a society in which
domestic relations are captured (if not fabricated) in the movies which we make about
ourselves and our loved ones, the presence of the camera and the move to a strikingly
artificial location may well be required to catalyze the process by which familial rela-
tionships can be reconstituted.
Although documentaries predominate in the body of films and videotapes by black
women, several of the directors have explored the possibilities of fiction and experi-
mental forms to embody their narratives. Your Children Come Back to You (1979) by Alile
Sharon Larkin literalizes the meaning of a “mother country” by means of the story of
a young girl, Tovi, who is torn between two surrogate mothers: one comfortably bour-
geois, the other nationalist. Naturalistically, the film considers the psychological and
emotional bond between mothers and daughters; symbolically, it probes the black
American’s cultural situation. This thematic juxtaposition is mirrored in the cross-
cutting from Tovi’s story to a dream sequence and to the child’s version of an alle-
gorical tale -African resonances that interrupt and counterpoint the surface
narrative.
Like Your Children, A Minor Altercation (1977) by Jacqueline Shearer is a fiction film
that explores complex economic and political issues within the context of a domestic
situation. The plot of this film is set in motion by a fight between two working class
teenage girls, one black and one white, in a newly integrated public high school in
Massachusetts. The film cuts back and forth from one girl’s family to the other to reveal
the emotional and financial implications of the girls’ consequent suspensions from
school. The similarities and differences between the juxtaposed scenes comment upon
the meaning of education in black and ethnic white working-class households and
suggest continuities in the mother-daughter bond that transcends racial difference.
As she does in Your Children, her first film, Larkin, in A Different Image (1982), ex-
amines the destructive impact of Western cultural practices and values on the Afro-
American. In both films, her characters seek renewal and inspiration by immersing
themselves in African art, history, and myth. Stylistically, Larkin represents the Af-
rican cultural alternative in sequences that take place at a different discursive level
than that of the main story. Her use of this technique might be read as part of her
critique of Western culture and patterns of representation. A Different Image tells the
story of a young woman, Alana, who refuses to be categorized as the object of male
erotic desire and who models her behavior and dress on images of women culled from
African ritual and art. As Alana and Vincent, her male friend, attempt to create a
mutually acceptable relationship, the film presents alternative representations of
women in collages of crosscut still photographs.
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_________ _ CALLALOO
Like A Different Image, Chenzira’s Hair Piece: A Film for Nappyheaded People (1982) also
takes as its subject alternative ways in which black women might view themselves
and be viewed in contemporary culture, although Hair Piece considers the issue at a
yet subtler level of experimentation. An animated satire of black hair-care devices and
products, Hair Piece interweaves paintings, collage, line drawings, still photographs,
song, and a medley of narrative voices that parody the resonances of black speech.
Apart from Chenzira’s animated piece, the fiction films which confront the tech-
niques of realism most directly take as their subject the issues that complicate the lives
of black women in the workplace. Grey Area (1982) by Monona Wali and Illusions (1982)
by Julie Dash are self-reflexive films that center on individual black women involved
in film production. Grey Area is about Yvonne, a black woman producer of television
documentaries, who is at work on a bank-financed project entitled Kids and Cons. Pat-
terned loosely on Scared Straight, Kids and Cons is designed to deter juvenile delin-
quency by arranging and then filming confrontations between adolescents and prison-
ers. Grey Area explores the way that filmic narrative – specifically the narrative of Kids
and Cons -is vulnerable to the demands of funding sources. At one point, for instance,
the bank manager insists that a speech delivered by Cecil (one of the prisoners) be
edited: “Leave in the swear words, take out the politics.”
An early version of Kids and Cons included within Grey Area contains a sequence in
which Yvonne as narrator indicts the bank for its complicity in the destruction of the
black community. To change the direction of the plot of the film, the bank quickly
finances a renovation that converts the former local Black Panther Party headquarters
into a Martin Luther King Youth Center. When Yvonne asks whether this renovation
is a great humanitarian act or a bank promotion, she refers at once to her own film
and to the creation of the King Center. The shaping of her film by economic circum-
stances thus problematizes the notion of narrative inevitability.
Grey Area ends in the editing room with the playing and replaying of discarded
footage from the ending of Kids and Cons. Yvonne’s inability to conclude the film with
a platitudinous plea to her viewers’ sense of individual responsibility reveals both her
and Wali’s own anxiety about the easy sense of closure that characterizes realist film
narrative.
Set in 1942 Hollywood, Illusions is about Mignon Dupree, a black woman studio
executive who passes for white. Her deception is one among many that characterizes
the world in which the film takes place. Mignon speculates repeatedly, for instance,
about the nature of historical reality. By means of an early voiceover, she considers
the way in which collective notions of the past are shaped by cinematic images. She
is thus driven to make her own films by her desire to determine what perceptions are
installed in the public imagination. At a literal level, the film thus explores the artifi-
ciality of history, the interconnectedness between the real and the fictive.
The plot of Illusions problematizes realist techniques even more concretely by ex-
amining the implications of synchronization. In realist film, image and voice track are
synchronous, creating the illusion that we are watching a real person speak, not a
visual image coordinated with a voice track. But in a scene in one of the musicals on
which Mignon has worked, the sound and visual tracks are out of sync; she must
therefore find a way to create the impression of synchronicity. She hires Esther Jeeter,
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CALLALOO
a young black singer, to match her voice to the image of the white star lip synching.
Esther remarks at one point that she prefers to perform in the customary manner; she
would prefer to sing as she chooses and require the star to conform her movements
to her voice. As Esther explains it, when voice track precedes image track, she is free
to be expressive, to sing with her eyes closed. But even if under ordinary circum-
stances the singer is allowed metaphoric mastery over the actor, the fact remains that
Esther is only performing vocals for a role she is too dark to play. Thus, by setting up
a situation in which voice track is subordinated to image, Illusions establishes the more
apt metaphoric relation between the white performer whose image we see and the
black singer whose voice we hear.
By revealing one way in which cinematic illusion is manufactured, Dash exposes
the kind of exploitation that underlies mainstream cinematic practice. This detailed
exploration of one aspect of filmmaking technique likewise reveals the artificiality of
her own film, a point underscored all the more dramatically when we read in the final
credits that the vocals are performed not by Roseanne Katon, who appears as Esther
jeeter, but by Ella Fitzgerald.
Because the body of work by black women filmmakers and video artists is still rel-
atively small, I am reluctant to generalize about its character or to attempt to articulate
here the contours of a black feminist cinematic aesthetic. I would particularly resist
an essentialist argument that seeks to identify a cinematic language or perspective
unique to black women directors. To make such an argument would be to deny the
ideological content of cinematic technique and to suggest that by virtue of gender or
race alone, a filmmaker might entirely circumvent or transform that content. The par-
ticular circumstances of these directors do, however, equip them to record the stories
of people like themselves with a specificity that has, for the most part, eluded non-
black and male filmmakers. These artists have given voice to a variety of stories that
remain untold by others in public media. They undertake to tell the previously sup-
pressed accounts of black mothers; they render the complex position of black women
in the workplace; and they offer unique perspectives on the relation of the woman of
color to Western patterns of socialization.
Notes
1. Amy Taubin, “Exile and Cunning,” The Village Voice 13 January 1987, p. 68.
2. E. Ann Kaplan, Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera, New York: Methuen, 1983, p. 132.
3. The phrase “Death Row” is the family expression for the times when Suzanne would retreat to
her bedroom to await her beatings.
Selected Bibliography
Bogle, Donald. Brown Sugar: Eighty Years of America’s Black Female Superstars. New York: Harmony
Books, 1980.
Brunsdon, Charlotte. Films for Women. London: British Film Institute, 1986.
Cripps, Thomas. Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900-1942. New York: Oxford UP,
1977.
Harris, Kwasi. “New Images: An Interview With Julie Dash and Alile Sharon Larkin.” The Independent
9 (December 1986): 16-20.
716
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CALLALOO
Hooks, Bell. “Black Women Filmmakers Break the Silence.” Black Film Review 2 (Summer 1986): 14-
15.
Kaplan, E. Ann. Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera. New York: Methuen, 1983.
Kuhn, Annette. Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema. London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1982.
Taubin, Amy. “Exile and Cunning.” The Village Voice 13 January 1987, 68.
Wali, Monona. “L.A. Black Filmmakers Thrive Despite Hollywood’s Monopoly.” Black Film Review 2
(Summer 1986): 10, 27.
Filmography
Madeline Anderson. I Am Somebody. 1970, 16mm, color, 28 min. (Icarus Films)
Carroll Parrott Blue. Varnette’s World: A Study of a Young Artist. 1979, 16mm, color, 26 min. (Carroll
Parrott Blue)
. Conversations With Roy De Carava. 1983, 16mm, color, 28 min. (First Run Features)
Lyn Blum and Cynthia Ealey. A Mother is a Mother. 1982, videotape, color, 27 min. (Cynthia Ealey)
Ayoka Chenzira. Syvilla: They Dance to Her Drum. 1981, 16mm, color, 25 min. (Visions in Film)
. Hair Piece: A Film for Nappyheaded People, 1982, animated, 10 min. (Visions in Film)
Julie Dash. Illusions. 1982, 16mm, black and white, 34 min. (Black Filmmaker Foundation)
James Hatch and Camille Billops. Suzanne, Suzanne. 1982, 16mm, black and white, 26 min. (Third
World Newsreel)
Alile Sharon Larkin. Your Children Come Back to You. 1979, 16mm, black and white, 27 min. (Black
Filmmaker Foundation)
. A Different Image. 1982, 16mm, color, 51 min. (Black Filmmaker Foundation)
Jacqueline Shearer. A Minor Altercation. 1977, 16mm, color, 30 min. (Black Filmmaker Foundation)
Monona Wali. Grey Area. 1982, 16mm, black and white, 40 min. (Black Filmmaker Foundation)
Fronza Woods. Fannie’s Film. 1981, 16mm, black and white, 15 min. (Black Filmmaker Foundation)
Directory of Distributors
Black Filmmaker Foundation
80 Eighth Avenue
Suite 1704
New York, NY 10011
(212) 924-1198
Carroll Parrott Blue
5324 Santa Maria Terrace
San Diego, CA 92114
Cynthia Ealey
Child Care Resource Center
3602 Fourth Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55409
(612) 823-5261
First Run Features
153 Waverly Place
New York, NY 10014
(212) 243-0600
Icarus Films
200 Park Avenue South
Suite 1319
New York, NY 10003
(212) 674-3375
Third World Newsreel
335 West 38th Street
Fifth Street
New York, NY 10018
Visions in Film
P.O. Box 315
Franklin Lakes, NJ 07417
(201) 891-8340
717
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Illusions by Julie Dash. Courtesy of Black Filmmaker Foundation.
I ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ . . …….A.
Your Children Come Back to You by Alile Sharon Larkin. Courtesy of Black
Filmmaker Foundation.
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A Minor Altercation by Jacqueline Shearer. Courtesy of Black Filmmaker
Foundation.
719
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- Contents
- Issue Table of Contents
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Callaloo, No. 37, Autumn, 1988
Front Matter [pp.687-687]
From Seduction By Light [pp.659-685]
Gwendolyn Knight: A Portfolio and Conversation
[Photograph]: Gwendolyn Knight [p.688]
A Conversation With Gwendolyn Knight [pp.689-696]
The Night Watchman (Metamorphosis of an African Objet d’Art) [pp.697-707]
Reconstituting the Image [pp.709-719]
Studies in Afro-American Literature: An Annual Annotated Bibliography, 1987 [pp.720-771]
Studies in Caribbean and South American Literature: An Annual Annotated Bibliography, 1987 [pp.772-845]
Studies of African Literatures and Oratures: An Annual Annotated Bibliography, 1987 [pp.846-903]
Subject Index for Callaloo 1-11 [pp.906-911]
Author/Title Index for Callaloo 1-11 [pp.911-933]
Back Matter [pp.904-905]
Angela Martin
“Refocusing Authorship in Women’s Filmmaking”
Angela Martin
Angela Martin observes that in discussions about women and authorship there are two types of omissions:
Films are often lost
This is something I found as I put together this course. UCLA has substantial resources and the media libraries are extensive yet there were some of Dash’s and DuVernay’s films/media that were not available.
Due to the loss of these films, they are not included in discussion concerning auteur theory.
Angela Martin
Martin argues that the lack of circulation of female directed films contributes to these films being ignored in film theory generally and auteur theory specifically.
She mentions other female directors
Agnès Varda – her work was influential to the French New Wave, her films examined feminist issues, produced social commentary, had experimental style, and documentary realism. She has been called the “grandmother of the French New Wave” and “pioneering member of the Left Bank.” https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/where-begin-agnes-varda
The Left Bank, or Rive Gauche, group is a contingent of filmmakers associated with the French New Wave, first identified as such by Richard
Roud.[7] The corresponding “right bank” group is constituted of the more famous and financially successful New Wave directors associated with Cahiers du
cinéma (Claude
Chabrol, François Truffaut, and Jean-Luc Godard).[7] Unlike the Cahiers group, these directors were older and less movie-crazed. They tended to see cinema akin to other arts, such as literature. However they were similar to the New Wave directors in that they practiced cinematic modernism. Their emergence also came in the 1950s and they also benefited from the youthful audience.[24] The two groups, however, were not in opposition; Cahiers du cinéma advocated for Left Bank cinema
3
Angela Martin
Other female directors
Diane Kurys – her films assisted in making female filmmakers more mainstream. Due to her commercial success, many dismiss her from being an auteur.
Dorothy Arzner – had a career that spanned from the silent era to the 1940s. From 1927 to 1943, she was the only female director working in Hollywood. As a director, she assisted in launching the careers of Lucille Ball, Rosalind Russell, and Katharine Hepburn.
Angela Martin
Martin summarizes the French New Wave as being a “generational revolt on the part of the young Cahiers du Cinéma critics, who were demanding a break with the persistently traditional mainstream French cinema, which they saw as heavy, entrenched, and tied to the wordiness of the theatre-inspired scripts.” The critics seemed to be unaware of the “gender-bound nature of their enthusiasm.” (128)
Angela Martin
She posits that Andrew Sarris continues the male-centeredness of auteur theory. And female directors face challenges because they do not have the opportunities to create bodies of work that get recognized as auteurs.
Angela Martin
Martin describes some of the challenges with theory. For example, Roland Barthes’, “The Death of the Author” cannot be reconciled with the idea of the auteur. And though feminist do find female directors within auteur theory, Martin wonders how effective their work is. She cites Audre Lorde’s “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.”
Angela Martin
Martin draws parallels between auteur theory and Germaine Greer’s comment that “the way poetry is lauded is actually as male display, and therefore, there is no point in arguing that any woman poet could be better than Shakespeare.” (130)
Angela Martin
Film studies scholars acknowledge there is a problem with bias against women in auteur theory yet they continue to ignore female directors. Martin cites that in the Oxford Guide to Film Studies, scholar Stephen Crofts says the “author is gendered” but then it’s the shortest part of his essay. Moreover female directors are only noted “in chapters dealing with ‘otherness’ – feminism and film; gay, lesbian, and queer cinema; the avant-garde; and non-American cinemas.” (130)
Angela Martin
Martin demonstrate how female directors are overlooked. Lois Weber was an actress, screenwriter, producer, and director. She is considered one of the most prolific and significant director of the silent era. Film historian Anthony Slide says that Weber was the first America’s first genuine auteur, “a filmmaker involved in all aspects of production and one who utilized the motion picture to put across her own ideas and philosophies”
Anthony Slide, The Silent Feminists, pp. 29, 151
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Angela Martin
Alice Guy Blaché was the first French woman to direct a film and a narrative fiction film. From 1896 to 1906, it is believed she was the only female filmmaker in the world. She directed A Fool and His Money which was the first film with an all African American cast.
Angela Martin
Martin observes one of the challenges when examining female directors is the framework associated with “what can be identifiably linked to the filmmaker (as woman):
A film’s autobiographical reference
A filmmakers actual presence in the film
The evidence of a female voice within the narrative (however located).” (130-131)
Angela Martin
In spite of the description on the previous slide, Martin states that none of those factors “guarantees authorship.” (131)
This is similar to Valerie Smith’s argument that female directors do not have to choose between cinematic realism and avant-garde styles to be transgressive.
Angela Martin
Martin closes the essay with a discussion on Kathryn Bigelow. Bigelow cannot fit into the typical female director framework yet she clearly is a director with strong vision.
She suggests using Agnès Varda’s cinécriture or “filmic writing” as a way to examine films. Filmic writing is broad and “organized around the director.” It includes the writing, filming, casting choices, locations, editing, camera movement, points of view, and “the rhythm of filming and editing.” (132)
François Truffaut
A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema
François Truffaut
In this essay, Truffaut delineates his problems with French cinema of the late 1950s. For him, there are ten to twelve films created yearly that are considered the “Tradition of Quality.”
Critics and cinephiles constantly laud these films. The films are supposed to be the embodiment of “psychological realism.” Truffaut strongly disagrees with this sentiment.
François Truffaut
Screenwriters Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost become prolific in French cinema and work with important directors. Their specialty is adaptation.
According to critics, Aurenche and Bost are faithful to the spirit the works they adapt. They are known to cite, “Invention without betrayal,” as a motto they follow.
François Truffaut
Though Aurenche and Bost claim that are specific scenes from novels that are ‘unfilmable,’ Truffaut disagrees. He uses The Diary of a Country Priest as an example to demonstrate that Aurenche and Bost were not faithful to the spirit or the letter of this novel. (11-13).
Another criticism Truffaut has of the screen writing duo is that they are literary men and not men of the cinema [“a man of the cinema”] 13
Truffaut’s mentor, Andre Bazin writes an entire essay praising Robert Bresson for the latter’s adaptation of “The Diary of a Country Priest.”
4
François Truffaut
Truffaut goes on to say that Aurenche and Bost profane and blaspheme the works they adapt. Moreover, due to their popularity in French cinema, the majority of screenwriters aspire to be just like Aurenche and Bost. Truffaut posits this makes French cinema repetitive with the same story constantly being told.
François Truffaut
After his critique of Aurenche and Bost, Truffaut claims that metteur en scène or the mise en scène of a particular film director/auteur will write their own scenes and dialogue.
While writing for cinema seems beneath the screenwriters he has criticized, there are auteurs ready to create a new French cinema.
François Truffaut
Truffaut lists these directors/auteurs: Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau, Jacques Becker, Abel Gance, Max Ophulus, Jacques Tati and Roger Leenhardt.
He declares that there can be no “peaceful coexistence of the ‘Tradition of Quality’ and the ‘auteur’s cinema.” (16)
François Truffaut
Interesting side note – Truffaut believes that comedy is the most difficult genre due to the fact that some many of the auteurs and “brilliant” screenwriters he respects failed at comedy.
François Truffaut
Truffaut writes this essay as a critic at Cahiers du cinema. He was known as a harsh film critic. In 1958, he was the only critic not invited to the Cannes Film Festival.
He later becomes a director. His first feature film, 400 Blows, is highly acclaimed; he receives the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1959. 400 Blows is considered the start of the French New Wave.
François Truffaut
Some of Truffaut’s colleagues at Cahiers du cinema also go onto to become directors as well: Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard, and Claude Chabrol. They are considered part of the French New Wave.
Toni Cade Bambara
“Programming with School Daze
Toni Cade Bambara
Toni Cade Bambara starts her essay with a discussion of the production challenges Spike Lee’s School Daze (1988) faced before it was released.
One of the issues the film exposes is color bias in the Black community. Colorism is considered “dirty laundry” as its something that many African Americans do not want to discuss.
School Daze portrays the pageantry of historical Black colleges; its spectacle link to the homecoming celebration. Limited focus on the classroom.
Toni Cade Bambara
Bambara notes that “confrontations between the [four] groups are theatrically stage moments rather than realistic debates about the issues. The disturbances are broken up, either by an intervening character or by a scene shift, leaving the parties unreconciled and the contradictions unresolved.” (11)
Toni Cade Bambara
Bambara notes that a great deal of the struggle African Americans have had in America is the fight over the “rights to literacy and autonomy and further that the educational institutions we have built are repositories for much of that history.” (11)
She posits that the film links itself to the Fanonian concept that when we internalize the enemy doctrine of supremacy, we jeopardize the liberation project.” (12)
Toni Cade Bambara
Bambara views the four groups in a hierarchy with the Gamma Phi Gamma fraternity, that “defend tradition at Mission and to perpetuate the prestige of their fraternity.” Da Fella desire to change to transform the campus through their anti-apartheid work. (12)
Toni Cade Bambara
For the women, the Gamma Rays are next in the hierarchy and they derive their power from “their ‘preferred’ looks (light complexions, wave jobs, tined contact lenses) and their position as the sister order of G Phi G.” These women are expected to maintain the frat. “Their labor is indispensable to the maintenance of the frat, they are not.” They are basically groupies of the frat. (12)
Toni Cade Bambara
Da Naturals are the working class, darker complexed Black women at the bottom of the Mission College hierarchy. As Bambara notes we learn the least about them and they seem “unorganized with no discernable agenda.” (12)
Bambara argues that “the film’s agenda to make a wake-up call is undermined by its misogynistic and gay-hating sensibility.” (12)
Toni Cade Bambara
Bambara understands School Daze as a musical but not in the old MGM sense of the word. She notes that “it is not ‘good news’ on campus that Daze is singing and dancing about. More it at stake at Mission than whether Grady (Bill Nunn) makes a touchdown. The college is being held hostage by the ‘old money’ robber barons.’” (13)
Toni Cade Bambara
Lee exposes the challenges faced by many historically Black colleges regarding their finances. During the late 1980s, several students across the U.S. protested their colleges financing the apartheid system and demanded they divest university funds from that country. Notice that at Mission, the threat is the appearance of telling rich people what to do with their money.
Toni Cade Bambara
Bambara views on of Lee’s signature visuals is when people are in one another’s face. She argues Lee creates ‘face” through close-ups and it creates an intimacy between the “filmmaker, film, and spectator.” (14)
Toni Cade Bambara
In spite of the film’s shortcomings, Lee is highly regarded by disparate groups; some are in complete opposition to one another. Bambara believes that what connects these groups is the “hunger for images” and “Lee’s accomplishments.” Moreover his diverse audience “speaks to the power of the films and the brilliance of the filmmaker.” (15)
In this film and others, Lee often cast a mix of veterans, newcomers, and performers known in other media (Ozzie Davis, Darryl Bell, and Branford Marsalis)
Toni Cade Bambara
Though Bambara and others feel that Lee’s success “helped to create a climate of receptivity for Black filmmakers in Hollywood,” it seems that it was only a phase for the industry.
See NYT article, “‘They Set Us Up to Fail’: Black Directors of the ‘90s Speak Out” – https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/03/movies/black-directors-1990s.html
Toni Cade Bambara
Bambara observes that the portrayals of women is very limited in this film. The Gamma Rays and Da Naturals have several interactions but their “behavior never varies; they sling color-hair insults, but nothing develops.” There is no exploration of how Black have internalized beauty standards that devalue/dismiss blackness.
Toni Cade Bambara
While Bambara’s argument that Half-Pint was seduced and corrupted is compelling, how do you feel about her view of Jane being ambitious?
Bambara exposes “disturbing patters” in Lee’s films. In Lee’s book, Uplift the Race, he wanted the frat members to run a “train on Jane.” This is gang rape and the way Lee writes it seems very nonchalant. This dismissive language is similar to how he constructs Nola’s rape. In Lee’s other films, Bambara cites several instances of sexism and violence against women.
Toni Cade Bambara
As the film winds down with an examination of the associations between sharecropping in the U.S. and the apartheid system in South Africa. We also see the class conflict between Da Fellas and locals at a Kentucky Fried Chicken.
The film ends with Dap urging his classmates and campus leaders to wake up.
Toni Cade Bambara
School Daze and A Different World (1987 – 1993) most likely contribute to an increase in enrollment in historical Black colleges and universities.
Wahneema Lubiano
“But Compared to What? Reading Realism, representation, and essentialism in School Daze, Do the Right thing, and the Spike Lee Discourse
Wahneema Lubiano
Wahneema Lubiano has interest in Spike Lee because of her research interest. She is concerned that Lee has gotten “press, media, and academic attention to the point of saturation.” (31) She argues that Lee’s work is typically celebrated uncritically, and this has lead many media outlets to solely focus on Lee; he becomes the only Black director.
Wahneema Lubiano
One of her chief concerns is how critics and Lee read his work as real or reality. Lubiano also wants Lee’s work to be more effectively contextualized.
“The problem of Spike Lee’s ‘sample,’ his place in the sun, is that his presence, empowered by Hollywood studio hegemony and media consensus on his importance, can function to overshadow or make difficult other kinds of politically engaged cultural work.” (32)
Wahneema Lubiano
While Lubiano notes that the media can give more than one African American filmmaker attention simultaneously, this can still be a challenge (and we will discuss this later in the quarter). The paucity of Black directors at this time (1991) allows for Lee’s work to be viewed as the “real thing” and often celebrated uncritically. (33) Critics and Lee himself act as if he speaks for the community or all African Americans.
Wahneema Lubiano
This view also marginalizes “other African American filmic possibilities – possibilities, for example, such as those offered by independent African American women filmmakers.” (33)
In part II of her essay, Lubiano examines how race and racisms operate historically in ways that are specific and inconsistent referencing Stuart Hall and Antonio Gramsci.
Wahneema Lubiano
For example in the United States racism has operated differently during enslavement, the Jim Crow era, and our present day.
“What has not changed in the history of race in the United States is its centrality within our culture, the importance of it to our socialization as produced and reinforced by schools, organizations, family, our sexual lives, churches, institutions – all of which produce a racially structured society.” (34)
Wahneema Lubiano
Lubiano views “race [as] a cultural factor of overwhelming importance.” (34) And Lee views his films as forcing “America to come to grips with the problem of racism.” (34)
Lubiano asserts that Lee mistakes “the media noise around race, racism, and his films for evidence that this country has ‘come to grips’ with race.” (34)
Wahneema Lubiano
Lubiano points out that Lee’s commercial films and their promotion does not directly translate into America dealing with race/racism. While she does not privilege independent films over commercial ones, she wants to “insist that Lee’s confidence needs to be mediate[d] by a complicated awareness of market pressure.” (35)
Wahneema Lubiano
As she turns to examine School Daze (1988) and Do the Right Thing (1989), she sets the stage for understanding Lee’s work. Discussions on “race, racism, and racialization in the United States” at that time are underdeveloped and stymied, there are very few African American films, Lee’s work is characterized as “politically radical or progressive.” All of these factors are troubling to Lubiano.
Wahneema Lubiano
Most reviewers of Lee’s films examined them based on “realism, authenticity, and relation to the ‘good’ of the community represented in them.” One of the questions Lubiano asks in relation to Lee’s work is compared to what? What is the basis these reviewers are using? Why are they mostly celebrating Lee’s work and not analyzing it more closely?
Wahneema Lubiano
The problem with realism, or what is real, is that it is determined by a “particular group.” Moreover, the framework of realism includes “aesthetic values central to the dominant film and media culture.” (38) For Black filmmakers, this paradigm reinscribes notions of an “objective existence ‘out there,’ that the process of representation simply aims to correspond to or reflect.”
Wahneema Lubiano
Due to the distorted images of African Americans in popular culture, there is a desire for “realistic” or “good” images of Black people. And since many of those grotesque images were created by people of European descent, there can be a preoccupation with African Americans to intervene and create “positive” images. Lee’s work being uncritically accepted means that his films can be considered “African American essences.” (40)
Wahneema Lubiano
The problem is when Lee’s work is accepted as “truth” or “real” in this context is that the films of other Black directors are dismissed or not viewed as legitimate. Remember the comments Julie Dash made about her work and how producers considered it not “really” Black or authentic.
Wahneema Lubiano
“Representation refers to images that are selected from what we recognize as reality.” (40)
Questions about representation can hinder African American cultural producers.
Essentialism is often defined as a person’s true essence. This idea can be applied to people groups and becomes problematic because the group essence is often fixed.
Wahneema Lubiano
One of the problems Lubiano cites with these frameworks is that Lee can claim his work is the truth and he is depicting reality. However, his portrayals of sexism or homophobia do not represent all African Americans.
Patricia Mellencamp
“Making History: Julie Dash”
Patricia Mellencamp
Patricia Mellencamp posits that “feminists, whether white, black, brown, or red, are operating another temporality, questioning the timing of history.” (76) This contrasts with how history counts or measures time.
Mellencamp also notes, using scholar bell hooks, that “history must be remembered.” (76)
In her films, Illusions and Daughters of the Dust, Julie Dash creates “speculative fiction,” asking history “what if.”
Patricia Mellencamp
For Mellencamp, Dash creates an “affective history, a history of collective presence both material and spiritual” that “balances the experimental and experiential.” (77) Dash also engages with Mellencamp’s “empirical feminism, “archival and activist – invokes history and acts to alter the course of time.” (77) She believes Dash’s films “expand the contours of female subjectivity.”
Often in film studies, the female subject is not the primary focus.
Patricia Mellencamp
Mellencamp analyzes Illusions and comes to different conclusions than Hartman and Griffin. She introduces Lela Simone, a “sound editor with the Arthur Freed unit at MGM.” Simone was an “executive assistant to Freed and reportedly one of the best editors in the business.”
Women in film editing
Patricia Mellencamp
Illusions exposes how Hollywood erased Black women historically and in representation. Dash demonstrates how the “cinematic apparatus” can and has repressed African American women. Mellencamp goes onto note that “sound editing and synchronization are strategies that conceal the politics of racism.” (79)
She contrasts Illusions with Singin’ in the Rain (1952) noting that some of the songs Debbie Reynolds sang were dubbed by someone else, the romantic plot, and how the women (Lina Lamont and Cathy Selden) are pitted against one another. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wI4jJq98tU
Patricia Mellencamp
Mellencamp observes how Rita Moreno, the Puerto Rican American actress is whitened for the film.
The first clip is only the very first part; the second clip start at 4:00.
6
Patricia Mellencamp
She exposes the ways whiteness in film is “not neutral, natural, or real – but a system, a ‘racialized” convention of the continuity style of Hollywood cinema.” The Production Code was how the industry tried to regulate itself to keep the government from censoring films. The section on “miscegenation,” “(sex relationship between white and Black races) is forbidden” made segregation overt and limited opportunities for African American actors and actresses.
Bring in PCA slides.
7
Patricia Mellencamp
Mellencamp’s structure here is interesting because her “Afterthoughts” sections are personal reflections and this does not often occur in academic essays.
She was advised by Manthia Diawara to look at other writings before she published this piece and to her credit she takes his advice.
She considers why her work differs from Hartman and Griffin but has similarities with hooks and Toni Cade Bambara.
Throughout her piece she cites various films scholars, most of them I have not cited because their work often reinscribes whiteness. Deleuze and Guattari and white Jesus.
8
Patricia Mellencamp
Bambara, hooks and Mellencamp argue that Mignon has a productive relationship with Ester Jeeter unlike Hartman and Griffin.
Mellencamp closes the section on Illusions stating that the film “calls into question the ‘White male’s capacity to gaze, define, and know. Illusions problematizes the issue of race and spectatorship. White people in the film are unable to ‘see’ that race informs their looking relations.” (86)
Patricia Mellencamp
Mellencamp’s initial analysis of Daughters of the Dust views the film as the opposite of films created by African American men that traffic in “male fear and high anxiety.” (87) Dash’s film is “told from the multiple, intersecting points of view of women of all ages – historical women, modern women – including the spirits of the unborn.” (87)
The film is set in the Sea Islands, off the coast of South Carolina, in 1902. It was a drop off point of Africans, “Dash calls this the ‘Ellis Island for the Africans,” the main dropping off point for Africans brought to North America as slaves.” (87)
Patricia Mellencamp
The film makes things visual such as intermarrying between African Americans and Native Americans.
St. Julian Last Child riding off victoriously
His future wife “riding off into the sunset for love.” (88)
Dash used the indigo ink stains as a “symbol of slavery…rather than the traditional showing of the whip marks or the chains.” (88)
Patricia Mellencamp
Mellencamp describes Dash’s production as only using natural light and Agfa-Geveart film because “Black people look better on Agfa.” The actresses Dash choose had worked in independent Black films.
Daughters of the Dust has shared space, “wide-angled, deep focus” and this is in contrast with Hollywood films and ‘spatial realism.’
Patricia Mellencamp
In “Psychological character motivation is not the main logic of cutting; neither is the point of view from usually a male perspective.” (93) This is typically a Hollywood convention.
Spatial realism “consists of shots in depth, of long duration, and the use of the moving camera. Thus the spectator has the freedom to look around. In addition, cuts are not motivated according to the same cause-effect logic of continuity style.” (93) Mellencamp argues Dash’s work is more align with spatial realism.
Dash notes the importance of memory and knowledges that were suppressed in her film. Black women are central subjects in her film. The visuals regarding hair grooming in the film are specific to the experiences of Black women.
Michael Martin
“Conversations with Ava DuVernay: ‘A Call to Action’: Organizing principles of an Activist Cinematic Practice”
Michael Martin
Michael Martin interviews Ava DuVernay; he states that she is a “undeterred catalyst for what may very well be a Black film renaissance in the making.” (57)
DuVernay has a mission and a call to filmmaking. Her “call to action” is to “further and foster the Black cinematic image in an organized and consistent way, and to not have to defer and ask permission to traffic our films: to be self-determining.” (57)
Martin views DuVernay’s work as an extension of Black independent cinema and documentarians such as William Greaves, Madeline Anderson, and St. Claire Bourne and those of the L.A. Rebellion, Julie Dash, Charles Burnett, Billy Woodberry, and Haile Gerima, as well as the Black Arts Movement, Larry Neal and Amiri Baraka.
Michael Martin
Martin posits that DuVernay’s films involve engagement with “Black women’s agency and subjectivity.” She also “foregrounds the family as [a] site and source of resilience, memory, cultural transmission, generational continuity and dissonance, and as purveyor of all things affirming of Black identity.”
Prior to becoming a filmmaker, DuVernay was a film publicist and marketer. Her work has received awards from the “ReelWorld Film Festival in Toronto, the Los Angeles Pan-African Film Festival, and the Hollywood Black Film Festival, and the Langston Hughes African American Film Festival in Seattle” and she won the Best Director Award at Sundance for Middle of Nowhere (2012). (58)
Michael Martin
DuVernay has also won the “African American Film Critics Association Best Screenplay in both 2011 and 2012, as well as both the Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award and Tribeca Film Institute’s Affinity Award in 2013.”
DuVernay has “six organizing principles of her practice” in addition to her formation of AFFRM, African American Film Festival Releasing Movement.
As a director, DuVernay works closely with her cinematographer and does prep work prior to production.
Michael Martin
Her six principles:
“Establishing the storyline as the first order of business;
Knowing something about potential funders before soliciting support for your project;
Working with what you have, rather than what you want;
Engaging with cinematic aesthetics, no matter the filmmaking context, as a means of signifying something personally and/or politically meaningful;
Avoid working in isolation; and
Being self-determining.” (59)
Michael Martin
Due to her work as a film publicist and marketer, DuVernay knew which doors to avoid regarding the production and distribution of her films.
She considers a film finished “when it’s presented to an audience.” One of the reason she created AFFRM was that filmmakers are “very rarely … taught and given tools to help our films survive to meet an audience.” (63)
DuVernay comes from a position of abundance; she focuses on what she has.
She asserts her “narrative point of view and the stories that [she wants] to tell within any context.” (65)
Michael Martin
DuVernay believes AFFRM bridges “the gap between what happens when [films are made] and how does it actually reach an audience.” (66)
The remainder of the interview examines DuVernay’s films I Will Follow (2010) and Middle of Nowhere.
I Will Follow is autobiographical; DuVernay was a caregiver for her aunt, Denise Sexton. She and her aunt were U2 fans.
DuVernay made Middle of Nowhere to speak to the “incarceration of a generation of Black men.” (79)
Maryann Erigha
“Black, Asian, and Latino Directors in Hollywood”
Maryann Erigha
Maryann Erigha utilizes Chris Rock’s 2014 essay in The Hollywood Reporter to discuss the dearth of Black, Asian, and Latino directors in Hollywood. One of Rock’s main points is that “you’ve got to try” to maintain a “racially homogeneous workforce in an area that boasts residents from an array of racial and ethnic backgrounds.” (59)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/top-five-filmmaker-chris-rock-753223
Maryann Erigha
She then lists the U.S. Census figures for Los Angeles County in 2013:
Black – 9.2%
Asian – 14.6%
White – 27.2%
Latino – 48.3%
When 72% of the population in Los Angeles are racial minority groups, this does indeed suggest “the film industry does, in fact, try exceedingly hard to be racially exclusive.” (59)
Maryann Erigha
Hollywood remains racially homogeneous in “upper-management positions” and “in all areas behind-the-scenes and on-screen employment, with Whites monopolizing the production of popular culture, while groups constituting the racial majority in Los Angeles remain on the fringes.” (59)
Erigha’s study considers “over 1700 Hollywood films distributed by Hollywood studios and theatrically released to U.S. cinemas between 2000 and 2011.” (60)
Maryann Erigha
With the set of films (over 1700), Black, Asian, and Latino directors helmed 13% of those films with the breakdown as follows:
Black directors – 7.5%
Asian directors – 3%
Latino directors – <2%
“There are marked differences in whether directors of different races are American-born or foreign-born.” (61)
Maryann Erigha
“In general, Hollywood far more often draws on narratives from foreign-born Latino and Asian directors than from Latinos and Asians born the U.S. Meanwhile, the industry disseminates more stories told by African Americans born in the U.S. and fewer stories of Africans abroad in the diaspora.” (61)
What types of ideologies are operating to make this so?
Notice that directors of African descent born outside of the U.S. direct stories that specific to the U.S. and NOT the diaspora. Erigha considers the following titles Pride (2007) a Black swim team in Philadelphia, PA; Just Wright (2010), an African American romantic comedy; The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 (2008) friendships among young women; and My Baby’s Daddy (2004) a groups of slackers must change because their girlfriends are pregnant.
Maryann Erigha
“Numerous popular Latino directors who have films distributed by Hollywood studios were born outside of the U.S.”: (61)
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu – 21 Grams (2003), Babel (2005), The Others (2001)
Guillermo del Toro – Blade II (2002), Hellboy (2004), Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008). He wins Best Director and Best Film Oscars for The Shape of Water (2017)
“The majority of Asian directors had birthplaces outside of the U.S. – in China, Japan, and Hong Kong, while a smaller contingent of directors were from Thailand, Taiwan, India, or various other countries.” (61)
Maryann Erigha
With the majority of Asian and Latino directors being foreign-born, one may think African American directors would have an opportunity for greater impact on “contributing to the Hollywood cinematic narrative.” But the participation and access of African Americans in “all aspects of production remains…limited.” (61)
In addition to these unfortunately statistics, Erigha finds “there was a declining inclusion of Black, Asian, and Latino directors over the 12-year period between 2000 and 2011, as their share of directing opportunities decreased during the latter years, especially between 2009 and 2011.” (61)
Maryann Erigha
Unfortunately based on the limited number of Black, Asian, and Latino directors, other challenges arise such as “fewer [directors from these groups] direct movies distributed by core studios [major studios – Sony, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, Universal, Warner Brothers, and Disney] compared to noncore studios.” (62)
On a positive note, Erigha found that “other studios are generally more inclusive [of], although they, too, fall short of employing a percentage of Black, Asian, and Latino directors that would match or exceed the level at which they are represented in the general population.” (62)
Maryann Erigha
In addition to these institutional barriers, Erigha finds that “major studios are unwilling to spend large amounts of marketing and promotion or widely exhibit [the films of directors of color] across theaters nationwide.” (63)
Production budgets are “stratified by the director’s race” (average budgets): (63)
Asian directors – $41 million
Latino directors – 34.5 million
Black directors – $28 million
White directors – $46 million
Maryann Erigha
Erigha posits that “racial groups are segregated into specific film genres and virtually excluded from others.” (64)
“Black directors’ overrepresentation in the music genre is likely a consequence of their tendency to be excluded from presumed intellectually minded SF genres and typecast within the entertainment and performance fields where they are assumed, stereotypically so, to have innate talents and abilities.” (65)
Asian directors are “most represented in the horror/thriller genre” with Hollywood seemingly having a “propensity to concentrate the inclusion of Asian directors into a niche market.” (65)
Maryann Erigha
Erigha includes intersectionality in her study and the numbers here are even worse.
White men – 82%; White women – 6%
Black men – 6%; Black women – <1%
Asian men – 2%; Asian women – <1%
Latino men – 1%; Latina women – <1%
Few women of color are “able to sustain careers directing multiple films.” (65)
Maryann Erigha
Gina Prince-Bythewood and Kasi Lemmons are exceptions to this rule.
Prince-Bythewood: Love & Basketball (2000); The Secret Life of Bees (2008); Beyond the Lights (2014)
Kasi Lemmons: The Caveman’s Valentine (2001); Talk to Me (2007); Harriet (2019)
Female-directed films are more likely to be distributed by noncore Hollywood studios.
Maryann Erigha
Erigha concludes that the lack of Black, Asian, and Latino directors means they have limited ability to “construct images and characters that appear in mainstream media… . Furthermore, their placement in restricted genres raises the issue of which roles they are able to penetrate behind the scenes and which roles still remain elusive for them to occupy.” (67)
The near exclusion of these groups from the more lucrative genres translates to “contemporary racial ideologies” remaining in place and reaffirming the “status quo of a White power structure, rather than offer nuanced characters derived from a diverse set of cultural creators.” (67)
Maryann Erigha
Erigha observes that having “more filmmakers from diverse racial/ethnic groups working on cultural products in a variety of genres will move use closer to ensuring that on-screen images more appropriately reflect the desires and worldview of diverse audiences.” Yet it is discouraging that despite the growing diversity in Los Angeles that Hollywood studios appear to be impervious to incorporating it into their organizations. (67)
She suggests that these groups not having a substantial voice in “the construction and manufacturing of mainstream culture prevents underrepresented groups from exerting their influence on what is at present a monolithic representation in America.” (67)
Maryann Erigha
Erigha names this inability as a “denial of citizenship rights, including the right to produce and be recognized in the nation’s dominant cultural myths, narratives, and images.” (67)
She also notes that “Black, Latino, and Asian audiences are being shortchanged – paying more proportionally for movies, but not receiving their comparable piece of the pie in exchange in the back end.” (68)
Are You as Colored as that Negro?: The Politics of Being Seen in Julie Dash’s Illusions
Author(s): S. V. Hartman and Farah Jasmine Griffin
Source: Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 25, No. 2, Black Film Issue (Summer, 1991),
pp. 361-373
Published by: African American Review (St. Louis University)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3041693
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Are You as Colored as That Negro?: The
Politics of Being Seen in Julie Dash’s
Illusions
S. V. Hartman and Farah Jasmine Griffin
I took myself far from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an
object. What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a
hemorrhage that splattered my whole body with black blood.
-Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
I am invisible … simply because people refuse to see me.
-Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
They made him feel his black skin by just standing there looking at him….
He was something he hated, the badge of shame which he knew was at-
tached to a black skin. He felt transparent.
– Richard Wright, Native Son
… Ah didn’t know Ah wazn’t white till Ah was round six years old….
when we looked at de picture and everybody got pointed out there wasn’t
nobody left except a real dark little girl with long hair …. Dat’s where Ah
wuz s’posed to be, but Ah couldn’t recognize dat dark chile as me….
Everybody laughed …. Miss Nellie … pointed to de dark one and said,
‘Dat’s you’ …. before Ah seen de picture Ah thought Ah wuz just like de
rest.”
-Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
They see me, but they cannot recognize me.
-Julie Dash, Illusions
It’s a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always
looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by
the tape of a world that looks on in an amused contempt and pity.
-W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black FoUc
It seems, Fanon remarked, that, if we must be black, “we must
be so in relation to the white man” (110). Through the classic
figures of blackness, we see ourselves seeing ourselves. The ex-
S. V. Hartmnan and Farah Jasmine Griffin are graduate students in the
Department of American Studies at Yale University.
BlackAmerican Literature Forum, Volume 25, Number 2 (Summer 1991)
X 1991 S. V. Hartman and Farah Jasmine Griffln
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362 S. V. Hartman and Farah Jasmine Gnffin
colored men, the tragic and passing mulattos, the invisible ones,
and the Biggers, whether affirming or resisting the social order,
are made subjects as visual objects of the racist gaze. Black-
ness-explicated, defined, and constructed in relation to the
gaze, the articulation of the dominant symbolic order-desig-
nates a relation between the seer and the seen, where we are
usually the object of the gaze. The gaze disciplines us. It consti-
tutes us.
Look, a Negro! The flesh burns. The palms begin to sweat. We
see ourselves as objects and as Others. We become the agents of
our own subjection.
Look, a Negro! The body exposes us. It is a site of shame. The
“truth” of the body becomes evidence used against us.
Fragmented, de-formed, and organ-ized-breasts, dicks, backs,
hands, buttocks, and pussies are in circulation. The organ-
ization of the body yields profits. The body becomes black embla-
zoned with the desires and truths of racist discourse. ” ‘. . . put
her human characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the
right. And don’t forget to line them up,’ ” says schoolteacher of
Sethe (Morrison 193). The anatomopolitics of the black body:
madness, hypertrophied genitalia, steatopygia, lack, atrophied
brains, genetic inferiority, a dark and diseased sexuality.
Through the organization, investment, and (e)valuation of the
body, we come to know the subject. One wonders, “Could this be
me?”
The Truth of the Gaze
The climax of Julie Dash’s Illusions occurs when the white Lt.
Bedford exposes the racial identity of the beautiful passing hero-
ine Mignon. Searching through Mignon’s desk, he finds a photo-
graph of her lover Julius, whose black body is the irrefutable
proof which enables the lieutenant to expose and name her. The
lieutenant’s gaze establishes Mignon’s “real” black identity.
The lieutenant consumes Julius’s body, objectified as image,
and finds “truth” there: the threat of black sexuality. Assailed by
the gaze and enframed by the lieutenant’s racial schema, Julius
becomes the clue which explains the elusive Mignon. Finally the
lieutenant understands the mystery he has detected in her eyes.
He never assumes that Mignon, despite her white appearance,
could be a white woman with a black lover, because to be en-
tangled in black sexuality is to be black. Still, he can only fix her
blackness by acknowledging her sameness and difference from
the black body of the Negro. An equation, a correlative construc-
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Julie Dash’s Illusions 363
Fig. 1. Mignon Dupree (Lorette McKee) in Illusions. ? 1982 Julie Dash.
Reproduced courtesy of Third World Newsreel.
tion is required in order to stabilize Mignon’s identity and con-
struct an absolute difference between himself and her. Julius’s
Negro body provides that correlative. Mignon must be made as
colored as any Negro. The lieutenant confronts her, not by call-
ing her a Negro, but by equating her with one. Ironically, in his
effort to situate her on the Other side, he’s forced to admit her
difference from other Negroes. Are they the same? Or are they
different?
The film’s narrative, set in the 1940s, focuses on Mignon, a
beautiful, fair-skinned movie executive who is passing for white.
Mignon has come to Hollywood to “make the world of moving
shadows work for’ her. However, she winds up developing escap-
ist entertainment fare. In the course of her duties at National
Studio, she befriends a dark-skinned singer, Esther Geeter, who
has been hired to dub the voice of white film star Leila Grant and
thereby save the studio’s Christmas blockbuster. Esther’s pres-
ence makes Mignon realize that she has become ‘an illusion just
like the stories here. They see me, but they can’t recognize me.”
As a result of her brief encounter with Esther, Mignon recog-
nizes that she has not been able to make films about real people.
After Lt. Bedford uncovers her for ‘who she really is,” Mignon
confirms her desire to work within the film industry so that she
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364 S. V. Hartman and Farah Jasmine Grfin
can tell real stories about real Negroes, and use the power of the
film industry to present honest representations of Negro life in-
stead of the singing-and-dancing-darky fare which Hollywood
produces. However, the lieutenant’s discovery imperils all that
she has hoped to accomplish.
Illusions explores questions of race, representation, and gender
in Hollywood cinema-in particular, the absence of “meaningful”
and “realistic” images of our lives. It is a film about images and
misapprehension: the black image before the eyes of the Other.
In discussing the black image in terms of true and false beliefs
and representations, the film posits “the truth of blackness.”
Faithful to its title, the misperception of the real grounds the
film’s discussion of the black in cinema.
The film opens with the revolving figure of the Oscar and a
voice-over: “To direct an attack upon Hollywood would indeed be
to confuse portrayal with action, image with reality. In the begin-
ning was not the shadow, but the act, and the province of Holly-
wood is not action, but illusion.” This quotation from Ellison’s
essay “The Shadow and the Act” (267), in which he discusses the
image of the black in Hollywood films of the 1940s, suggests that
a direct attack on Hollywood’s racist images confuses the issues
by shifting the focus of blame from society to the movies. He
argues that Hollywood doesn’t create anti-Negro images; it only
manipulates and replicates them. Hollywood reproduces existing
social codes.
If movies only mirror society, then the efficacity of representa-
tional practices is greatly circumscribed. Illusions borrows
Ellison’s language of shadow and act, yet attempts to address
the importance of the cinema in determining our relation to the
world. However, shadow and act reduce questions of representa-
tion to considerations of accurate or distorted reflections. Images
do not simply fulfill desires; they create desires and identities.
Shadow and act are tropes which undergird the film’s polemic
on cinema as well as terms that chronicle Mignon’s journey. The
film opens on shadow and closes on act. Yet Mignon’s precarious
existence defies the rigidity of these categories. She occupies the
neither/nor and both/and categories, and lives the opposition
between the shadow and the act. She wants to make images, but
she cannot because she is an image. How can she act if she is all
shadow? Mignon acts so that she can appear to be what she is
not. But what is she? What true identity is disguised by the fair
flesh? And what is a true identity?
The conflicts between shadow and act, essence and appear-
ance, I am and I am not, same and Other, black and white, and
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Julie Dash’s Illusions 365
interior and exterior are articulated in the relation between the
visual and auditory registers in the film. The problem of synchro-
nization in the film-within-the-film demonstrates how racial and
sexual differences are produced. In order to explore the antino-
mies which structure the film, and the relation of Illusions to the
dominant cinema, an examination of the projection room se-
quence is required. The projection room scene unveils the role of
the cinema’s technological mastery in creating identities; and, in
doing so, the film foregrounds the role of the gaze and the voice
in producing subjects.
Imagine How Differences Sound
The projection room scene provides a map for dismantling the
construction of racial and sexual difference in the cinema. Mi-
gnon, her boss, and two white male technicians are positioned in
the sound booth. The objects of their gaze, Esther and footage of
film star Leila Grant, are on the stage. The glass of the booth
divides the products of the cinema from the locus of its enuncia-
tion. The image of a white male technician looms on the glass
separating the producers from the commodified women.
The sequence opens with footage of Leila Grant singing a swing
number with two male dancers. The technicians in the sound
booth explain to Mignon and her boss that the following portion
of the film has lost sync. National Studio has hired a “Negro gal,”
Esther Geeter, to help them out. Watching the out-of-sync foot-
age of Leila Grant, Esther coordinates her singing with the move-
ment of Leila’s lips. Not only are Esther’s voice coordinates
appropriated, but the violence of the appropriation is heightened
by the fact that Esther must lip sync the garbled movements of
Leila -a reversal of the typical lip-syncing situation, in which the
non-singer matches his or her voice movements to the singer’s
voice. In this case, Esther’s live voice is being excised and repro-
duced, although she must mime the dumb star. Esther is both
ventriloquist and dummy.
Leila Grant’s continued stardom is made possible by Esther’s
labor, yet it must be hidden in order that the white woman’s
status be maintained. Like capital feeding off the body of labor,
Leila’s corpse is resuscitated by Esther’s voice. The live body
becomes deposited in the ghostly image so that it can carry out
its seduction (Lieberman). Leila’s image, the desired body, is
mortified without the animating voice required to make her a
desirable woman. Acting as cosmetic surgeons, the studio tech-
nicians construct Hollywood’s ideal woman from composite
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366 S. V. Hartman and Farah Jasmine Gnfflin
parts. Leila becomes the desired female after being the object of
technological dissection. In fact, Esther and Leila are both ob-
jects of the technological apparatus. Esther’s voice is in circula-
tion, but her body must be banished to the dark zones
off-screen. (This convention has, of course, guided Hollywood’s
utilization of black voices since the advent of sound: The “better
voices” of Negroes were used to enhance the entertainment value
of Hollywood fare, thus providing the industry with greater prof-
its. Yet, within these films, blacks existed in segregated musical
zones. Their voices were employed, yet the boundary between the
black and white worlds was maintained vigilantly.)
Esther’s voice is excised from her body so that the black body
can be contained and the white body animated. After being con-
sumed, Esther’s body is cast away, like the utterly depleted body
of the whore and the desexualized and devoured body of the
nanny once her breasts are no longer in use. Esther must re-
main off-screen in the hinterlands of unrepresentability. Within
the dominant conventions of representation, the black woman
has been a passageway between the sexual and the porno-
graphic. Like the lesbian and the prostitute, the black woman
inhabits a sexual realm overcoded by the language of disease,
pathology, and perversion.
The Darkest Continent
Leila Grant is the object of desire: “the true woman of the
discourse of femininity,” an object of the gaze and the editor’s
cut. She does not have desire; she is desire. She does not have
voice; she embodies it. Stranded on the dark continent, Esther
looks at Leila and desires to be desired. Esther mimics for work
and pleasure. She must simulate Leila’s position in order to do
her job and experience any pleasure as a black woman viewer in
the cinema. “Sometimes, when I go to the theater, I sit and listen
to my voice coming out of those movie stars. I close my eyes and
pretend it’s me up there in a satin gown. It’s a funny situation,
’cause I know how to sing that sad song.” Rather than witness
the violence of the cinema, which exploits her as a laborer and
exiles her to the hinterlands of the unseen and the unspoken,
Esther opts for fantasy and identification. As a viewer, she de-
sires to be in the position of the starlet, a position which is
rightly hers by virtue of her labor and would enable her to
recover her disembodied voice. Implicitly, Esther desires the em-
bodiment of a black voice in a black body which can be repre-
sented and desired.
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Julie Dash’s Illusions 367
In the projection room, where female images and voices are in
circulation, we observe Mignon seeing herself. Literally, she
looks at her reflection in the glass of the sound booth; figura-
tively, she sees herself not in the images on the screen but in the
off-screen space where no one else looks. She gazes longingly at
Esther. After listening to Esther sing, Mignon immediately de-
cides to call her mother. Esther’s song guides Mignon’s return to
the maternal body, her desire for grounding and for home. The
return to the maternal provides an escape and reprieve from
Mignon’s charade, and within the locus of this desire, she comes
to know Esther.
Conventionally, in the passing narrative, it is via the black
mother that one returns home. The black mother is of pivotal
importance not only because she is the site of racial origin, but
because she would induce the white daughter to give up the
passing charade, return home, and accept the limits of Negro
life. The black mother binds the daughter to blackness. In the
1934 version of Imitation of Lffe, Delilah’s visit to the shop where
her passing daughter works threatens to expose Pecola’s identity
and cost Pecola her job. In the 1959 version, Sarah Jane is
beaten by her white lover when he discovers who her mother is
and that Sarah Jane, therefore, must be black. Similarly,
Mignon’s voiceless mother wants her to accept the strictures of
Negro life-being the black wife of a black man.
“I just wanted to hear your voice,” Mignon tells her mother.
Engulfed in the darkness of the phone booth, she wants to be
assured and coaxed by the soothing sound of her mother’s voice.
The mother, a Delilah to Mignon’s Pecola, comforts her but lacks
an understanding of her daughter’s ambitions and her position
in the white world. Like Esther and Julius, the mother links
Mignon to blackness, and ultimately to subordination, since
blackness is repeatedly figured in terms of discursive impotence.
Julius, Esther, and the mother are all situated in positions of
vulnerability and passivity in relation to the gaze and the voice.
Julius is absolute image and bereft of voice. Curiously, in the
scene in which Mignon reads his letter, the contents are revealed
through her voice, not the voice of Julius, the writer, as would
usually be the case. Esther’s voice literally becomes the posses-
sion of others. Muted, excised, and interior, the black voices can
only be described as symbolically unempowered, constrained,
and impotent. This encoding of blackness culminates in the
mother, who is neither seen nor heard. According to Kaja Silver-
man, inferiority in the dominant cinema “implies linguistic con-
straint and physical confinement-confinement to the body, to
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368 S. V. Hartman and Farah Jasmine Grffiu
claustral spaces, and to inner narratives” (45). Given the associ-
ation of blackness and inferiority, Mignon’s dark natality and
sexuality are characterized by confinement, passivity, and subor-
dination.
Although Mignon speaks publicly with limited authority as a
white woman in a white world, her interior voice-her private,
true, black voice-is as disembodied as Esther’s. In the course of
their work, their voices become unanchored from their black
bodies and harbored within white female bodies. In fact, their
work requires the decorporealization of the black female voice,
which must be transplanted elsewhere in order to contain, to
render docile, the threat of the black body. Like the excess of the
clitoris in a reproductive heterosexist economy, the excess of the
black body must be regulated. The excision of the voice im-
periously organizes the black body.
The opening voice-over delivered in confidential tones becomes
quickly identified with Mignon’s secret. It hints at her mystery.
Her voice, looming in dark space, asserts the power of cinema to
produce images and illusions. At the film’s conclusion, where the
viewer is presumably to believe that Mignon is empowered, once
again a voice-over narrative turns her “inside out” so that the
black truth of the interior can be penetrated.
Blackness lurks in the dark zones. It is a secret that the domi-
native gaze brings to light. Mignon is an illusion, seen but not
recognized, until the lieutenant names her and brings her mas-
querade to an end. Her blackness becomes public only when
ascertained by the lieutenant. Esther knows her secret and has
helped her maintain it. Although we are asked to believe that
Esther has helped Mignon to “act without fear,” it is difficult to
believe this. Esther does question her, “Do you pretend when
you’re with them, or can you be yourself?” Mignon, however,
refuses to address her subterfuge and only laments her illusory
status: “They see me, but they cannot recognize me.”
Upon returning to her office after her conversation with Esther,
Mignon is confronted by the lieutenant. “You sure had me
fooled,” he quips. “You are as colored as that Negro singer.”
Mignon attempts to explain herself, but much of what she says
to him during this encounter is difficult to understand because
of poor sound quality. Her reply is elliptical, an affirmation and a
negation. “I am not ashamed of what I am.” Shame enmeshes
her existence and non-being. Are you ashamed? “I am.” “I am
not.” The self is (un)named under the violating scrutiny of the
racist gaze. In this reenactment of America’s racial melodrama,
Mignon’s image is subordinated to the truth of her identity. The
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Julie Dash’s Illusions 369
film inadvertently reaffirms the power of the racist gaze insofar
as the dramatic climax turns on Mignon’s unveiling.
The scene concludes with Mignon determined to stay on at
National Studio, learning the tricks of the trade so that she can
make movies about her boys overseas. The conclusion is ambig-
uous. It is highly implausible that Mignon could remain at Na-
tional Studio and, as a black woman in Jim Crow America,
accomplish what she couldn’t as a white woman. If this were the
case, then the film denies its premise that she needed to pass in
the first place. Or does the film close with Mignon’s greatest
illusion? If so, then her interior voice no longer has the status of
truth. The boundary between the interior and the exterior, the
true and the false, has been abrogated. The interior recesses are
infected by illusions too.
Interiority and exteriority, as defined in the narrative, belie the
division between the diegetic narrative and the locus of produc-
tion. In unveiling the mechanisms of synchronization in the film-
within-the-film, the construction of sexual and racial differences
becomes visible. Yet, Illusions’ own operation remains transpar-
ent. Ironically, in the projection scene, the diegetic and extra-
diegetic levels collapse; all the female voices in this sequence are
post-dubbed. Both Esther and Leila lip-sync Ella Fitzgerald. The
narrative’s focus on synchronization-the corporealization of the
female voice -shifts attention away from the film’s orchestration
of image and sound so that Leila’s voice, in fact, is no more or
less true than Esther’s.
The focus on better representations and truer stories super-
sedes questions regarding cinematic practice. As a result,
Illusions’ critique of Hollywood reinscribes its conventions. The
film endeavors “to tell real stories” about black women by em-
ploying the narrative conventions of the dominant cinema and
the passing tale. In the effort to make black women visible,
Illusions does not consider the context or the terms of visibility,
or the immanence of power, in its cinematic practice.
The employment of the passing tale, which defines blackness
as it is seen and bounded by the white world, forecloses the
possibility of representing black women who are not made sub-
ject, first and foremost, by the gaze of the Other. At best, passing
and mulatta characters are “narrative device[s] of mediation”
that serve as vehicles for “a fictional exploration of the relation-
ship between the races” (Carby 171). The wretched conditions of
Negro life and the goodness of the black mother/mammy help
document the injustices of racism through a dialogue about
blackness with and for the Other. As Ellison points out, passing
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370 S. V. Hartman and Farah Jasmine Grinn
films “are not about Negroes … ; they are about what whites
think and feel about Negroes” (268). These films enable whites to
identify with the plight of the Negro, for “. . . in the eyes of Holly-
wood, it is only “white’ Negroes who suffer. . .” (269).
Blacks occupy subordinate and supplemental positions in the
passing tale. Utilized as evidence in the case against racism, they
are vehicles for exploring racism and subordination, foreclosing a
discussion of black lives outside these confines. In passing for
white, Mignon exemplifies the making of racial difference. Worn
as a disguise, whiteness becomes denaturalized as a category.
Yet an essential idea of blackness persists in the film and acts as
a force of closure. A natural body (the body inscribed as nature),
subordination, and interiority define blackness.
Mignon desires a true seduction by real images because
“there’s no joy in the seduction of images if they are false.”
Illusions resonates with this desire. Its discourse on true and
false images allies black bodies with truth in the hope of achiev-
ing a joyful seduction. Black bodies are indices of the real, of
what lies beyond the shadows, and of the deception of appear-
ances. Both Esther and Julius are utilized as evidence in estab-
lishing Mignon’s identity. They represent the facts of blackness
for the lieutenant and are utilized as evidence within the narra-
tive of the film. The lieutenant’s indexical use of Julius’s photo-
graph to decipher the mystery of Mignon resembles the use of
criminal evidence by the police. The viewer is shown the photo
before the lieutenant’s discovery, but only after we are Mignon’s
co-conspirators in her passing charade. We see the image of
Julius after Mignon’s conversation with Esther.
For the lieutenant, the photo documents the fact of black-
ness-the body as aberrant nature. Illusions uses the photo to
reveal Mignon’s secret; it employs one image to unlock another.
The image is simply raw data without need of explanation or
interpretation. The facts of blackness (don’t) speak for them-
selves. Not only in employing the codes of the dominant cinema,
but also by utilizing the representational practices which fix the
facts of blackness-i.e., science, sociology, criminology, etc.-,
Illusions attempts the impossible: to decenter the dominant im-
ages of blacks and to provide a cinematic pleasure, a spectacle of
seduction, based on truth. How can Illusions joyfully seduce
when its truths are enmeshed with the very codes it seeks to
displace?
To the extent that she is able, Dash successfully challenges the
conventions of the traditional mulatta melodramas. In conven-
tional tales, mulattas are punished for desiring to be white.
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Julie Dash’s Illusions 371
Dash’s passing heroine realizes the possibilities of some of her
desires, and if we are to believe the narrative, Mignon will con-
tinue to do so without retribution. Ultimately, unlike Pecola,
Mignon does not reject the black mother; nor does she cease to
aspire towards power and authority in the white man’s world, as
does the title character of the 1949 film Pinky. Mignon maintains
a relationship to, and a sense of responsibility for, her people.
Dash is to be commended for exploring the conventions of the
mulatta tale. As much as is possible she subverts the passing
tale, and in owning it, she is able to exploit its oppositional
possibilities. However, unless the form as well as the content of
the passing tale is challenged, these possibilities remain severely
limited.
The traditional mulatta is a character for white audiences,
created to bring whites to an understanding of the effects of
racism and, in so doing, encourage both their sympathy and
empathy. The passing tale calls for agency on the part of the
white viewer. Dash attempts to make Mignon a figure with whom
black viewers identify, but to do so we would have to perform the
trick of mimicry employed by Esther. We would have to close our
eyes and pretend it’s us up there. Under what conditions can we
identify with a heroine of the passing melodrama, particularly
when her mulatta visibility depends upon the erasure or
marginalization of black women? Ultimately there are no true
stories, only differing conditions of visibility determined and ex-
acerbated by race, gender, and the politics of color.
Before Esther appears on the scene, we share Mignon’s secret; we
empathize with the masquerade. We know; we participate in the lie.
We are silent. Esther’s entry precipitates our rebellion, our mutiny.
When she appears, our identification with Mignon is ruptured. The
violence perpetrated against her body by the cinematic apparatus
and the contradictory impulses of a black womanist identity poli-
tics begin to trouble us. At the moment of rupture, we reclaim
ourselves; we break the confines of representation and no longer
comply to the violating conditions of our representability. Anger
and resentment are the afterthoughts of this rupture.
Mignon facilitates Esther’s consumption by the cinematic ap-
paratus; Mignon is literally the masquerading subject of media-
tion. The theft of Esther’s voice leaves her a sweet, smiling Negro
girl who consents to the symbolic circumcision of the excess of
the black voice-the threatening excess, that which might de-
stroy the imperial organ(ization) of vision and voice in the cin-
ema. Esther’s discarded body, like that of Bessie Mears, is
evidence of the act of violence. Yet her body merely supplements
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372 S. V. Hartman and Farah Jasmine Griffin
the grander violence of the mulatta tragedy, the inability to be
seen. Just as Bessie’s body is wheeled into the courtroom in
Native Son as the evidence which indicts Bigger for the violation
of Mary Dalton’s body, Esther’s body becomes the example of the
cinema’s terror and racism.
Mignon, not Esther, confronts and triumphs over this terror
and racism, or so we are to believe. Esther is the evidence, and
Mignon is the agent. Esther’s body serves as the vehicle for
Mignon’s infantile and narcissistic desires, the context in which
Mignon sees and does not see herself. Mignon’s identification
with Esther is both ambivalent and narcissistic: She sees Esther
as both sister and mother, yet she is cognizant of herself as
different-as a fair, virtually white, black woman. The encounter
of Esther as mirror of Mignon’s sameness and difference cata-
lyzes Mignon’s agency. Esther’s own agency seems confined to
witnessing and pretending.
In closing her eyes and pretending to be on the screen, Esther
must first repress the violence which has resulted in the dissoci-
ation of voice and body. In order to succumb to the fantasy, she
must comply with the agent responsible for the violence. How-
ever, her pleasure is premised on the denial of the violence.
Unlike Esther, we cannot deny the violence done to the black
female body in order to maintain our identification and our plea-
sure. To identify with Mignon would be to accept our position as
subordinate to her, to engage in an act of self-hatred. Though
Dash attempts to establish a relationship of equality between
Esther and Mignon, between the black woman viewer and Mi-
gnon, that relationship is a farce. Mignon occupies a space of
privilege denied black women. Our only healthy response to her
is ultimately one of rejection.
It is important to consider the dynamics of spectatorship, be-
cause the film raises questions concerning our identities as
black women and problematizes the meaning of sisterhood.
Illusions exemplifies the difficulty of representing anything as
grand or as totalizing as a black female subject, and its problem-
atic lies in its utopian longing to present a unified black female
perspective. Can we assume a position of the black female viewer
or subject? The varieties of black women’s experience determine
our viewing relationship. What we see is informed by our differ-
ences: our color, class background, education, politics, and sex-
uality. Black women have been made visible in Hollywood film
only as they are subject to the cinema’s violence. Dehumanized
by the gaze, our screeches, our screams, our rolling eyes, our
extended bosoms, and our infernal heat have been the guaran-
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Julie Dash’s Illusions 373
tors of Others’ pleasure. How does one represent she who has
been made visible only in order to insure her abjection and
subordination? How does one represent she who is seen only so
that she may feel the play of power on her body? “Unseen,
unspoken, and awaiting her verb,” writes Hortense Spillers (76).
Can black women be represented as subjects within a visual
economy organized by a hierarchical regime of difference? At
what costs and to what ends?
Iusions raises the difficult question “How can blackness be truly
represented, if at all?” It decodes the conventions of the dominant
cinematic and representational practices. In employing the conven-
tions of the mulatta tale, Dash problematizes the meaning of sister-
hood in the confines of domination and affords us a way to talk
about differences among ourselves, rather than solely in relation to
whiteness. This leads us to question the necessary fiction of the
black female subject. As resisting spectators who refuse to identifIr
with the heroine or to suspend disbelief, our contradictory position
as spectators is foregrounded. The dynamics of color and privi-
lege in the film unveil the fiction of an essential black female
subject, while the film utilizes strategic essentialism in its cri-
tique of Hollywood’s racism. Spectatorship is determined not
only by issues of race, gender, sexuality, and class, but also by
issues of caste and color and aesthetic predisposition.
Once we have rejected opting for a passive pleasure, re-
jected closing our eyes and pretending it’s us, rejected as-
sisting one another in masquerades that render us invisible,
we come to realize that the possibility of our pleasure lies in
defiance-the rapturous rupture, the unleashing of aggres-
sion against the cinematic apparatus and disrupting the
terms of our (in~visibility.
Works Cited
Carby, Hazel. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Black
Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.
Ellison, Ralph. The Shadow and the Act.” Reporter 6 Dec. 1949. Shadow
and Act. New York: Signet, 1966. 264-7 1.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann.
New York: Grove, 1967.
Lieberman, Rhonda. “‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’: Vampires, Tech-No-Bod-
ies, Cinema.” Unpublished essay, 1988.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987.
Silverman, Kaja. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis
and Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988.
Spillers, Hortense J. “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words.” Pleasure and
Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality. Ed. Carol S. Vance. Boston:
Routledge, 1984. 73- 100.
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All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
- Contents
- Issue Table of Contents
[361]
362
363
364
365
366
367
368
369
370
371
372
373
Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 25, No. 2, Black Film Issue (Summer, 1991), pp. 213-436
Front Matter [pp. 213-374]
Introduction: [Black Film] [pp. 217-219]
A No-Theory Theory of Contemporary Black Cinema [pp. 221-236]
Spike Lee and the Commerce of Culture [pp. 237-252]
But Compared to what?: Reading Realism, Representation, and Essentialism in School Daze, do the Right Thing, and the Spike Lee Discourse [pp. 253-282]
The Nature of Mother in Dreaming Rivers [pp. 283-298]
Ganja and Hess: Vampires, Sex, and Addictions [pp. 299-314]
Negotiations of Ideology, Manhood, and Family in Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts [pp. 315-322]
An Interview with Charles Burnett [pp. 323-334]
Thoughts and Concepts: The Making of Ashes and Embers [pp. 335-350]
Micheaux: Celebrating Blackness [pp. 351-360]
Are You as Colored as that Negro?: The Politics of Being Seen in Julie Dash’s Illusions [pp. 361-373]
Dialogic Modes of Representing Africa(s): Womanist Film [pp. 375-388]
Black Macho Revisited: Reflections of a Snap! Queen [pp. 389-394]
Encounters: The Film Odyssey of Camille Billops [pp. 395-408]
Delta Scalene: A Passage Through Mississippi Triangle [pp. 409-416]
God’s Angry Man [pp. 417-420]
“The Subject is Money”: Reconsidering the Black Film Audience as a Theoretical Paradigm [pp. 421-432]
Afterthoughts on the Black American Film Festival [pp. 433-436]
Back Matter
83
At its best, the university can be a generative nexus where creative minds
collaborate and facilitate each other’s expression, where diff erences are
catalyzed into productive synergy. The Black fi lmmakers who came
together at UCLA starting in the late 1960s, a group that Clyde Taylor
retrospectively designated as the “L.A. Rebellion,” were from a variety
of places, including southern towns and cities, New Mexico, Texas,
New York City, various neighborhoods in Los Angeles, and even Haiti
and Ethiopia.1 The shared experience of being fi lm students at UCLA,
specifi cally fi lm students of color, fostered a bond between them in spite
of their diverse backgrounds and life trajectories to that point. As much
as the process of studying fi lm in a university consisted of learning the
necessary skills, techniques, and history of fi lmmaking, working with a
medium that had historically been mobilized in the persistent marginal-
izing and dehumanizing of people of color necessitated approaching
fi lmmaking with circumspection. It required a radical unlearning. In
these students’ work, as Taylor observed, “Every code of classical cin-
ema was rudely smashed—conventions of editing, framing, storytelling,
time, and space.”2 They were likewise committed to questioning cultural
assumptions about representation, as well as challenging institutional
practices and many aspects of the fi lm school curriculum.
Of the many meanings of “rebellion” that Taylor’s appellation
invokes, the act of unlearning is the most foundational to the collectivi-
zation of these student fi lmmakers. This was initially practiced in the
2
Rebellious Unlearning
UCLA Project One Films (1967–1978)
ALLYSON NADIA FIELD
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Account: s6876347.main.ehost
84 | Allyson Nadia Field
Project One assignment, the fi rst fi lm made by each student after arriving
at UCLA. The Project One process established a spirit of collectivity
among the Black fi lmmakers and other student fi lmmakers of color,
allowing open exploration of the medium of fi lm. From an initial dis-
mantling of formal conventions, the student fi lmmakers experimented
with diff erent strategies for articulating notions of Black “authenticity.”
Such a totalizing goal was of necessity complicated, and the ambition of
the fi lmmakers’ projects, coupled with the fact that these are student
fi lms, means that we are dealing with a body of work that is at once
uneven and diffi cult to categorize. Yet with the unruliness of the Project
One fi lms comes incredible energy, vibrancy, and a rawness that refl ect
the cultural environment in which they were made and its affi liated polit-
ical movements, social concerns, and problematic gender expectations.
The fi lms assert the claim, as Taylor put it, “Black cinema spoken here!”3
For something described as a group, the L.A. Rebellion is unusual in
that it was not a collective of fi lmmakers with a shared background or
a common political or aesthetic agenda. Rather, it was defi ned by a
network of relationships woven through the experience of making fi lms
as students at UCLA. The L.A. Rebellion fi lmmakers were shaped across
decades by a shared collaborative process that impacted not only how
they made fi lms but what was in them. Because of this, a straightfor-
ward typology of the Project One fi lms would suggest a coherent and
deliberate project incongruous with the more open association of the
Black students, other fi lmmakers of color, and like-minded “fellow
travelers.” Even so, there are a number of themes and formal aspects
that characterize this body of work to the extent that certain tendencies
emerge and common concerns can be traced across the fi lms. Taken as
a whole, these fi lms refl ect a general and not necessarily linear trajectory
from pessimism and near nihilism to an optimistic belief in the capacity
of fi lm to catalyze social change. The Project One fi lms also laid the
foundation for the subsequent works produced by these fi lmmakers at
UCLA and beyond.
While the fi lm school at UCLA had a few notable Black alumni by
1968, such as Ike Jones and William Crain, it was the multiethnic stu-
dent-led Media Urban Crisis Committee (MUCC, cheekily dubbed the
“Mother Muccers”) that resulted in the establishment of the Ethno-
Communications Program the following year, enabling more Black stu-
dents to enroll in signifi cant numbers.4 While students came into the
fi lm school through a variety of channels, the Ethno-Communications
Program was the primary catalyst for collaboration among fi lmmakers
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Rebellious Unlearning | 85
of color. Students formed multiethnic crews on one another’s shoots,
but they were especially encouraged to work within their minority
groups and to produce fi lms that refl ected the communities from which
they came. There was certainly a naïve assumption operating here about
community, one that elides diff erences of gender, class, and geographic
origin and segments students along the reductive category of ethnic
identity. Thus, this emphasis created confl icts for some students, such as
the women who often had to contend with male colleagues who were
arguably enacting internalized patriarchal hierarchies through their
work and their collaborative styles. Indeed, the gender dynamics that
emerge from the fi lm school’s pedagogical model merit further explora-
tion, especially the ways in which the “assertive nationalism,” as David
James has characterized these early works, was manifested through gen-
der.5 Nonetheless, the Ethno-Communications Program off ered stu-
dents access to dedicated equipment and encouraged them to tell stories
that refl ected their experiences (rather than those that conformed to
industry expectations). The collaborative pedagogical model served the
purpose of the students’ socially conscious goals.
This essay surveys a series of extant and nonextant Project One fi lms
made by sixteen of the African American students in the fi lm school at
UCLA between 1967 and 1978. This is the group retrospectively recog-
nized by Taylor as the L.A. Rebellion and by Ntongela Masilela as the
fi rst and second “waves” of the Los Angeles School of Black Filmmak-
ers: Charles Burnett, Larry Clark, Thomas Penick, Haile Gerima, Billy
Woodberry, Jamaa Fanaka, Ben Caldwell, Don Amis, O.Funmilayo
Makarah, Alile Sharon Larkin, Bernard Nicolas, Jacqueline Frazier,
Carroll Parrott Blue, Barbara McCullough, Julie Dash, and Melvonna
Ballenger.6 In looking at the fi rst student fi lms of these fi lmmakers, I will
trace several overarching themes and formal strategies that account for
the changing dynamics, interests, and foci across the decade following
the establishment of the Ethno-Communications Program.
The Project One assignment was a standard part of the MFA curricu-
lum that was then applied to the undergraduate program in Ethno-
Communications, so both the undergraduate and graduate students
who would later be termed the “L.A. Rebellion” typically made a
Project One fi lm. “Like an initiation” into fi lm school, it set technical
parameters for student work while allowing aspiring fi lmmakers to
explore a subject of their choosing.7 The minimal constraints were that
fi lms had to be shot in 8mm nonsynchronous sound, with the option of
a 16mm mag soundtrack mixed by the student. Added in the editing
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86 | Allyson Nadia Field
process, sound was a crucial element in L.A. Rebellion Project One
fi lms: both sound and image were subjected to critical rethinking as the
fi lmmakers experimented with creative combinations of fi lm elements.
In particular, the sonic structure of the L.A. Rebellion Project One fi lms
demonstrates an investment in representing the multilayered textures of
the fi lmmakers’ experiences, not just complementing the fi lms’ visual
elements but serving key narrative and formal functions.
Project One functioned like a laboratory for experimenting with the
medium of fi lm as a means of expression, and the fi lms demonstrate this
sense of formal experimentation that would be foundational for the
fi lmmakers’ later work. Each student wrote, produced, directed, and
edited his or her own Project One fi lm, which was then screened and
critiqued by faculty and fellow students.8 The faculty stipulated that
Project One fi lms should be around three minutes, but the fi lms made
by the students of color tended to be signifi cantly longer. As Larry Clark
recollects, “Well you’ve kept us quiet all these years, and you give us a
chance to speak and you can’t tell us it’s got to be three minutes, it’s
whatever you want it to be!”9 Giving the students ample leeway to
design the projects on their own, the faculty emphasized the individual-
ity of each student’s voice, stressing that they did not want all fi lms
coming out of UCLA to look the same.10
In general, the Project One fi lms of Black students centered on issues
of race, class, and community, though the fi lms covered a range of top-
ics aff ecting African American people and their communities: rising
political consciousness (Tamu [Dir. Larry Clark, 1970], Hour Glass
[Dir. Haile Gerima, 1971], Rain/(Nyesha) [Dir. Melvonna Ballenger,
1978], Daydream Therapy [Dir. Bernard Nicolas, 1977]); notions of
patriotism and cultural belonging (Apple Pie [Dir. O.Funmilayo Maka-
rah, 1975]); drug abuse (Tamu, A Day in the Life of Willie Faust [Dir.
Jamaa Fanaka, 1972]); domestic labor (The Kitchen [Dir. Alile Sharon
Larkin, 1975], Daydream Therapy); social oppression and mental
health (Charles Burnett’s untitled Project One [1968], The Kitchen);
representational disenfranchisement (Medea [Dir. Ben Caldwell, 1973]);
identity, self-determination, and cultural pride (Hour Glass, Ujamii
Uhuru Schule [Dir. Don Amis, 1974], The Diary of an African Nun
[Dir. Julie Dash, 1977]); family (Chephren-Khafra: Two Years of a
Dynasty [Dir. Barbara McCullough, 1977], Hidden Memories [Dir.
Jacqueline Frazier, 1977]); cross-generational dialogue (Two Women
[Dir. Carroll Parrott Blue, 1977]); unplanned pregnancy and abortion
(Hidden Memories); sexual assault (Billy Woodberry’s untitled Project
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Rebellious Unlearning | 87
One [1973], Willie Faust, 69 Pickup [Dir. Thomas Penick, 1969], Day-
dream Therapy); and interracial sex (Charles Burnett’s untitled Project
One, 69 Pickup). While sharing a commitment to social relevance, the
fi lms employed a variety of formal strategies from narrative to the
avant-garde, fi ction to documentary. Many of the fi lms are replete with
references, allusions, slogans, and symbols of political commitment
(Tamu, Hour Glass, Daydream Therapy). Others are more formally
restrained but no less critically invested (Ujamii, The Diary of an Afri-
can Nun). Through the Project One fi lms, the Black student fi lmmakers
demonstrated an eagerness to rethink cinema as a medium of communi-
cation, critique, persuasion, and activism.
Film students were encouraged to work on one another’s shoots,
ostensibly to gain valuable experience in production.11 Designed to model
the collaborative aspect of industrial fi lmmaking, the group-project
aspect of the Project One process also refl ected the collective nature of
contemporary social movements with which most students closely identi-
fi ed. The camaraderie that emerged in the Project One process, fostered
through shared experience and “sweat,” united students from diff erent
backgrounds and life experiences to create lasting respect among them.12
Filmmakers who would later be seen as diametrically opposite in style
and purpose (such as Ben Caldwell and Jamaa Fanaka) collaborated on
early fi lms.13 The students also bonded in the “bull pen,” the nickname
for the Project One editing room. Often staying consecutive nights in the
editing room where they were practically living, the sleep-deprived stu-
dents edited and synched their fi lms by hand. As Julie Dash described the
atmosphere in the editing room, “Everyone’s complaining, miserable—it
was great.”14 It is this act of collaboration, perhaps even more than polit-
ical commitments, resistance to Hollywood aesthetics, and shared experi-
ence, that characterizes the L.A. Rebellion as a collective group, however
informal or loosely defi ned.
In an educational environment, part of the students’ unlearning had
to do with determining from whom to learn. With the faculty taking a
hands-off approach to the Project One process, the mentorship of the
older students, particularly Burnett, Gerima, and Clark, was especially
signifi cant to the younger students of color. In the mid-1970s, Charles
Burnett served as a TA for the Project One class and was an unoffi cial
mentor to many more, to the extent that he earned the nickname “the
Professor.” This kind of internal mentorship was necessary because
the fi lmmakers of color felt they received little support from others. The
atmosphere, as one fi lmmaker recalls, was like “the inmates running the
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88 | Allyson Nadia Field
asylum.”15 Yet the inmates did not always get along. While the atmos-
phere was “creatively chaotic,” Burnett recalls the combination of per-
sonalities that comprised the UCLA fi lm school as “explosive.”16 Along-
side the fi lmmakers of color were many students from privileged
backgrounds who had not been exposed to the kinds of issues explored
in the fi lms of minority fi lmmakers. When the students would screen the
fi lms for the faculty and fellow students, the fi lms made by the African
and African American students were often met with stunned silence,
what Alile Sharon Larkin characterizes as the recognition that “this is
something new and diff erent.”17 At the same time, many narratives were
met with skepticism from an audience so culturally removed from the
subject. Critical comments often centered on the veracity of a story,
dismissing troubling subject matter (such as police brutality) with, “Oh,
that couldn’t happen.”18 Gerima became so frustrated with the disbelief
of his fellow students over issues such as police brutality that he wrote
a monologue called “The Bunch of Mr. Convince Me” to motivate him-
self to continue doing the kind of work that he found signifi cant.19
The skepticism and general disconnect from inner-city realities prev-
alent on the Westwood campus should certainly be considered contrib-
uting factors to both the relentlessness of some of the works (the
unfl inching camera of Bush Mama [Dir. Haile Gerima, 1975], the pro-
longed church sequences in As Above, So Below [Dir. Larry Clark,
1973]) and the documentary impulse behind many of them (the use of
photographs of a demonstration against Eula Love’s killing by the
LAPD in Gidget Meets Hondo [Dir. Bernard Nicolas, 1980], the sys-
tematic documentation of Medea and I & I [Dir. Ben Caldwell, 1979],
the location shooting in Watts and use of non-professional actors from
the community in Killer of Sheep [Dir. Charles Burnett, 1977]). This
same skepticism and general disconnect also explain, in part, the asser-
tive tendency of the early Project One fi lms; their shocking content can
be read as a manifestation of aggression born out of frustration on the
part of students who, at least in the early years, were seen by some
white faculty, administrators, and students as out of place in the fi lm
department. Frustrations with the curriculum, though, sometimes
erupted in creative ways, such as in Haile Gerima’s “The Death of Tar-
zan,” made for a design course and lauded by one of the Chicano stu-
dents in the class for killing “that diaper-wearing imperialist,” and in
the critical reimaginings of Gunsmoke (1955–75), a television series
used so frequently for the basic editing course that the class was com-
monly referred to just by the title of the show.20
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Rebellious Unlearning | 89
Charles Burnett entered UCLA in 1967, a year prior to the organiza-
tion of MUCC. As UCLA did not have an enforced policy of archiving
student fi lms, Burnett’s untitled fi rst fi lm is believed to be no longer
extant.21 He shot it on a Bolex with a Switar lens, borrowed from his
TA, using regular 8mm Kodak color fi lm.22 Burnett had gone to school
with the artist Michael Cummings and featured him as a Black artist
who chokes his white nude model after making love to her.23 Shortly
after Burnett arrived, Thomas Penick came to UCLA and made his fi rst
fi lm, with Burnett as director of photography. 69 Pickup is about two
Black men who pick up a white woman and then rob, sexually assault,
and beat her.24 Penick made the fi lm shortly after breaking up with a
girlfriend and was admittedly angry. The woman, played by a UCLA
theater student, stood on Western and Adams, an unusual spot for a
white woman to be hitchhiking at the time, which led to numerous cars
pulling over and interrupting the shoot.25
The Project One fi lms of Burnett and Penick, who perceived them-
selves to be outsiders in the insular world of UCLA, demonstrate an
assertive resistance to white middle-class sensibilities. Their presenta-
tion of interracial taboos around sex evokes contemporary revolution-
ary discourses. While neither of these fi lms is overtly political (in the
sense of Eldridge Cleaver’s assertion that raping white women was “an
insurrectionary act”),26 they inherently reference the disturbing sexual
politics of certain aspects of the Black Power and Black Arts move-
ments, such as that conveyed in sections of Cleaver’s 1968 Soul on Ice
and the work of Amiri Baraka, where the idea of poetry as a weapon of
action extends to imagined physical violence. While Burnett and Penick
challenge white patriarchal norms, their acts of resistance actually serve
to reinforce those same norms through a form of racialized misogyny.
Thus, although Jamaa Fanaka is often singled out as embracing aspects
of exploitation cinema that put him at odds with many of his class-
mates, Burnett’s and Penick’s Project One fi lms show that he was not
alone in portraying women as sexualized objects of male fantasy. (In
fact, while Fanaka’s later work arguably draws from sexually exploita-
tive elements of popular “Blaxploitation” cinema, his second feature
fi lm made at UCLA, Emma Mae [1976], centers on an active and strong
woman protagonist who is neither a victim nor subordinate to any
man.) The otherwise progressive fi lms of some of the male fi lmmakers
arguably perpetuate the fetishization of fi gures such as Angela Davis or
fall back on stereotypes or voyeuristic fi lmmaking, something that sev-
eral of the fi lmmakers themselves acknowledged was a concern.27 The
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90 | Allyson Nadia Field
fi lmmakers also rehearse patriarchal and nationalist notions of gender
roles in these early fi lms and in this respect refl ect contemporary debates
about the role of women in revolutionary struggle.
The machismo evident in some of these early fi lms extended to the
classroom, where professors reportedly felt intimidated by the perceived
aggression of the male students of color. Larry Clark recalls one instance
of a run-in with the faculty:
They would show Birth of a Nation [Dir. D. W. Griffi th, 1915], and it was
always prefaced, “Well, we’re not going to talk about the sociological parts,
we will talk about the fi lm itself as cinema.” Now how can you not with
Birth of a Nation? And so one year this professor was going to show Birth
of a Nation and Haile Gerima and Francisco Martinez walk to the front of
the room and one grabbed one arm and the other grabbed the other arm,
they lifted him up and carried him out of Melnitz Hall and went back and
taught the class.28
Incidents like this arguably prompted the faculty to admit more women
in subsequent admissions cycles in an attempt to neutralize the aggres-
sion of the male students of color.29
Other student fi lmmakers of color aimed to present positive images
of their respective cultural experiences that would correct the misrepre-
sentation prevalent in mainstream culture. As with Third Cinema prac-
titioners, they were concerned with modeling resistance through narra-
tive choices and cinematic language. Inspired by Glauber Rocha, Larry
Clark recalled, “We were thinking more, really truly more of cinema as
a gun.”30 Like many of his colleagues, Clark came to UCLA with a
strong social mission that seemed well suited to the fi lm school’s col-
laborative emphasis and multicultural orientation. Clark had been pres-
ident of the Black Students Union in college in Ohio, and when he fi rst
came to UCLA he fi rst went to the Afro-American Studies Program,
which pointed him to Elyseo Taylor and the new Ethno-Communica-
tions Program in the fi lm school. At the same time, Clark was deter-
mined to get involved in the cultural community off campus: “I made
myself a promise that I would have one foot in UCLA and another foot
in the community.”31 To this end, he became involved with PASLA (Per-
forming Arts Society of Los Angeles), an all-Black theater company
founded by Vantile Whitfi eld in 1964 to train inner-city youth in the
performing arts.32 Clark started a fi lm workshop with the support of
Whitfi eld and met both Nathaniel Taylor and Ted Lange at PASLA, as
well as most of his crew for As Above, So Below and Passing Through
(1977).
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Rebellious Unlearning | 91
With Tamu, his Project One fi lm (shot on Super 8), Clark set out to
counter Hollywood’s negative stereotyping. “I wanted to do something
positive,” he explained. The desire to produce positive images proved to
be more complex than he initially expected. He describes the process as
an “Aha! Eureka!” moment:
I am editing the fi lm and I get a rough cut and I say “Jesus Christ!” and I saw
this fi lm is just as negative and stereotypical as anything coming out of Hol-
lywood. And that’s when I really realized how deep this stuff is—people say,
“Oh, I’m not infl uenced by Hollywood,” even if you are a person of color
you pick up on these same negative things. So then you realize “I have some
work to do”; you can’t just say, “I’m going to do something that’s not nega-
tive.” Those are good intentions, but how do you get there? You have to
unlearn a lot of stuff .33
He ended up recutting the whole fi lm “to salvage it.”34 The Project One
experience made Clark realize that fi lm could be a powerful medium for
him to convey his message through writing and directing.35 In the fi nal
edit, Tamu was twelve minutes long and imagines the thought processes
of two fi gures, based on Eldridge Cleaver and Angela Davis, as they
develop their consciousness against the realities of drug infi ltration and
other systemic means of perpetuating a Black urban underclass. Con-
currently, the fi lm imagines a relationship between the two fi gures who
are represented as both specifi c Black leaders through references to
Cleaver and Davis and relatable everymen through the generality of
their portrayal.
Clark’s fi lms are generally notable for the way they mobilize politi-
cally progressive contemporary jazz and spoken word artists to proff er
a critique of Black disenfranchisement and political apathy. In Tamu,
the soundtrack indicates political commitment and demonstrates the
cultural fl uency with music that Clark and many of his colleagues had
while they were learning the technical skills of fi lmmaking. The musical
samples, in fact, express the thematic concerns of the fi lm in a more
coherent critical perspective than the narrative diegesis, opening up a
rich terrain to comprehend the fi lm’s loose narrative structure. The fi lm
begins with Pharoah Sanders’s “Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah”
from the 1969 album Jewels of Thought, as the Eldridge Cleaver fi gure
sits in his car in the rain watching a junkie across the street, wondering
in an internal monologue if the problems of the day are any diff erent
than before. After a rapid montage of images representing historical
oppressions of Black people, the man concludes that the issues are the
same: “the only diff erence is that there are bigger and better forms of
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92 | Allyson Nadia Field
control and repression.” He then goes on to connect the struggles in the
United States to international liberation movements as he drives through
a neighborhood replete with wig shops and other visual markers of
broad disenfranchisement of the Black urban underclass. Later, The
Last Poets’ “Two Little Boys” is heard over a scene in which the man
witnesses two boys stealing a purse from an elderly woman, followed
by an excerpt from Malcolm X’s “Message to the Grass Roots” on the
necessity of overcoming diff erences between Black people. This excerpt
motivates the man to think about Black-on-Black violence, referencing
Frantz Fanon’s characterization of the internalized violence of the
oppressed. At the end of an impassioned internal monologue, he asserts
that “what we need is a revolution,” motivating a cut to a wanted
poster for “Eldridge Brown,” who is listed as “Interstate Flight Revolu-
tionary” (a subversion and reimagining of the FBI’s poster for Cleaver
that announced assault with the intent to commit murder).
The next section of the fi lm follows the Angela Davis character,
introduced in her apartment making coff ee, a Patrice Lumumba poster
hanging in her kitchen and Miles Davis’s “Sanctuary” from the 1970
album Bitches Brew playing extradiegetically. The Davis fi gure refl ects
FIGURE 2.1. Tamu (Dir. Larry Clark, 1970).
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Rebellious Unlearning | 93
on the image of the Soledad Brothers in chains and cites Fanon, “the
oppressor always overreacts to the actions of the oppressed,” conclud-
ing, like the Cleaver fi gure, that “what we need is a revolution.” The
two characters then meet as he climbs the stairs to her apartment as the
opening theme from Pharoah Sanders replays. Reaching her, he draws
her close to him and tells her, “Hey baby, you’re the one. The true Black
gold. The real Black gold. Ain’t going to ever miss the joy of calling you
sister.” The two fi gures then go outside, where the man observes the
junkie urinating against a wall with a PASLA tag. As if channeling the
intersection of the junkie’s subjectivity and that of Cleaver, the sound-
track samples The Last Poets’ “Jones Comin’ Down,” with Martin
Luther King Jr. saying “suddenly a great revolution is going on in our
world today, sweeping away an old order.” The Cleaver fi gure sees the
junkie standing under a stop sign and shakes his head in disapproval,
followed by Malcolm X proclaiming “revolution is in Asia, revolution
is in Africa.” Here, the situation of the disaff ected urban poor is juxta-
posed against global liberation movements.
The fi lm concludes with the junkie staggering off as Cleaver’s voice
declares the organization of the Black Panther Party: “We’re going to
develop a coalition all the way across this country and we’re going to
organize. Black Panther Party all across this country.” In this sense, the
organization of the Panthers is posited as an act of resistance to the dis-
enfranchisement of the poor, yet the optimism of the call to organize is
tempered by the sustained image of the junkie. Tamu portrays progres-
sive Black political activism as emerging from the actual conditions of
urban poverty and vying against counterforces detrimental to collective
action for the consciousness of the community within a patriarchal
framework. The fi lm then ends with a reimagined wanted poster for
“Tamu Davis,” who, like “Eldridge Brown,” is listed as “Interstate Flight
Revolutionary.” Although the fi lm is named Tamu and ends with the
wanted poster for Davis—Tamu was Davis’s African name—the fi lm
centers on the Cleaver fi gure. Davis’s revolutionary potential is circum-
scribed by the implicit gender expectations of Black revolution: the
Cleaver fi gure is portrayed as active as well as refl ective, while the Davis
fi gure is passive and refl ective, associated with domestic space and
delighting in the validation given to her by her male counterpart.
Like Tamu, Jamaa Fanaka’s 1972 Project One fi lm, A Day in the Life
of Willie Faust, highlights the abuse of drugs in the Black urban envi-
ronment. While Tamu grounds its social critique in the intellectual his-
tory of anti-imperialist struggles, Willie Faust allegorizes systemic
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94 | Allyson Nadia Field
oppression through the fi gure of an interracial corporate board oversee-
ing the “payment in full” of a junkie who has, in eff ect, sold his soul for
drugs. Where Tamu’s central protagonist observes the junkie from a
detached standpoint, Fanaka makes him the central fi gure, chronicling
a day in his life—a day predetermined by the plotting devil fi gure as his
last. Fanaka had read Goethe’s Faust while a student at Compton Com-
munity College, and with Willie Faust he contemporizes the Faust leg-
end by transposing the story to South Central Los Angeles. Like Clark,
in Willie Faust Fanaka mobilizes popular, politically engaged, and
socially conscious contemporary music to articulate the critique and
provide commentary on the narrative action. The fi lm’s episodic struc-
ture is punctuated by musical samples, as Fanaka draws from the
recently released soundtracks of Shaft (Dir. Gordon Parks, 1971) and
Super Fly (Dir. Gordon Parks Jr., 1972) as well as The Beatles’ “Come
Together” and the music of Pharoah Sanders.
The fi lm opens with Isaac Hayes’s “Walk from Regio’s” from the
soundtrack to Shaft, which serves as the entrance theme for the devil.
The devil is imagined as the president of an interracial corporation,
named Universal, whose board is meeting on the fi nal day of an execu-
tive seminar. While acknowledging the eff orts of Universal’s “archrival
Gabriel & Associates,” who endeavors to convince its clients to renege
on their agreements, the president tells the board that they will observe
one of the president’s own clients on the day in which his account is to
be “paid in full.” The scene then cuts to Willie, played by Fanaka him-
self, in bed with his wife, who sleeps as he tries to steal the cash she has
tucked in her bosom. Unsuccessful, he leaves the house as his wife tries
to quiet their crying baby. Willie breaks into a house, and after being
caught in the act of robbery and attempted rape, he escapes, shoplifts
from a supermarket, sells what he stole to a pool hall, and buys drugs on
a street corner. Against Curtis Mayfi eld’s theme from Super Fly, the
drug dealing scene is shot from across the street as if from a surveillance
camera or the perspective of a removed observer, like the evil corporate
board or even that of an audience titillated by the spectacle of an urban
underworld in fi lms such as Shaft and Super Fly. As the fi lm is structured
with a framing device so that the entire unfolding occurs through the
lens of the board members, the audience shares their privileged perspec-
tive and the spectator’s view is thereby complicit with Willie’s downfall.
Yet, if Fanaka denies the spectator the salaciousness of the drug deal,
keeping his camera at a distance, he unfl inchingly presents the overdose
in an extended shoot-up sequence. After buying drugs, Willie returns
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Rebellious Unlearning | 95
home to his baby crying, goes into the bathroom and shoots up to Isaac
Hayes’s rendition of Charles Chalmers’s “One Big Unhappy Family.”
Then, when the heroin is injected, Pharoah Sanders’s “Black Unity”
comes on, musically expressing the eff ects of heroin on Willie; it obliter-
ates the “unhappy family” with Sanders’s free jazz. Yet the Black unity
imagined by the music is rendered ironic through Willie’s self-imposed
isolation and self-destruction. In the absence of true Black unity, drug
abuse is able to infest. As Sanders’s saxophone punctuates Willie’s deadly
high, Fanaka intercuts close-up shots of the corporate board members
laughing directly at the camera, watching Willie as we do. As Willie
slowly overdoses, the laughter of the board members becomes increas-
ingly grotesque, merging with the shrill saxophone. While at fi rst “Black
Unity” signaled a release from the demands of his crying baby and plead-
ing wife, as Willie dies the saxophone becomes like an alarm crying for
help while the board members laugh in sadistic delight. When Willie col-
lapses to the fl oor, the board members collectively rise in a standing ova-
tion, celebrating the conquest of another soul.
The fi lm ends with Willie’s wife discovering his overdose as the board
members look on in amusement. Following an intertitle “paid in full,”
FIGURE 2.2. A Day in the Life of Willie Faust, or Death on the Installment Plan (Dir. Jamaa
Fanaka, 1972).
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96 | Allyson Nadia Field
Willie’s wife tries to revive him as their baby cries. The fi lm concludes
with the fi rst verse of “The Creator Has a Master Plan (Peace),” sung
by Leon Thomas and recorded in 1969 with Pharoah Sanders. The fi nal
song is thematically circular in that it conjures a pre-Fall idyll “when
peace was on the earth, and joy and happiness did reign, and each man
knew his worth.” The nostalgic optimism of the lyrics is subverted by
the cynicism of the board’s ruthless “cashing in” of Willie’s debt. As a
social critique, Willie Faust draws from Super Fly’s and Shaft’s recogni-
tion of economic and racialized inequities—captured through the street
scenes that, like Bush Mama, reveal the commercial reinforcement of
the disenfranchisement of the urban underclass (such as wig stores and
pawn shops)—while complicating these two fi lms’ voyeuristic aesthetic.
In the initial course screening, Willie Faust was reportedly well
received, which Fanaka found invigorating—“I loved it! That’s when
the directing bug bit me.”36 Fanaka went on to make an unprecedented
three feature fi lms while a student at UCLA. While these fi lms were cri-
tiqued by some fellow fi lmmakers for their commercialism, with charges
of replicating stereotypes rather than exploding them (especially the
Penitentiary [1979, 1982, 1987] series), the message, execution, and
narrative of Willie Faust are consistent with the formal and thematic
concerns of the other Black fi lmmakers at UCLA at the time, and the
work exhibits characteristics that would later be identifi ed as represent-
ing a fi lm movement.
Fanaka’s use of allegory is also present in Haile Gerima’s Project One
fi lm, Hour Glass, made in 1971. Where Fanaka imagines the devil made
fl esh as a CEO, overseeing a corporate board of evil executives who plot
to win souls through drug addiction, Gerima imagines college basketball
culture as a contemporary iteration of the brutality of ancient Roman
gladiator matches. Hour Glass serves as a kind of bridge between the
more narrative projects of fi lmmakers such as Fanaka and the experi-
mental works of fi lmmakers such as Ben Caldwell and Barbara McCul-
lough, as it embeds formally experimental sequences within a larger nar-
rative trajectory centered on a single protagonist. Hour Glass is a
fourteen-minute fi lm shot by Gerima and Larry Clark, made with Clark’s
leftover Super 8 fi lm that he gave to support Gerima (who had just
entered the fi lm school from the Theater Department).37 Such sharing of
unused fi lm was a common practice among the L.A. Rebellion fi lmmak-
ers and supportive African American fi lmmakers working in Hollywood
(such as Carlton Moss, who gave Clark a box of short ends that contrib-
uted to Passing Through).38 Hour Glass was edited after Gerima dreamt
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Rebellious Unlearning | 97
the fi lm rolling through his mind, and he edited it the way he had dreamt
it. Dreams became a signifi cant part of Gerima’s fi lmmaking process; his
Project Two fi lm, Child of Resistance (1972), came out of a dream he
had after seeing the image of Angela Davis in handcuff s.39
Like Gerima’s later features Bush Mama, Ashes & Embers, and
Sankofa (1993), Hour Glass chronicles a protagonist’s coming into
political consciousness, assuming a sense of identity and self-worth. In
Hour Glass, a Black college athlete becomes politicized, rejects the role
assigned to him on campus, and moves to a Black community. Even
more directly than Child of Resistance, Hour Glass is a laboratory of
ideas for Bush Mama. Most notably, it shares with the later feature an
interest in capturing on fi lm the vibrancy of the Black community, con-
trasted with the hostility of the university and the imagined fi ckle toler-
ance of white students for the Black student athlete. Gerima’s critique
of the way Black student athletes provide entertainment for white spec-
tators certainly echoes the tensions he must have observed between the
campus politics of that era and the championship years of UCLA’s
men’s basketball team under celebrated coach John Wooden. Hour
Glass captures the spirit of players such as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (Lew
Alcindor), a Bruin who boycotted the 1968 Olympics in protest against
America’s treatments of its Black citizens. Abdul-Jabbar was inspired
by sociologist Harry Edwards, who encouraged the boycott, proclaim-
ing, “It’s time for the black people to stand up as men and women and
refuse to be utilized as performing animals for a little extra dog food.”40
Still, despite its resonance with actual events, the fi lm is highly sym-
bolic and weaves narrative diegesis and dreamscape, color and black
and white (a strategy Gerima will employ in his next fi lm, Child of
Resistance). As with Gerima’s later work, the soundscape is key for
understanding the fi lm. Just like the bureaucratic voices that occupy
Dorothy’s mind in Bush Mama, the soundtrack of Hour Glass func-
tions as the externalization of the mental subjectivity of the student
athlete. The subjective soundscape also triggers the visual projection of
the athlete’s fantasies. As Larry Clark did in Tamu, Gerima samples the
socially conscious spoken word poetry of The Last Poets and the
speeches of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Angela Davis.
Hour Glass opens in black and white with a striking extreme low-
angle shot of a young Black man with a noose around his neck, the sound
of a clock ticking. This leads to an extended basketball sequence in which
the player imagines the white spectators as modern-day Roman emper-
ors, deriving sadistic pleasure from the physical battles of combatting
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98 | Allyson Nadia Field
slaves. Later in his dorm room, the student athlete reads postcolonial
theory and Black liberation literature, and he imagines a nightmarish
scene of a naked Black boy trapped in a prison cell full of liquor bottles
and a frightening elderly white woman who snatches the sheets away
from him to reveal they are in fact portraits of civil rights leaders. She
hangs the sheet portraits of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. on
the wall, only to have them immediately crossed out by shadows and the
sounds of bullets and screaming. As she tries to take the sheet bearing
Angela Davis’s image, the boy resists and holds on to the portrait. This
gendered fantasy scene of successful defi ance is followed by the student
athlete intervening between the camera and Davis’s poster, packing his
bags, leaving the dorm, and moving to a Black community as Elaine
Brown’s “Seize the Time” plays on the soundtrack. In addition to com-
menting on the political issues concerning Black student athletes, the
story draws from Gerima’s own experiences as a student at UCLA. Hour
Glass exhibits the frustration and alienation that Gerima felt at UCLA
while also refl ecting the growing political consciousness of the Black stu-
dent body in the wake of the 1969 Campbell Hall shootings, the fi ring of
Angela Davis, and the founding of the ethnic studies centers. Most of the
fi lmmakers strongly identifi ed with the Black Panthers and their critique
of American imperialism at home and abroad. The male fantasy of pro-
FIGURE 2.3. Hour Glass (Dir. Haile Gerima, 1971).
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Rebellious Unlearning | 99
tecting Angela Davis that is evident in Tamu and Hour Glass refl ects the
gendered politics of the Black Panthers but also springs from the general
outrage against the pervasive mistreatment of Black women.
For his Project One fi lm, Billy Woodberry drew from an actual inci-
dent that took place in Chicago yet represented widespread police mis-
conduct toward African Americans and the historical sexual abuse of
Black women by white men. The story centers on a young girl who was
sexually assaulted by the police; initially ignored, when the incident was
reported to the Panthers they pursued the offi cer and demanded justice.
Woodberry took the story from the Black Panther Party newspaper and
used it as voice-over narration for his fi lm.41 Another story Woodberry
wove through the fi lm centers on the attractive girlfriend of a member
of his Marxist study group. In retrospect, Woodberry realized he had
shot the woman voyeuristically and that as a result the fi lm was unsuc-
cessful and “a mess because of two confl icting impulses or ideas.”42 The
instance where the girl is captured by the police in their car is shown
abstractly—“the only thing you really see is shadow and light”—relying
on narration to convey the full signifi cance of the incident. Woodberry
recollects the response Gerima had to the use of the newspaper story as
narration: “Haile told me, wonderfully, you don’t talk a fi lm, you show
a fi lm.”43 (Gerima would show a similar atrocity in the climactic scene
of Bush Mama.)
Woodberry praised the relative freedom of the Project One experi-
ence, in which the fi lmmakers were free to explore images that intrigued
them: “I do this thing at the end of the fi lm, just a car driving on a wet
street. Why? Because I liked shooting a car driving on a wet street.”44
Like a number of other Project One fi lms, Woodberry featured traveling
shots of people on the street to create a sense of urban ambiance, in this
case fi lming skid row as a stand-in for Chicago. Though grappling with
how to avoid a voyeuristic gaze, and how to best structure a narrative,
Woodberry’s fi lm demonstrates a commitment to bringing to light rac-
ist atrocities and to recentering cinematic language to focus on the
neglected stories of the urban African American underclass. The narra-
tive of the fi lm is an evident precedent for Woodberry’s later works, The
Pocketbook (1980) and Bless Their Little Hearts (begun in 1978 and
completed in 1984).
The critical focus of Project One fi lms was not simply on the present,
as Black student fi lmmakers also evinced an interest in exploring the
damaging historical trajectory of racist imagery that had gained such a
stronghold in the visual representation of African Americans, particularly
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100 | Allyson Nadia Field
in Hollywood and popular culture. O.Funmilayo Makarah’s 1975
Project One, Apple Pie, is a refl ection on the bicentennial in which she
asked diff erent people what they thought about America. Choosing an
all-male multiracial group of more advanced students, she asked her sub-
jects to sing “The Star Spangled Banner.” She refl ects, “No one could do
it, and at the very end I had a group of people singing it and it was so out
of tune and so wrong that it was a good comment on America about
everybody.”45 With Apple Pie, Makarah off ered a critical perspective on
the dissonance between the offi cial national discourse of the bicentennial
celebrations and the “true reality” of inequality and racism.46
The work of Ben Caldwell similarly refl ects on questions of represen-
tation and the role of visual culture in systemic racism. Engaging with a
diff erent project than many of his classmates, who saw him as “off into
the cultural part,” Caldwell privileged cultural questions over a specifi c
political project conveyed through narrative storytelling.47 Still, Cald-
well’s work exhibits fl uency with the same set of intellectual references
as his classmates, drawing from contemporary Black Arts writings and
a selectively curated visual arsenal. These diff erences and similarities
sparked intense dialogues and led to decades-long conversations about
the nature of fi lm and art, most notably in his collaborations with
Charles Burnett. As Caldwell remembers, “It helped make really engag-
ing discussions because we were all very diff erent and we were all from
diff erent places. So all of that diff erence was really engaging, even though
that same diff erence made it impossible for us to organize a name for the
organization, but part of it had a lot to do with the reason we were
together was to be diff erent. We were trying to make Western thinking
concepts out of something that was very antithetical to it.”48 It was in
such ways that the process of fi lmmaking could unify the students of
color far more than a single style or voice. The questions that the minor-
ity students brought to their work demonstrated a shared consciousness,
however elastic, that informed their work and their collaboration.
The six-and-a-half-minute long Medea was submitted as Caldwell’s
Project One, under the supervision of Haile Gerima, the TA for the
course. Caldwell describes the collage fi lm as being about “all of the
information that comes into a child before it’s born.”49 The title Medea
for a fi lm concerned with the preexisting world into which a child is born
references the immediate threat that will confront the child as well as the
history of infanticide as a gesture of resistance. In Euripides’s version,
Medea is a scorned barbarian woman who kills her children to exact
vengeance for her husband’s betrayal. Caldwell has a diff erent account,
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Rebellious Unlearning | 101
one based on the view of Margaret Garner as a modern Medea, a posi-
tion that took imaginative hold in antislavery discourse, most notably in
Thomas Satterwhite Noble’s 1867 painting The Modern Medea. Subse-
quent invocations of Medea in an African American context have carried
a tone of gravitas, cognizant of the complexities and ambivalences of
bringing children into a world of such totalizing inequity.50
Using an animation crane, Caldwell linked static images “kind of like
the history of art in ten seconds,” conveying “the history of the birth of
this young man in those few minutes.”51 Editing in the camera, that is,
shooting sequentially and precisely so that there is minimal postproduc-
tion editing necessary, Caldwell worked on the interplay between stasis
and motion in a single image: “Within each picture is also an innate
movement even though it is a static picture.”52 Accompanying these
images, a woman’s voice recites Amiri Baraka’s poem “Part of the Doc-
trine” from Black Magic: Collected Poetry, 1961–1967. The amalgama-
tion of still images comprises a collected history of representations of
culture, mainly African and African American, chronicling early cultural
encounters through the history of segregation and civil rights struggles.
Caldwell uses a myriad array of examples, ranging from white ethno-
graphic images to contemporary photojournalistic representations to a
FIGURE 2.4. Medea (Dir. Ben Caldwell, 1973).
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102 | Allyson Nadia Field
history of Black self-representation. In the fi lm, these images function
like fl ashes of memory, the collected mental subjectivity of a people’s
history, the history that the unborn child will inherit.
Caldwell’s collected images counter the persistent dehumanizing
images perpetuated in Western visual culture. But, as his initial invoca-
tion suggests, they are also a kind of “comeback” whereby the ethno-
graphic images give way to twentieth-century moments of empower-
ment, resistance, and affi rmation. Caldwell, in fact, came to the idea for
the fi lm as he was becoming interested in the ways in which fi lm could
function as “ritual and spell”:
I’ve noticed that a lot of those subliminal images were threaded throughout
fi lms in the history of fi lmmaking and all those things were to the demise of
my culture. It was like jigaboos and funny things and subtle implications of
who we are and that’s because we were conquered and the conqueror was
the one that was showing these fi lms. You could see with Birth of a Nation,
no subtleties there but they played like it was subtle and I had to fi ght for
imagery. [. . .] I felt we had to work against that kind of symbology and we
had to change the ritual.53
To change the ritual, he cites the tradition of “making the tools work
towards our story”:
That’s why I ended up on that road of really seeing it as a way of emancipat-
ing the image. So that’s the reason I got involved with the fi rst frame. With
each frame I wonder, how does it look, how was it operated, and we as
humans see each frame. It changes your view, and so how are they related to
each other almost like poems? Each was created within the poem, there is no
word stronger than the word before it or the word that it’s about to follow;
it’s the same thing with pictures.54
By editing in the camera, Caldwell creates a kind of visual poetry akin
to jazz or spoken word, where the impact is aff ected by the real-time
experimentation with visual collage. The live-action sequences feature
cloud patterns in the sky, a pregnant Black woman, and a young child
holding a balloon that bursts at the end as Caldwell cites a passage from
Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons: “A culture provides iden-
tity, purpose and direction. If you know who you are, you’ll know who
your enemy is. You’ll also know what to do, what is your purpose.”
Caldwell uses an experimental form to articulate a gendered national-
ism predicated on a practice of othering.
As in Medea, Don Amis’s nine-minute Project One fi lm, Ujamii
Uhuru Schule Community Freedom School, uses documentary tech-
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Rebellious Unlearning | 103
niques to understand the process of transmitting knowledge to future
generations. One of the few Project One fi lms entirely documentary in
approach, Ujamii is a portrait of an Afrocentric elementary school a
few blocks west of Crenshaw on West Adams in Los Angeles. Perhaps
because of this documentary impulse, Ujamii moves away from the pes-
simism of the previous Project One fi lms to present a more positive
celebration of Black cultural practice and cross-generational affi rma-
tion. Amis came to UCLA through the High Potential Program and saw
himself as coming to the university from “a community perspective”; he
made his Project One to take back to the community, ultimately giving
the school the original negative. He described his decision to fi lm at the
school: “I visited the school and checked it out. And I thought it was a
good visual. It was a lot of activity, a lot of kids, adults, a lot of cultural
history going on, a lot of self-awareness, a lot of self-respect, a lot of
teaching about things that weren’t being taught any place else at the
time.”55 He fi lmed on three occasions, and by the end of his fi lming the
students were used to the camera and he was able to get a number of
cutaway shots. Amis recalls, “Being part of the community, being in
that environment, knowing what was going on, looking and dressing
like everyone else, it made the actual fi lming of that project easy.”56
Ujamii is shot in an observational mode, showing a day in the life
that captures the artwork, slogans, images, and sounds that comprise
the Community Freedom School. Against these images and the sound of
drums and students repeating slogans, a teacher explains in voice-over
the educational philosophy of the school and the commitment to cor-
recting the misperception of Black inferiority perpetuated by the public
school system. With an emphasis on pride and heritage, the school
exemplifi es the educational mission of the Black Power movement. (It is
the kind of school that the fi ctional Tovi attends in Alile Sharon Lar-
kin’s Your Children Come Back to You [1979].) When Ujamii was
screened for the UCLA faculty and students, Amis recalls that they were
shocked and surprised because the majority of fi lms made by Black stu-
dents were fi ction narratives. Apart from Chicano and Asian American
students who were making community-based documentaries, the fi lm
school was largely sequestered from the diverse ethnic communities of
greater Los Angeles. Amis recalls, “Nobody was bringing what was
going on in the community or outside of UCLA—what was going on in
the real world into the campus or onto the screen. [. . .] Nobody was
doing what was going on around them. And there was everything—
there was so much going on at that time.”57 With Ujamii, Amis presents
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104 | Allyson Nadia Field
a celebratory portrait of the transformative power of early education,
an optimism markedly resilient in the context of repeated attacks on
Black Power, civil rights, and progressive politics that were coming to
dominate the tenor of the era. By focusing on the positive message of
self-respect and self-determination, Amis provides a stark contrast to
the Project One fi lms that turned a lens on the damage of such extreme
social inequity, to both the individual psyche and the collective con-
sciousness.
Made the following year, Alile Sharon Larkin’s fi rst fi lm demon-
strates the power of the message of “Black Is Beautiful” championed by
the Community Freedom School and how harmful the absence of posi-
tive images could be. Made in 1975 as her Project One and shot in
Pasadena, The Kitchen is a six-minute narrative fi lm about the psycho-
logical damage caused by a beauty culture that values straight hair over
“natural” African American hair. The fi lm lays bare the psychological
damage caused by Eurocentric beauty culture, a theme taken up by
other Black student fi lmmakers who critiqued the proliferation of
wigs and wig shops in urban Black communities (e.g., in Tamu, Willie
Faust, and Bush Mama, among others). The surviving copy does not
FIGURE 2.5. Ujamii Uhuru Schule Community Freedom School (Dir. Don Amis, 1974).
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Rebellious Unlearning | 105
have synch sound, though the original soundtrack consisted of a wom-
an’s stream of consciousness narration that expressed her wish to look
like her white employer, with long, straight hair.58 Like several other
Project One fi lms, The Kitchen has a nonlinear structure and the plot
unfolds through the protagonist’s fl ashbacks.
The Kitchen begins with a straitjacketed young woman in a near-
catatonic state being led down an institutional hallway into a cell. She
repeatedly strokes a wig she wears and does not allow the nurse to
remove it. The cause of her breakdown is made evident through a series
of fl ashbacks intercut with her institutionalization. These fl ashbacks
show her working as a domestic in the home of a white woman, roughly
brushing her daughter’s coarse hair, and then primping her daughter’s
hair as they wait for a bus. The concerns of the fl ashbacks—her place of
employment and her relationship with her daughter—become linked as
the fi lm unfolds, as she turns out to be obsessed with the quest for
straight hair. While ironing in the background, she watches mesmerized
as her employer brushes her own daughter’s long, straight hair. Dis-
tracted, she burns the ironing and the smell of burning interrupts the
employer: in the foreground of the frame, she and her daughter rapidly
turn around to face the burning ironing and whip their long, straight
hair, as if to punctuate the cause of distraction. The employer rushes to
the maid and angrily points to the ruined ironing, trying to shake her
out of the reverie, but the maid just reaches for the employer’s straight
hair, running it through her fi ngers.
The most haunting sequence is the subsequent fl ashback, where we
see the maid’s daughter running toward her, smiling and excited. The
reverse shot shows the mother smiling at her daughter, but when the
shot returns to the daughter we see that the mother does not see her
daughter as she is but as she wishes her to be: in a dress with perfectly
coiff ed hair, twirling around and enacting a classical type of prettiness.
The idealized daughter is intercut with the real daughter wearing
a T-shirt, pants, and sweater tied around her waist and less styled hair.
Her mother’s hand enters the frame and yanks the daughter by the
hair, and the fi lm cuts to the two of them in the kitchen as the mother
roughly combs the daughter’s hair with a straightening comb, causing
the young girl pain. The mother heats up the comb on the stove so that
it is smoking and holds it on her daughter’s head. The daughter strug-
gles, but the mother keeps her grip. Larkin allows the camera to linger
on the torture of the young girl to register the horror of the dam-
age, physical and psychological, caused by an impossible ideal. After
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106 | Allyson Nadia Field
the mother’s psychosis has resulted in the maiming of her daughter, the
scene cuts back to the mother in the institution, shaken from her coma-
tose state by the memory and subdued by the nurses in a straitjacket.
The Kitchen is a thematic corollary to Haile Gerima’s Bush Mama,
made the same year. Like the young mother in The Kitchen, through
much of Bush Mama Dorothy has a glazed, detached stare. Gerima
chronicles her awakening political consciousness and her assumption of
her own self-worth, culminating when she declares that “the wig is off ,”
both a literal statement—she removes her wig—and a fi gurative marker
of resistance to hegemonic disenfranchisement. But where Dorothy is
motivated to action to protect her daughter, whom she discovers being
raped by a policeman, the mother in The Kitchen is awakened from her
comatose state only after she realizes the horror that she has infl icted on
her daughter due to her own internalization of her distorted self-image.
Both fi lms depict the political and social disenfranchisement of poor
African Americans as violently played out on the bodies of the young
daughters.
While The Kitchen depicts the displaced frustrations of a working-
class mother, Jacqueline Frazier’s Project One fi lm, Hidden Memories,
FIGURE 2.6. The Kitchen (Dir. Alile Sharon Larkin, 1975).
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Rebellious Unlearning | 107
focuses on a middle-class notion of family in tension with the profes-
sional ambitions of a Black woman. Made in 1977 and set in Los Ange-
les, Hidden Memories is a ten-minute narrative fi lm featuring Mary
Porterfi eld as a college student who gets pregnant and chooses an abor-
tion in order to attend graduate school. Frazier was invested in narra-
tive storytelling, “When I came to UCLA and was seeing all these other
peoples’ fi lms . . . it was all this abstract stuff , and I’m like, ‘What the
hell is that? I want a story. I want to tell a story. That’s what I’m here
to do.’ So that’s what I did.”59
With The Supremes’ “Refl ections” as the main theme, Hidden Mem-
ories presents its action through a fl ashback within a presumably con-
temporary frame. The fi lm opens in color with an elated couple holding
a newborn baby. The camera tracks in on the baby, motivating a fl ash-
back shot in black and white that depicts the mother as a student. She
approaches her boyfriend, who is fl irting with another woman, and
despite misgivings she goes home with him. After he leaves, she realizes
she has missed her period and goes to the clinic for a test. At the clinic,
the nurse tells her that her pregnancy test is positive and the word “pos-
itive” echoes repeatedly. She is distraught but, watching kids play, saves
a young boy from running in the street and being hit by a car, as if to
suggest that her maternal instincts are in place despite the pregnancy
being a surprise. She fi nds her boyfriend, who is again fl irting with other
women, and her confession “I am pregnant” again echoes. At home, she
opens a letter announcing her acceptance to the Stanford School of
Journalism for fall quarter 1967, indicating that the fl ashback likely
takes place a decade earlier. Embracing her mother, she hears on the
radio an announcement for an abortion clinic.
The abortion sequence is the most striking part of the short fi lm, as
the doctor and nurse are shot through a distorted lens and their reassur-
ing banter seems grotesque against the woman’s screams and moans.
(The scene recalls Dorothy’s abortion nightmare in Bush Mama.) The
fi lm then returns to the present day, in color, and the woman looks out
as if refl ecting on the past. She walks past her husband picking fl owers,
and as he off ers her one she smiles and embraces him. She is then shown
inside, cooking, an activity intercut with shots of her holding the new-
born with her husband—the same shot that opened the fi lm—and shots
of her next to her sleeping husband, holding his head adoringly. These
juxtapositions reframe the initial shots with the newborn as if to situate
the birth of their baby as a corrective to the fl ashback of the past, itself
represented in black and white. The hidden memories of the abortion
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108 | Allyson Nadia Field
are thereby supplanted by the joyful memories of marriage and mother-
hood. Despite the use of such contrasts, Hidden Memories does not
judge the protagonist’s actions but rather presents her choices as legiti-
mate, her “proper” marriage functioning as a redemptive ending to the
traumatic experience of choosing abortion a decade earlier. Yet, with
this narrative resolution, the fi lm curiously validates a middle-class
ideal of family as compatible with the woman’s professional ambition.
Marriage and education may not be presented as in confl ict, but the
fi lm’s social vision is dependent on the woman’s choosing an appropri-
ate partner and her pregnancy’s occurring within the stability of a mid-
dle-class marriage.
The Project One fi lms of Carroll Parrott Blue and Barbara McCul-
lough, both made in 1977, also center on issues of the family and deal
with cross-generational dialogue.60 Two Women centers around Blue’s
aunt, who was in her eighties, and a teenage girl. Blue explains, “I was
making comparisons about what it meant to be an older Black woman
and young Black woman and how their philosophies about life were dif-
ferent.”61 McCullough’s Chephren-Khafra: Two Years of a Dynasty fea-
tures the fi lmmaker’s two-year-old son and weaves together moving
FIGURE 2.7. Hidden Memories (Dir. Jacqueline Frazier, 1977).
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Rebellious Unlearning | 109
images and still photography in a personal portrait. As the title suggests,
the interest in Egyptian and other African histories, as well as the rela-
tionship between the Black diaspora and Africa, was an important theme
in the fi lm. Chephren-Khafra also prefi gures fi lms such as I & I, Your
Children Come Back to You, Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purifi –
cation (Dir. Barbara McCullough, 1979), Cycles (Dir. Zeinabu irene
Davis, 1989), Daughters of the Dust (Dir. Julie Dash, 1991), and Sankofa.
An interest in Africa is likewise present in Julie Dash’s The Diary of
an African Nun, a fi lm that refl ects on the tenuous and often damaging
relationships that result from cultural dissonance. Made in 1977, Dash’s
Project One is an adaptation of an Alice Walker short story, featuring
the magnetic Barbara O. Jones as a nun in Uganda questioning her faith
and cultural belonging.62 Dash matriculated at UCLA after attending
the American Film Institute, where she had already written Four Women
(1975) and Illusions (1982) (she would direct Four Women for her
Project Two and Illusions for her thesis fi lm). As Dash had more experi-
ence than most of her classmates, The Diary of an African Nun demon-
strates a polish and professionalism rarely found in their fi rst (or even
second) fi lms. Dash was inspired to adapt Walker’s story because of the
striking image of the nun’s habit and a photograph that she encoun-
tered, which appears in the fi lm and was used for its publicity, of several
white nuns surrounded by a group of Black children. The contrast of
the habit with the environment, along with the inner turmoil expressed
by Walker’s protagonist, led Dash to want to see that woman come to
life and to visualize her confl ict.63 She also saw the story as relevant to
contemporary Black life, to issues of assimilation, class mobility, cul-
tural authenticity, and individual aspirations. Moreover, she was struck
by Walker’s way of describing the nun’s confl ict, the nun’s knowing
that she was bringing “death to an imaginative people” yet at the same
time believing that she was ultimately working in their best interest.64
Though set in Uganda, Diary thematically resonates with the Project
One fi lms set in Los Angeles through its concern with women’s choices
and with telling stories about women’s lives that are “personal and dif-
ferent” from what is typically shown on screen.65
One of the strongest feminist fi lms made as a Project One is Bernard
Nicolas’s Daydream Therapy. In it, Nicolas subverts the Hollywood rep-
resentation of the fi gure of the Black maid, who labors in the margins of
the narrative and the frame, by centering both on the daily chores of such
a worker and on her interior and intellectual space. While Bush Mama
would later imagine a voice for the systemically silenced, Daydream
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110 | Allyson Nadia Field
FIGURE 2.8. Production photograph, The Diary of an African Nun
(Dir. Julie Dash, 1977). Collection of Julie Dash.
Therapy already treats that voice as resistant, militant, and self-possessed,
envisioning the fantasy life of a hotel worker whose daydreams provide
an escape from workplace indignities. Made in 1977 under the supervi-
sion of Robert Nakamura, who was teaching the Project One course at
the time, Daydream Therapy is set to Nina Simone’s haunting rendition
of “Pirate Jenny” (from Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny
Opera) and concludes with Archie Shepp’s “Things Have Got to
Change.” As in Bush Mama, which opens with documentary footage of
the LAPD harassing Gerima and his crew, the shoot of Daydream Ther-
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Rebellious Unlearning | 111
apy was interrupted by the local sheriff who was alarmed at the sight of,
in Nicolas’s words, a “bizarre assemblage” of a dozen Black people with
strange costumes surrounding a white man apparently bleeding on the
ground in Burton Chace Park in Marina del Rey.66 Of course Nicolas was
shooting guerilla-style, without the necessary permits, but the white actor
who played the hotel manager had gone to school with the sheriff and
was able to explain that it was a student fi lm and thus diff used the situa-
tion. The fi lm was well received and Nicolas subsequently entered it in a
number of festivals, winning several awards—including fi rst place in its
category at the Philadelphia International Film Festival.
Like Gerima’s Hour Glass, Nicolas alternates between black-and-
white and color images to express the increasing indignation and
FIGURE 2.9. Handwritten insert, The Diary of an African Nun (Dir. Julie Dash, 1977).
Collection of Julie Dash.
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112 | Allyson Nadia Field
political consciousness of the protagonist as she resists sexual exploita-
tion by her boss. As Jacqueline Stewart has pointed out, Nicolas draws
from Third Cinema and avant-garde precursors—such as Ousmane Sem-
bène’s La Noire de . . . (1966) and Maya Deren and Alexander Ham-
mid’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)—but reimagines their endings to
replace impasse with resilience.67 With precision, Nicolas frames his pro-
tagonist with the sharp diagonals of the furniture and architecture that
make up her work environment, from the wooden table she lifts as she
vacuums to the railings of the steps in front of an offi ce building where
she sits to have her lunch. Spatially confi ned, she fi nds liberation through
her imagination. Looking out beyond the immediate concrete surround-
ings, she fantasizes about an insurrection of which she is the leader. With
creative geography that connects downtown Los Angeles’s banking
center to the shore at Marina del Rey, the fi lm depicts Black pirates who
abduct the hotel manager and look to the domestic worker for instruc-
tion for whether to kill the captive “now or later.” Dressed in her regular
clothes (rather than her maid’s uniform) and holding a child, she opens
her eyes wide as Nina Simone whispers “right now,” silently conveying
the death sentence. A sword is raised over the victimizer turned victim,
and the fi lm cuts back to the woman distractedly eating chips while star-
ing out to the distance, daydreaming as the music shifts to Archie Shepp’s
“Things Have Got to Change.” The woman gets up and leaves. No
longer statically framed, she now moves through the urbanscape, the
camera barely keeping pace as it fi lms her rapidly moving legs and body,
intercut with matching shots in color of her briskly walking in red pants
as she caries a copy of Kwame Nkrumah’s Class Struggle in Africa (1970).
As the fi lm toggles between the maid in black and white and her polit-
ically conscious self in color, we see her carrying a sign announcing
“don’t just dream, fight for what you want.” The color image of her
marching with the sign cuts to a black-and-white shot of her holding a
camera, leading to a color image of her marching with the camera and
fi nally a shot of her marching with a rifl e. The trajectory from thought to
action—book to camera to gun—is literalized through montage. When
she returns to work, walking through the sliding-glass doors of the hotel,
she is armed with the militant consciousness that serves as her “therapy.”
The fi lm ends with the optimistic intertitle “the beginning . . . ” and iden-
tifi es Nicolas not as director but as “Answerable,” just as Gerima identi-
fi es himself in the opening titles of Bush Mama.
A self-styled revolutionary, Nicolas was foremost an activist who
turned to fi lmmaking as a tool of activism. It is fi tting, then, that he
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Rebellious Unlearning | 113
portrayed a young revolutionary in Melvonna Ballenger’s Project One
fi lm, Rain/(Nyesha), made in 1978. Like Daydream Therapy, the six-
teen-minute narrative of Rain is concerned with political consciousness,
in this case of a young typist played by Evlynne Braithwaite. Ballenger
chronicles the woman’s increasing political awareness at the encourage-
ment of an activist, played by Nicolas, whom she meets as he is handing
out fl yers on the street. The soundtrack of the fi lm poetically brings
together voice-over refl ections of the two protagonists with John Col-
trane’s “After the Rain,” celebrating the will to personal transforma-
tion and demonstrating how personal changes are refl ections of broader
political transformations. Rain is fi gured as a metaphor for revolu-
tion—cleansing “the atmosphere of elements detrimental to the human
mind and to all of nature”—and the fi lm concludes with the optimistic
refrain, “Storm winds are blowing.”
Though concerned with political consciousness, the fi lm is equally
invested in depicting the quotidian routine of its protagonist. As Zein-
abu irene Davis, in Cycles, would later explore the personal space of a
young African American woman living alone, Ballenger here gives atten-
tion to the small gestures that comprise her protagonist’s daily routine,
including showering and dressing.68 This attention is lovingly presented
even while Ballenger’s subject speaks of her “dreary routine.” By start-
ing the fi lm with the character in her own home, Ballenger simply yet
radically positions the Black female body within its own context, not as
defi ned in relation to others—whether men, white people, strangers, or
employers. Ballenger thus radically defi nes the locus of identity and self-
respect as something innate rather than externally catalyzed. The typist
may have been encouraged by the radical’s outreach eff orts, but, as the
character explains in voice-over, change comes from within, and by
changing yourself you change those around you. Unusually for Project
One fi lms, as the protagonist becomes increasingly politically aware, the
gender roles correspondingly change: she shifts the typing to the activist,
making him type up his manifesto in a feminist gesture that belies the
machismo of much contemporary revolutionary rhetoric.69 The fi lm
thus refl ects the mission of its fi ctional activist, who types the manifesto
for a fi lmmaking collective: “The fi lm co-op is a progressive group of
fi lmmakers dedicated to developing strong and positive images of the
minority peoples in their respective communities.”
This fi ctional collective is likely an echo of the collaborative emphasis
of Ethno-Communications, as well as the work of other groups coming
out of UCLA (such as Visual Communications). The collective also
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114 | Allyson Nadia Field
presents an ideal image of what organized collaboration would look like
had the Black fi lmmakers of the L.A. Rebellion formalized their collectiv-
ity. With “the fi lm co-op,” Ballenger echoes the commitment of Ethno-
Communications to presenting positive images of people of color that
would serve as a corrective to the myriad misrepresentations prevalent in
mainstream culture. Like Hour Glass, Ujamii, and Daydream Therapy,
Rain is optimistic about the possibility of personal and political change.
What the vast and varied Project One fi lms show is that, as much as
the fi lmmakers were rooted in their communities, UCLA was a tremen-
dous infl uence on their work, fostering an environment where creative
experimentation through rebellious unlearning was possible. UCLA not
only gave access to equipment and facilities; it also provided exposure
to world cinema (thanks to Elyseo Taylor and Teshome Gabriel) and
off ered camaraderie and collaboration among the students of color and
their “fellow travelers,” other progressive and politically engaged stu-
dent fi lmmakers from a broad range of backgrounds. Through the
Project One fi lms, we can see the nascent coming together of ideas,
styles, themes, and goals that would become emblematic of this Los
Angeles–based Black independent fi lm movement.
FIGURE 2.10. Rain / (Nyesha) (Dir. Melvonna Ballenger, 1978).
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Rebellious Unlearning | 115
The Project One fi lms are the least known of each fi lmmaker’s creative
oeuvre, as many have not been seen since their initial showing in UCLA’s
Melnitz Hall screening room and a few subsequent festival appearances.
However, thanks to the eff orts of the UCLA Film & Television Archive
and the tenacity of the fi lmmakers who saved their work in whatever
format possible, we are now able to revisit these early works. Doing so
gives us a fuller appreciation of the creative trajectories of the Black fi lm-
makers at UCLA during this period and an understanding of the genesis
of the only Black independent fi lm movement to come out of a univer-
sity.70 Even if the Black fi lmmakers “graduated into a desert” rather than
a welcoming industry, as Gerima lamented, their Project One fi lms ena-
bled experimentation with fi lm form and a free exploration of thematic
concerns, providing the opportunity for student fi lmmakers to collabo-
rate and lay the foundation for their subsequent creative work.71 Through
this process of unlearning, the L.A. Rebellion fi lmmakers discovered that
“revolution” through fi lm is not so simple, and their later work is marked
by the rebellion born of these early experimentations with fi lm form.
NOTES
Many thanks to Chon Noriega for his insightful comments on an earlier draft
of this essay and to Daniel Morgan for his astute eye. Thanks also to Artel
Great and Samantha Sheppard for their research assistance.
1. Clyde Taylor, “The L.A. Rebellion: A Turning Point in Black Cinema,” in
Whitney Museum of American Art: The New American Filmmakers Series 26,
1–2 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1986).
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. See the introduction to this volume for a more thorough discussion of
MUCC and Ethno-Communications.
5. David E. James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography
of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2005), 305.
6. Taylor, “Turning Point”; Ntongela Masilela, “The Los Angeles School of
Black Filmmakers,” in Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara (New
York: Routledge, 1993), 107. While I focus on the key fi gures, there were other
Black fi lm students at UCLA at the time. The sixteen fi lmmakers I discuss here
refl ect the materials collected and oral histories conducted as part of the L.A.
Rebellion Preservation Project. Hopefully, more materials will continue to
become available to encourage wider consideration of even more student fi lm-
makers of color.
7. Bernard Nicolas, oral history interview by Allyson Nadia Field, Jan-Chris-
topher Horak, and Jacqueline Stewart, January 23, 2010, LAROH.
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116 | Allyson Nadia Field
8. Several fi lms had a more prolonged screening life outside of UCLA as they
circulated in festivals, though these were primarily in Europe where the fi lms’
political engagement and anti-Hollywood aesthetic were met with critical approval.
9. Larry Clark, oral history interview by Jan-Christopher Horak and Jacque-
line Stewart, June 2, 2010, LAROH.
10. Don Amis, oral history interview by Jacqueline Stewart, November 2,
2010, LAROH.
11. The connections between fi lmmakers can be traced in this volume’s
comprehensive fi lmography detailing their collaborations.
12. O.Funmilayo Makarah, e-mail correspondence with the author, April 6,
2012.
13. For example, Jamaa Fanaka performed in I & I (Dir. Ben Caldwell,
1979) and Ben Caldwell’s still photography appears in Welcome Home, Brother
Charles (Dir. Jamaa Fanaka, 1975).
14. Julie Dash, oral history interview by Allyson Field, Jan-Christopher
Horak, and Jacqueline Stewart, June 8, 2010, LAROH.
15. Monona Wali, “Roundtable: L.A. Rebellion: Then and Now,” at the
symposium “L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema,” UCLA Film &
Television Archive, Billy Wilder Theater, Los Angeles, November 12, 2011.
16. Charles Burnett, oral history interview by Allyson Field and Jacqueline
Stewart, June 7, 2010, LAROH; Clark, oral history.
17. Alile Sharon Larkin, oral history interview by Allyson Field, Jan-Chris-
topher Horak and Shannon Kelley, June 13, 2011, LAROH.
18. Ibid.
19. Haile Gerima, oral history interview by Jacqueline Stewart, Allyson
Field, Jan-Christopher Horak, and Zeinabu irene Davis, September 13, 2010,
LAROH.
20. Ibid.
21. Charles Burnett, conversation with author, March 11, 2012.
22. Burnett, oral history.
23. Michael Cummings, e-mail correspondence with the author, January 19,
2012. Cummings went on to become a renowned painter and quilter.
24. In his oral history, Penick recounts that 69 Pickup’s original ending had a
surrealist twist, with the three fi gures throwing balled-up newspapers around the
room, having fun. Penick states that in a fi t of anger he removed the ending because
the response from students and professors was that the ending was inconsistent.
Thomas Penick, oral history interview by Allyson Nadia Field, LAROH.
25. Ibid. The soundtrack of the fi lm does not survive.
26. Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York: Dell, 1968), 33.
27. See Billy Woodberry, oral history interview by Jacqueline Stewart, June
24, 2010, LAROH.
28. Clark, oral history. Notably, Clyde Taylor has written the most convinc-
ing argument against this type of pedagogy concerning Birth of a Nation. Clyde
Taylor, “The Re-Birth of the Aesthetic in Cinema,” Wide Angle 13, nos. 3/4
(July–October 1991): 12–30.
29. Several fi lmmakers have agreed with Teshome Gabriel’s assessment that
more women were admitted because the faculty “didn’t want to deal with the
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Rebellious Unlearning | 117
men anymore.” Teshome Gabriel, conversation with the author, October 21,
2009. See also Larkin, oral history.
30. Clark, oral history.
31. Q&A at screening of Passing Through (Dir. Larry Clark, 1977), Billy
Wilder Theater, Los Angeles, December 10, 2011.
32. Whitfi eld also appeared in Haile Gerima’s Ashes & Embers (1982).
33. Clark, oral history.
34. A perfectionist, Larry Clark would not permit Tamu to be shown in the
UCLA Film & Television Archive’s series “Creating a New Black Cinema.”
However, the fi lm can be viewed at UCLA’s Archive Research Study Center in
Powell Library, along with the other surviving fi lms of the L.A. Rebellion that
have been deposited at UCLA.
35. Clark, oral history.
36. Jamaa Fanaka, oral history interview by Allyson Field, Jan-Christopher
Horak, and Jacqueline Stewart, June 16, 2010, LAROH.
37. Gerima, oral history.
38. Clark, oral history.
39. Gerima, oral history.
40. Scott Moore, “Negroes to Boycott Olympics,” San Jose Mercury News,
November 24, 1967, 1.
41. Black Panther Newspaper 10, no. 7 (1973): 6 and 13.
42. Woodberry, oral history.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid.
45. O.Funmilayo Makarah, oral history interview by Jacqueline Stewart,
May 29, 2011, LAROH.
46. O.Funmilayo Makarah, e-mail correspondence with the author, April 6,
2012.
47. Ben Caldwell, oral history interview by Allyson Field and Jacqueline
Stewart, June 14, 2010, LAROH.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid.
50. Tyler Perry’s signature character Madea may seem to reference the clas-
sical myth, yet the character’s name more closely references the truncation of
“Ma’Dear,” a common appellation for African American matriarchs, derived
from southern Black culture.
51. Caldwell, oral history.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid.
55. Amis, oral history.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid.
58. Larkin, oral history.
59. Jacqueline Frazier, oral history interview by Jacqueline Stewart and Jan-
Christopher Horak, August 29, 2011, LAROH.
60. Neither of these fi lms is known to be extant.
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118 | Allyson Nadia Field
61. Carroll Parrot Blue, oral history interview by Allyson Field and Jacque-
line Stewart, June 23, 2010, LA Rebellion Oral History Project, UCLA Film &
Television Archive.
62. Walker’s short story was fi rst published in Freedomways: A Quarterly
Review of the Freedom Movement 8, no. 3 (Summer 1968), and subsequently
anthologized in Alice Walker, In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women
(Orlando, FL: Mariner Books, 1973), 113–18.
63. Julie Dash, interviewed by Barbara McCullough on Convergence, c.
1978–79, UCLA Film & Television Archive, inventory no. VA8025 M.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid.
66. Nicolas, oral history.
67. Jacqueline Stewart, “Defending Black Imagination: The ‘L.A. Rebellion’
School of Black Filmmakers,” in Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles,
1960–1980, ed. Kellie Jones (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, University of
California; New York: DelMonico Books/Prestel, 2011), 47.
68. For a thorough discussion of Cycles, see Kathleen Anne McHugh,
“Experimental Domesticities: Patricia Gruben’s The Central Character and
Zeinabu Davis’s Cycles,” in American Domesticity: From How-To Manual to
Hollywood Melodrama (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 179–94.
69. While it is not clear if Ballenger saw the fi lm, her interest in the intersec-
tion of political and domestic revolution echoes the great blacklisted fi lm of the
1950s, Salt of the Earth (Dir. Herbert Biberman, 1954).
70. Many of the Project One fi lms are now available for streaming on the
UCLA Film & Television Archive’s L.A. Rebellion website, www.cinema.ucla.
edu/la-rebellion.
71. Gerima, oral history.
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http://www.cinema.ucla.edu/la-rebellion
http://www.cinema.ucla.edu/la-rebellion
Valerie Smith
Reconstituting the Image: The Emergent Black Woman Director
Valerie Smith
Valerie Smith observes that Black women have entered into filmmaking more recently (this article was written in the 1988) as producers and directors.
The “earliest, and easily accessible film by a Black woman” was Madeline Anderson’s I am Somebody (1970). (711) Unfortunately, cutbacks in the grants for arts may have prevented other Black women from continuing and expanding their creative work.
Valerie Smith
Smith states that some Black female independents move away from cinematic realism because it often “manipulates the use of camera and its techniques of editing, lighting, and synchronization in ways that create the illusion that cinema is like life.” (711)
These filmmakers wanted to move away from that practice but Smith explains that independents using cinematic realism can still be transgressive in their work through their subject matter.
Valerie Smith
The work of many Black female independents was in documentary because that genre is usually cheaper. And, more importantly, documentaries “provide an opportunity for inscribing the untold accounts of Black public and private figures in the historical record.” (712)
She mentions several works that were documentary and those that were fictional films. Among the latter are Ayoka Chenzira’s Hair Piece: A Film for Nappyheaded People (1982) and Julie Dash’s Illusions (1982)
Graham Petrie
“Alternatives to Auteurs”
Graham Petrie
Graham Petrie starts with quotes from directors John Huston and Franklin Schaffner. Huston won the Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay Oscars for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). Schaffner won the Best Director Oscar for Patton (1970). Both directors mention the lack of control they had over their own content.
Graham Petrie starts with questioning the premise of auteur theory. He argues that the theory was developed to “by-pass the issue of who, ultimately, has control over a film.” (110)
Graham Petrie
He notes auteur theory ignores the “power conflicts and financial interests that are an integral part of any major movie project.” (110) He asks several important questions that are neglected in auteur theory:
“Who instigated the project, and for what motives?
Who wrote the script, and how much of it survived?
Who cast the film, and for what reasons?
Who edited the final product, and for what reasons?” (110)
Graham Petrie
Petrie posits that cinema needs to be thought of a “cooperative art and of the ways in which it thereby differs from fiction, poetry, painting, and even music and drama.” (111)
Graham Petrie
Petrie asks what is “visual style” and what type of control the auteurs really have over his/her visual style regarding
The lighting arrangement
“Choice of lenses, filters, and gauzes” (typically the preview of the cinematographer/director of photography”
Framing and composition
Moving or static camera
Type of location and setting
The color scheme of the film
Costumes and make-up
The basic editing rhythm
Graham Petrie
He then describes how
The director of cinematography would control the “balance of light and shadow, the visual effect of the close-ups, and the movement of the camera.”
The screenwriter may have established the “pattern, order, and the type of shot.”
The studio may have selected the costumes and sets.
The editor and producer “may create the final shape of the film between them without even consulting the director.” (111)
Graham Petrie
Petrie views the flaws of auteur theory as not only the “assumption that the director’s role is of primary importance as its naïve and often arrogant corollary that it is only the director who matters and that even the most minor work by auteur X is automatically more interesting than the best film of non-auteur Y.” (112)
He discusses the importance of actors to the filmmaking process. Bette Davis had a very specific artistry and “wielded much more power at Warner’s at that time than more directors (and even read her scripts right through before committing herself to filming them).” (112)
Graham Petrie
Petrie feels that directors were recognized for the personal touches before auteur theory came into existence. He argues that while one can recognize “recurring themes, characters, and situations that reappear throughout the work of many directors,” relying these alone may be deceptive. “The continuity may be the result of working within a certain genre, or for a particular studio, or in habitual collaboration with a favorite scriptwriter or actor.” (113)
Graham Petrie
He creates a list of filmmakers that he believes had almost complete control over their films. He then notes who stars, producers, cameramen, and scriptwriters had a personal style and influenced films as well.
Pauline Kael
“Circles and Squares”
Pauline Kael
Kael starts by examining the last part of Sarris’ “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962.” She questions his word choice (internal meaning as opposed to meaning; essentially feminine and virile) and then goes on to note how “we would never get anywhere with Sarris if we tried to examine what he is saying sentence by sentence.” (13)
Pauline Kael
Kael posits that auteur theory is not exceptional because “in every art form, critics traditionally notice and point out the way that artists borrow from themselves (as well as from others) and how the same devices, techniques, and themes reappear in their work.” (13)
She argues that “repetition without development is decline.” (13)
She explains that the way auteur theory has been explained is reductive; it’s basically a formula.
Pauline Kael
Her explanation of what critics do is educational: “Critics use a full range of intelligence and intuition, rather than relying on formulas. Criticism is an art, not a science, and a critic who follows rules will fail in one of his most important functions: perceiving what is original and important in new work and helping others to see.” (14) Also “it takes extraordinary intelligence and discrimination and taste to use any theory in the arts, and that without those qualities a theory becomes a rigid formula.” (14)
How do you feel critics function today?
Pauline Kael
Technical Competence
Kael delineates that Sarris’ first premise is shaky. “Sometimes the greatest artists in a medium by-pass or violate the simple technical competence that is so necessary for hacks.” (14)
“An artist who is not a good technician can indeed create new standards.” (14)
“Great new directors are very likely to be condemned precisely on the grounds that they’re even good directors, that they don’t know their ‘business.’” (14)
How does “knowing their business” change when directors are not white men?
5
Pauline Kael
“The director must be judged on the basis of what he produces – his films – and if he can make great films without knowing the standard methods.” (14)
Her frustration is that auteur critics seem enthralled with the routine material of directors.
Pauline Kael
Distinguishable Personality
Kael feels that this idea is not plausible. For example, we often notice a director’s style when the film is bad. She argues that Hitchcock had a “personal theory of audience psychology” more than personal style. And she thinks this demonstrates his contempt for audiences.
Note on Hitchcock.
Pauline Kael
She also notes who the auteurs dismiss
John Huston (see Graham Petrie)
She finds it problematic that Sarris then calls some of Huston’s good films “actors’ classics.”
For Kael, this category is a “cult of personality.” (17)
Pauline Kael
Interior Meaning
The auteur critics downgrade writer-directors (remember Sarris) because there is no tension between the director’s personality and the material.
Interior meaning is simply mystique.
For Kael, this type of formula seems to be desirable if the goal is to eliminate the critic.
However critics should “transmit their knowledge and enthusiasm for art to others.” (21)
Pauline Kael
She shows how this type of work is anti-art.
It can be dangerous because it doesn’t give new artists something to strive for in order to be unique.
And its definitions are lacking.. “you know it when you see it.”
Julie Dash Interview
“I Do Exist”: From “Black Insurgent” to Negotiating with the Hollywood Divide – A Conversation with Julie Dash by Michael Martin
Julie Dash Interview
Through this interview, we learn biographical details about Julie Dash. She was born and raised in the Queensbridge Projects in Long Island City, NY. From the Mark Anthony Neal interview, we discover that the singers Nas and the real Roxanne were also raised in Queensbridge.
Dash’s parents are from South Carolina and her father and his family practiced Gullah traditions.
She attends a film workshop at “the Studio Museum in Harlem.” She obtains a “BA in film production at the City College in New York.” (1)
Julie Dash Interview
Dash moves to Los Angeles wanting to attend UCLA but she did not have a letter of recommendation. She becomes a “producing and writing fellow at the American Film Institute.” (2)
While attending UCLA, she works with Charles Burnett, Billy Woodberry, Halie Gerima, Alile Sharon Larkin, Carroll Parrott Blue, Barbara McCullough, and Melvonna Ballenger.
Those Dash worked with have been called the “black insurgents,” “the Los Angeles School or LA Rebellion.” (2)
Julie Dash Interview
These students “engaged in interrogating conventions of dominant cinema, screening films of socially conscious cinema, and discussing ways to alter previous significations as they relate to Black people.” (2)
In this interview, Dash comments that she wants to re-define the way we see African American women on screen.
Julie Dash Interview
The group “engaged and were inspired by the writings of Third World theorists, the cultural texts and practices of the Black Arts Movement, and the anticolonial and postrevolutionary films and political tracts of the New Latin American Cinema Movement.”(2)
Julie Dash Interview
Dash is part of the second wave of the LA Rebellion.
Diary of an African Nun (1977) won a Director’s Guild of America Award
Illusions (1982) receives a Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame Award
Daughters of the Dust (1992) is the first feature film directed by an “African American woman to have a national theatrical release.” (3)
Julie Dash Interview
Dash works on television and video projects after Daughters. She observes that Hollywood “is still not quite open to what I have to offer.” She joins The Rosa Parks Story (2002) because Angela Bassett, the star and executive producer, requests her. Alfre Woodard star and executive producer of Funny Valentine (1998) also requests Dash.
Dash mentions that without those requests, she probably would not have been chosen for those projects.
Julie Dash Interview
She also delineates how Hollywood dismisses her. One producer tells her not to replicated Daughters of the Dust and an executive says “I’ve seen your movie – Daughters of the Dust. Let’s not even talk about it, let’s move on from here.” (4)
In light of these challenges, Martin asks her if she has had to compromise her “vision and artistry.” Dash responds, “I will always maintain the integrity of the subject matter whatever I am doing.” (4)
Julie Dash Interview
Dash discusses potential projects and then asks important questions about Black film at the time of the interview, 2006. Black romantic comedies were popular yet “who is deciding on which films will be made and which will not? What kinds of films are being made and why? Who is the audience? Are we just performing for white audiences? Are we being funny, are we dancing, are we singing, or are we now the love interest?” (5)
Julie Dash Interview
Dash comments that studios in Hollywood “claim the demographics show that they cannot afford to do films with a female lead.” (6) Remember she made this comment in October 2006. Studios are finally realizing this is a false claim.
She also believes that people in development “have a very myopic view of who we (Black people) are and what we are and what we want to do.” While continuing her discussion about how Daughters was received, she tells how people felt the film should have been a documentary or claims that there was no script for the film. (6)
Julie Dash Interview
She states that a foreign distributor felt that Daughters “wasn’t an authentic African American film. It wasn’t, like, from the hood, which is interesting to me, having grown up in the hood. Ironically, those filmmakers who make the ‘hood’ films haven’t necessarily grown up in the hood. It’s exotica to them.” She hopes when people review this period of time, they will realize hood films weren’t culturally representative of African American people. (7)
Julie Dash Interview
Dash prefers fiction films to documentary because of her mother. In her films, “the narrative depends on the story. The story tells me how I’m going to tell it, what it’s going to be.” (8)
She believes her films have a specific aesthetic. It’s a combination of her own style along with a Black aesthetic and a woman’s aesthetic.
Julie Dash Interview
Dash states that one of the reasons she choose UCLA was to work with Larry Clark, Halle Gerima, and Charles Burnett. She also has worked with St. Clair Bourne [he created documentaries on Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson] and Kathleen Collins (editing and filmmaking). Writers Toni Cade Bambara and Toni Morrison have also influenced her work.
She is disappointed with films that portray African Americans as victims or “reacting to external forces” or “testosterone films.” (10) She argues that we should be “dedicated with a concerted and focused effort to demand more balanced images of ourselves.” (11)
Julie Dash Interview
Dash posits that a “signature film is like an auteur film. It implies the director had control over everything. However, filmmaking is a collaboration, unless the film is some of kind of surveillance with one camera.” (12) Yet she believes she has a signature in her films.
Julie Dash Interview
Dash views authenticity films that “you can feel that it comes out of the filmmaker, out of the community, out of the issues, out of the events, out of history.”
She also believes that filmmakers do not have to take the approach to film as either commerce or art; “we can have both.” (13)
For Black filmmaking in the 1970s, the East Coast was known for documentaries and the West Coast, narrative film.
Julie Dash Interview
Dash perceives what happened with Black filmmakers in the 1990s was competition created by the industry. People ignored her [“Well, they didn’t know where you were.”] and didn’t want her to interact with others like Matty Rich.
The industry tries to push just one person of color – Spike, Tyler, Ryan, etc.
Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin
The Structure and History of Hollywood Filmmaking
Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin
Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin discuss “what Hollywood film is and how it developed.” It is important to understand that Hollywood film “can be identified by a specific set of formal and stylistic structures as well as by a set of historical, industrial, and economic determinants.” (21)
These structures, that can seem invisible or natural, shape “how Hollywood films represent America and how they conceive of issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability.” (21)
Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin
The dominance of Hollywood film, both in the United States and abroad, can limit how others believe movies are made.
Hollywood films are films made in or around Hollywood, CA.
The impression of those not familiar with Hollywood is very different from its reality.
The global dominance of Hollywood, it seems that “Hollywood film is American film, obscures its historical development, and in effect works to naturalize the structure and style of its films.”
Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin
Benshoff and Griffin argue that the way this naturalization of the structure and style of Hollywood films are examples of “ideology working to erase the socially constructed nature of a specific cultural institution: Hollywood gains strength and power by making its form and practice seem to be basic common sense.” (22)
This naturalization of structure and style hides “the fact that Hollywood form and practice developed over time in response to specific socio-political factors and it also works to erase awareness that there are other ways of making (and understanding) film as a cultural artifact.” (22)
Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin
The dominance of Hollywood films means that many in the United States are not exposed to other types of films; Movie theaters in the U.S. rarely screen other types of films – independent films, avant-garde or experimental films, documentaries or foreign films.
The proliferation of Hollywood films means that for those brought up viewing these films may find other types of films “weird, boring, or badly made.” (22)
These other types of films and filmmakers have made deliberate formal choices, “in mise-en-scène, montage, sound, and narrative design,” that are not necessarily consistent with Hollywood style.
Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin
Benshoff and Griffin note that the dominance of Hollywood film worldwide means these films can have a “greater ideological impact on American culture (and arguably the world).” Its stylistic choices have “strongly influenced the ‘rules’ of how TV shows and computer games make meaning.” (23)
Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin
Classical Hollywood style is made up of “formal and stylistic conventions.”
Film form – “specific cinematic elements such as mise-en-scène and editing.”
Film style – a specific way “formal elements are arranged.”
Though this style is “not rigid or absolute,” it has been the same since the 1930s.
Hollywood style and business practices have been so dominant in the U.S. and globally that “classical Hollywood style is often considered the standard or ‘correct’ way to make fictional films.” (23)
Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin
Benshoff and Griffin posit that the “main objective of classical Hollywood style is to ‘spoon feed’ story information to the spectator.” Hence if plot points or style is “too different or challenging” audiences will react negatively to the film. (24)
This style appears to be invisible “because it does not call attention to itself as even being a style.” Ideally the viewer is emotionally connected with the film’s characters and narrative and is not aware of the “lighting of the sets or the edits between shots.” (24)
Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin
Arranging the formal elements in this way can prevent the viewer from questioning the story; s/he merely follows the narrative.
“All of the formal aspects of cinema under the classical Hollywood style work to keep the story clear and characters simple and understandable.” (24)
Style is “subordinate to story in classical Hollywood style.” The story or classical Hollywood narrative form is linear with a beginning, middle, and end. These stories usually have a protagonist, antagonist, and love interest.
Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin
One element the authors continually emphasis with Hollywood film is how is simplifies the story and characters. “Such ‘instant characterization” often draws upon pre-existing social and cultural stereotypes.” (25)
Hollywood films typically have closure and happy endings. “Any ideological issues or social strife that may have been raised by a film are allegedly resolved by narrative closure, and thus there is no longer any need for spectators to think about them.” (25)
Closure reaffirms the “status quo of American society” and this status quo is “white patriarchal capitalism.” (25)
Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin
Benshoff and Griffin explain that white patriarchal capitalism as an ideology in film means that most classical Hollywood films have white male protagonists who seek power or wealth. Their abilities seem natural due to the invisible style. Most other characters in the film are secondary to the protagonist.
The authors state that Hollywood often reuses stories and characters. This is very evident with the number of sequels and remakes. They also mention genres and its iconography, the look and feel of a genre.
Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin
Benshoff and Griffin turn to the “specific economic and industrial conditions that determine how Hollywood produces its films.” They note that Hollywood films are both “formal and stylistic structures” and “an industry that produces certain types of fictional films for profit.” Hence “Hollywood is an excellent example of capitalism at work.” (28)
It produces films that it believes people want to see that reflect the dominant ideology. “Hollywood’s business practices use every tool at their disposal to lessen competition, increase buyer demand, and reduce the cost of production.” (28-29)
The authors make the argument that “Hollywood film’s merit is chiefly judged by its box office revenues.” (29)
Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin
Film can be divided into three parts: production, distribution, and exhibition.
Production is making the film – “the financing, writing, shooting, editing, etc.” (29)
Distribution is the “shipping of copies (or prints) of the finished film to various theaters.” (29)
Exhibition is where films are shown.
During the classical film era and prior, most studios were vertically integrated meaning they controlled all three aspects of the industry. It was an oligopoly.
Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin
As an oligopoly, the industry worked together and kept potential competitors weak or drove them from business. Benshoff and Griffin declare that these oligopolies worked and “continue to work to keep foreign and independent American films marginalized.” (29)
This marginalization has specifically affected minority filmmakers. Also note that “Hollywood’s control of production, distribution, and exhibition has not been limited to the United States alone.” Hence Hollywood films can impair filmmakers from other countries from showing their films in their home countries. (29)
This is a type of cultural imperialism, “the promotion and imposition of ideals and ideologies throughout the world via cultural means.”
Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin
With this dominance, it becomes more apparent how other types of films have problems being created and distributed. And this dominance has not altered significantly in almost one century.
Films affected American culture from their beginning. Nickelodeons, “small store-front theaters devoted solely to showing films.” were popular. As films grew in popularity, so did the theaters screening them.
In the 1910s, films were popular with immigrant populations. Then studios, in the 1910s and 1920s, created the “concept of the movie star.” (33)
Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin
During the Classical Hollywood era, typically this is considered the sound era (1930s to 1950s), the studio system was set in motion.
The Production Code was Hollywood’s attempt to censor itself to keep others from censoring their films. However it is a “good example of how discrimination can become institutionalized, embedded within a corporate or bureaucratic structure.” (36)
Benshoff and Griffin demonstrate how the Red Scare caused a type of mandated conformity after it was over. People who questioned the status quo were often labelled communists. Those individuals were blacklisted.
Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin
Hollywood’s oligarchy ended with the Paramount Consent Decrees. Interestingly with the independence of directors, stars, and writers along with theaters no longer obligated to screen Hollywood films, the films being created were not very challenging of the status quo.
The authors also note various movements that impacted films – Civil Rights Movement, the Beat Movement, as well as movements for Native Americans, Latinas/os, women, and homosexuals were prominent. These groups were considered counterculture.
Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin
After the end of the studio era, the Film School Brats become popular. They “revamp traditional genre formulas.” (40)
Though it’s a new generation of filmmakers, they are “mostly white, male, and heterosexual.”
Consider who is celebrated and why.
The Production Code gives way to the Ratings System.
Genre films that reinforce traditional ideologies and film form return; Benshoff and Griffin refer to these as nostalgic Hollywood blockbusters.
Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin
With the advent of corporate conglomerates, “large multination businesses that control multiple aspects of the entertainment industry,” and their marketing techniques of selecting projects that are pre-sold (have high name recognition) and saturation advertising and booking, independent films have challenges being seen.
Independent cinema did have some moments in the 1980s and 1990s. Now most of those studios have been bought out by larger corporations.
Benshoff and Griffin close the chapter observing though Hollywood has cutting edge technology, the content and ideology has not shifted dramatically. And Hollywood’s dominance keeps independent films and filmmakers marginalized.
Bambi HagginS
Introduction to Laughing Mad
Bambi HagginS
Bambi Haggins discussion of African American comedy gives context for The Original Kings of Comedy (2000). The way the audiences and the comedians, Steve Harvey, D. L. Hughley, Cedric the Entertainer, and Bernie Mac, enjoy themselves could be considered laughing mad. There is an exuberance and joy in a space that is predominately Black.
Haggins cites the constraints that can inhibit African Americans and how often expressing anger or rage was not possible. This inability to honestly express one’s feelings led to jaws being tight.
Bambi HagginS
In safe, communal Black spaces, laughter has therapeutic value. Laughter and humor are/were weapons used to fight pain. “Black humor … has always overtly and covertly explored the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of African American communities.” (2)
Haggins situates Black comedians historically and explains that these men and women “occupied clearly delineated spaces for Black and white audiences.” For those individuals who crossed over, there was an expectation of “adherence to codes of conduct.” (2)
Bambi HagginS
Haggins posits that the careers of Bert Williams, Mantan Moreland, and Tim Moore “illustrate how Black comic personae, like the African American condition, were diffused and often distorted in mainstream popular consciousness.” (3)
She cites Dick Gregory as an activist-comedian. Gregory used his humor as “an unabashed tool for social change.” (4)
Black comedians face a series of challenges and crossing over complicates things further.
Bambi HagginS
Haggins examines the persona of recent Black comics. She argues that the “comic persona is the performance of the intersection of multiple ideologies and lived experiences.” (5)
“Historically, the black comic has retained the ability to get the audience laughing while slipping in sociocultural truths.” (6)
Bambi HagginS
Michael Eric Dyson observes that the “comic-as-cultural-critic-and-social-commentator does not merely celebrate or valorize the culture from which he or she emerges. Such comics enable us to understand our culture’s internal contradictions, stress its positive features and acknowledge its detrimental characteristics.” (6)
Bambi HagginS
Haggins takes Dyson’s observation a step further and posits “in order for the comedic discourse produced by the Black comic to be effectively edifying, it must be self-aware and self-reflexive – able to illicit thought along with laughter.”
She contends that the challenge comes when this Black comedic discourse is placed in mainstream settings such as Hollywood films or “primetime network (or netlet) television.” (7)
When most comics are examined, they are analyzed through a particular medium or genre/subgenre.
Bambi HagginS
Herman Gray contends that Black comedic discourses in the mainstream are narratives that “push [African Americans] towards an imaginary center.” (8)
Haggins suggests there are three discourses: assimilationist, where racism and social-political issues “are constructed as ‘individual problems,’ pluralist, ‘separate but equal’ “where Black characters live and work in hermetically sealed social milieus that are approximately equivalent to their white counterparts; multicultural or diversity, representations of the Black cultural experience that did not adjust for white viewers. (8)
Bambi HagginS
Beretta Smith-Shomade states that Black women are often marginalized in comedy, specifically television comedy. She asserts that the “greater proportion of Black women’s representation remained in supporting, mummified, and one-dimensional capacities.” (8-9) And notes the “unsettling tendency for the normative elements of dominant culture to seep into black comedy.” (9)
S. V. Hartman and Farah Jasmine griffin
“Are You as Colored as That Negro?: The Politics of Being Seen in Julie Dash’s Illusions
Hartman and Griffin
S. V. Hartman and Farah Jasmine Griffin examine issues of spectatorship, specifically Black female spectatorship in Julie Dash’s film. They cite Frantz Fanon in their opening to demonstrate how Black subjects are often viewed by others and even themselves.
In the not so distant past, theories of spectatorship assumed that the viewer was white and male.
Hartman and Griffin view Mignon Dupree as a liminal figure; she is inbetween.
They also consider issues of realism and representation.
Hartman and Griffin
Ellison states that directly attacking Hollywood “confuses issues” because films reflect society. “Hollywood doesn’t create anti-Negro images; it only manipulates and replicates them. Hollywood reproduces existing social codes.” (364)
Hartman and Griffin posit that desiring “meaningful” and “realistic” images can be problematic because representation can be reductive.
Representation in some academic circles is dismissed
Hartman and Griffin
The authors closely analyze the projection room scene. They view this scene as foregrounding “the role of the gaze and the voice in producing subjects.” (365)
Esther Geeter, the singer who dubs Leila Grant, sings but her voice is appropriated violently. Hartman and Griffin view the appropriation as violent because she is removed or dismissed.
This harkens back to the start of the sound era. It was thought that because Black voices were rich and sonorous more opportunities would become available to Black artists.
Hartman and Griffin
Passing narratives were created for white audiences. Consider who passes.
Imitation of Life
Pinky
Narratives of Black men who pass are not common
In this film, Dash breaks with the ways light-skinned African American women are portrayed – tragic, not wanting to be Black or self hating.
Hartman and Griffin give Dash credit for moving away from the problems with the passing narrative but they are leery of Mignon.
Hartman and Griffin
Hartman and Griffin view Esther’s body as “the example of the cinema’s terror and racism.”
They will not try to identify with her as spectatorship demands. They do not view her relationship with Esther as helpful; it is a farce. And they feel the only way to deal with Mignon in a healthy manner is to reject her.
Hartman and Griffin interrogate whether Black women can “be represented as subjects within a visual economy organized by a hierarchical regime of difference? At what costs and to what ends?” (373)
Karen Bowdre
“Spike and Tyler’s Beef: Blackness, Authenticity, and Discourses of Black Exceptionalism”
Karen Bowdre
This essay is an examination of Spike Lee and Tyler Perry using their public argument as a point entry. Lee made comments about Perry, without mentioning the latter, at a conference in May 2009. He felt that Perry’s work was “coonery and buffoonery” with troubling images and harkening “back to Amos ‘n’ Andy.” (180)
Perry responds to these attacks and one is particularly interesting. “It’s attitudes like [Lee’s] that make Hollywood think that these people do not exist and that’s why there’s no material speaking to them.” (181)
My analysis is that the beef, problem or grudge, “between Lee and Perry is rooted in director discourses and the ways a director’s blackness can often pivot around ideas of authenticity, region, and Black exceptionalism.” (181)
Karen Bowdre
I consider popular definitions of beef
Biggie Smalls viewed beef as a “life and death battle that endangers even those around you.” (182)
Royce 5’9” “describes beef as a ‘literary game written in rhyme and validated through belief.’” (182)
I posit that the beef between the two men is a “media construction of an exaggerated antagonism.”
Their beef highlights how the two men often overshadow the “ability of other filmmakers to gain considerable media attention” and this “obscures the creative work of several other Black directors,” especially Black women.
Karen Bowdre
When this “argument” starts, Lee has lost some steps with his films critical and financial reception. In 2009, Perry is experiencing financial success with most critics openly hostile and/or dismissive of his films.
Regarding authorship, I note that one of the challenges with auteur theory is who is permitted to be a director/auteur. Perry is typically dismissed because “his films lack technical savvy and/or creativity.” (185)
Perry is aware of how critics receive his films and he often states he does not make his films for them and their awards. Remember here his exclusion is based on the fact that his films do not “conform to ‘bourgeois esthetic judgement.” (185)
Karen Bowdre
Interestingly, the business aspect of Hollywood enables Perry to have a type of freedom with his films, final cut privilege, that usually only auteurs receive.
I posit another troubling aspect of auteur theory is the media’s tendency to treat African American directors as if “there can be only one.” While other Black directors do receive some media coverage, it is not to the degree that the Black director has.
Due to the racist history of film, when African Americans entered the industry many wanted to create “positive” images. However, “Blackness is not a fixed term” and has a “constellation of productions, histories, images, representations, and meanings associated with [a] Black presence in the United States.” (187)
Karen Bowdre
The idea of authenticity or authentic blackness is tied to creating “better” images of African Americans. For example when Lee portrayed the issue of colorism in School Daze (1988), his blackness was questions. For Perry, “his use of comedy (a genre with a complicated history and links to minstrelsy), Madea, and his class politics have been among reasons why critics question his blackness.” (188)
Blackness is complex. Perry positions himself as being authentic because of his large African American female audience and Lee cites his realness with films that “tell the truth.” (188)
Karen Bowdre
Historically and even today Black communities are portrayed as monolithic. This means issues such as class, levels of education, and region are often dismissed.
Riché Richardson examines the issue of region within African American communities and details the ways Black masculinity has been demonized since the end of enslavement.
She insightfully posits Malcolm X positions himself in contrast to southern Black men like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This type of discourse is hierarchical in nature and places Black men from the north as more authentic than those from the south. It also employs the “house Negro” and “field Negro” dyad.
Karen Bowdre
During an interview with Oprah, she asks Lee about his differences from Perry. She plays a clip of Perry mentioning that he is from the rural south and Lee is from the urban north.
Lee pushes back against this critique and states that his parents are products of the south. He goes onto say his differences with Perry are a matter of style and taste.
Here Lee elides his education, specifically his training at NYU film school. And as we know from Bourdieu, taste isn’t random.
Karen Bowdre
These director discourses work to further differentiate Lee and Perry from other Black directors. This plays into the false notion of Black exceptionalism. While the concept may seem benign, it is racially biased because it makes talented African American an anomaly and divorces from their communities of origin.
There are similarities with the “exceptional Negro” and the media “Magical Negro.” These type of characters mysteriously appear and disappear. In the context of this discussion, the “exceptional Negro” enables directors like Lee and Perry to be separated from other Black filmmakers and Black theatre.
Lee linked to Woody Allen and Jim Jarmusch
Perry a surprise because critics never considered his theatre success.
Karen Bowdre
In spite of their past feud, the men share problematic portrayals of Black women. Perry has many of his female characters go through extreme trauma and suggests that with the love of a good man, everything will be alright.
Lee claims he desires to create strong Black women but continually compromises them sexually within the narrative.
Perry can be a complicated character because of his work. I often find it problematic and yet his achievement of his own studio is something that cannot be denied.
Andrew Sarris
Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962
One of the challenges of Sarris’ work is his subjectivity. While he attempts to be objective, there are several instances where this is not the case.
When he starts describing auteur theory, he says that critics can assume a “bad director always will make a bad film. No, not always, but almost always, and that is the point.” (42) There is an assumption here that we all agree on what constitutes a bad film and/or a bad director. According to Sarris, a bad director is “a director who has made many bad films.” (42)
Andrew Sarris
Andrew Sarris
His “first premise of the auteur theory is the technical competence of the director as a criterion of value.” After making this claim, he then notes “what constitutes directorial talent is more difficult to define abstractly.” (43) If he cannot discern a director’s talent how can he determine his/her technical competence? Are talent and technical competence two distinct ideas that do not overlap?
Andrew Sarris
“The second premise of the auteur theory is the distinguishable personality of the director as the criterion value. Over a group of films, a director must exhibit a certain recurring characteristics of style, which serve as his signature. The way a film looks and moves should have some relationship to the way a director thinks and feels.” (43)
He dismisses the work of Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Billy Wilder because they are “without adequate technical mastery.” Wilder won Best Director Oscars for The Apartment (1960), Sunset Blvd. (1950), The Lost Weekend (1945); his also won Oscars for writing those films as well.
Andrew Sarris
Joseph L. Mankiewicz won Best Director Oscars for All About Eve (1950), A Letter to Three Wives (1949); he also won the Best Writing for those films.
Note that Sarris’ opinion about writer-directors appears to be in contrast to how Truffaut views this group. Truffaut praised writer-directors such as Hitchcock.
Andrew Sarris
The third aspect of auteur theory is “concerned with interior meaning, the ultimate glory of the cinema as art.”
Sarris seemingly notes the arbitrariness of his theory when he states that “If I could describe the musical grace note of the momentary suspension, and I can’t, I might be able to provide a more precise definition of the auteur theory. As it is, all I can do is point to the specific beauties of interior meaning on the screen and, later, catalogue the moments of recognition.” (43)
Andrew Sarris
This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA
Interior Meaning
Personal Style
Technique
Andrew Sarris
Sarris eventually describes technical competence as “simply the ability to put a film together with some clarity and coherence.” (44)
Novotny Lawrence
From Compton to Center Court: Venus and Serena and the Black Female Experience in Professional Tennis
Novotny Lawrence
Novotny Lawrence maps out the history of Black women in tennis. He starts with describing what is considered “the moment that women gained equality in professional tennis” – the Billie Jean King-Bobby Riggs match. (93)
He notes that this story is told at the “expense of African American female tennis players who had been working to gain respectability in the sport long before King and Riggs ever set foot on the court in the Houston Astrodome.” (93)
Novotny Lawrence
In his historical overview, Lawrence comments that “it is unclear why Blacks were attracted to the game [tennis] in the first place.” (94)
“A number of Blacks were playing the game by the 1890s.” When the United States National Lawn Tennis Association was founded in 1881, African Americans were barred from participating in professional tennis.” (94)
In spite of these restrictions, African American interest in the sport grew and a “group of African American businessmen, college professors, and physicians founded the American Tennis Association (ATA).”
Novotny Lawrence
Lawrence observes that the ATA did not restrict whites from playing as the USNLTA prevented African Americans.
The “ATA would become the preeminent Black tennis organization, hosting tournaments.” (94-95)
He mentions the dominance of Ora Williams in tennis. While Williams won several tournaments, she was prevented from playing against white players.
Novotny Lawrence
Lawrence then discusses Althea Gibson. Gibson, like Williams, was an extraordinary tennis player and initially it seemed that she would also never be able to play against white players.
“Four-time U.S. Nationals Champion and 1939 Wimbledon Champion Alice Marble” wrote an open letter that “challenged the USLTA’s racist practices.” (96) This letter along with the ATA persistence enabled Gibson to play tournaments against white players.
In 1956, Gibson wins the French Open and “was the Wimbledon runner-up.” (97). The following year, she won Wimbledon.”
Novotny Lawrence
Zina Garrison is the last player Lawrence cites. Garrison reached the final of Wimbledon in 1990, wins a bronze medal in the 1988 Olympics in Women’s Singles and a gold in doubles with Pam Shriver.
As Lawrence transitions to the second part of the essay, he states that the stories of these women and others “rarely receive the recognition that they deserve in mainstream accounts of tennis history.” (99)
Novotny Lawrence
Lawrence analyzes the documentary Venus and Serena, written, produced, and directed by Maiken Baird and Michelle Major. Baird had produced several documentaries while Major was a producer for Good Morning America.
Baird and Major were granted access to the family and “spent the entire 2011 season with the sisters, recording over 450 hours of footage that they would use in conjunction with archival materials to bring the one-hundred-minute documentary to fruition.” (100)
Novotny Lawrence
The documentary moves between the past and present. During the season, both sisters are injured.
Lawrence observes that “Baird and Major subtly challenge the traditional accounts of Venus’s and Serena’s training, which credit Richard (and their mother, Oracene Williams) for making his daughters successful professional players.” Rich Macci, a coach based in Florida is often not mentioned.
Lawrence discusses the 2001 U.S. Open final where the sisters played one another. It was the first time two Black players played a final and on the court named after Arthur Ashe, an African American tennis legend and activist.
Novotny Lawrence
Lawrence delineates the racism the sisters faced from the start of the careers. He notes the 2001 Indian Wells Final where the crowd was explicitly horrible to Serena. Venus and Serena boycott that tournament for several years.
One of the issues that Lawrence’s chapter addresses is the media’s treatment of Venus and Serena. Though sports is often falsely framed as a meritocracy where the cream rises to the top, it is not. And some of the people most hostile to African American athletes are sports writers, who are mostly white and male.
Novotny Lawrence
One example of this hostility are articles written that condemned the sisters for their continued boycott of Indian Wells. The audacity (or caucasisty) of white men, who typically aren’t even athletes, to tell Black women who had experienced unprecedented racism at a tournament its time to get over their traumatizing experience and return to the place of their assault embodies yet another way racism operates.
Novotny Lawrence
Another example of media hostility is how the sisters are constantly framed as controversial when most of their actions are not. Thus when the documentary premieres there are rumors that the sisters didn’t attend because they disliked the film.
The film was subject to a lawsuit from the USTA.
Michael Eric Dyson
Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster
Michael Eric Dyson
Michael Eric Dyson compares the situation in New Orleans to Pompeii and how those without resources could not escape a natural disaster.
In the preface, he asks a set of questions that can be applied to our class through our discussions of representation, race, and racism. His question regarding why “the black and poor” were left behind causes him to look at the history of the U.S. and public policy. (xi)
Michael Eric Dyson
In Chapter 1 – Unnatural Disasters: Race and Poverty, Dyson observes that long before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, “the poor had been abandoned by society and its institutions, and sometimes by their well-off brothers and sisters.” (2)
Many of us can accept poverty “so long as it doesn’t interrupt the natural flow of things, doesn’t rudely impinge on our daily lives or awareness.” (3)
Dyson states that “poverty’s grinding malevolence is fed in part by social choices and public policy decisions that directly impact how many people are poor and how long they remain that way.” (3)
Michael Eric Dyson
Dyson indicts readers regarding the collective complicity in the plight of the poor. He cites politicians who “cut programs aimed at helping the economically vulnerable, the narrative of bootstrap individualism we invoke to deflect the relevance of the considerable benefits we’ve received while bitterly complaining of the few breaks the poor might get.” (3)
Consider the previous Democratic debate and how former Mayor Mike Bloomberg states he worked hard. What does that statement imply? Why does he assume others don’t work hard.
Michael Eric Dyson
Dyson also mentions how religious myths function to “shame the poor” and ridicule them for not being ambitious and the “alleged pathology of poor blacks.” (3) These attitudes work together and have created policies that harm the poor. And when something like Katrina occurs, we can blame “the local, state, or federal government.”
Hence, while we can be outraged when natural disasters do occur, this does not absolve us from our complicity in the policies and the people it affects.
Michael Eric Dyson
Dyson notes several poverty statistics
“More than 90,000 people in each of the areas stormed by Katrina in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama made less than $10,000 a year.” (5)
Blacks in these areas earned 40% less than whites.
69% of the Black children in Louisiana were in poverty.
57% of “elders with disabilities” were in New Orleans. (5)
9% of “households in New Orleans didn’t own or have access to a vehicle.” (5)
27% of Blacks in New Orleans did not have cars.
Michael Eric Dyson
Most Katrina “survivors lived in concentrated poverty – they lived in poor neighborhoods, attended poor schools, and had poorly paying jobs that reflected and reinforced a distressing pattern of rigid segregation.” (6)
“Concentrated poverty is the product of decades of public policies and political measures that isolate black households in neighborhoods plagued by severe segregation and economic hardship.” (7)
Michael Eric Dyson
Dyson also give statistical information regarding the stifling affect of concentrated poverty on “the academic success of Black children.” (8)
“New Orleans has a 40% illiteracy rate
Over 50% of Black 9th graders will not graduate in 4 years
Louisiana expends an average of $4,724 per student
Louisiana ranks third-lowest for teacher salaries
The Black dropout rates are high with nearly 50,000 students cutting class every day.” (8)
Michael Eric Dyson
The prison Dyson mentions Angola Prison; it is the largest maximum-security prison in the US and the size of Manhattan.
Dyson challenges President Bush’s words as the latter did not attempt to address the problems of the area – such as lack of adequate medical care and poor schools.
He cites the “strong relationship between education and employment, and quality of life, it keeps the poor from better-paying jobs that might interrupt a vicious cycle of poverty.” (10)
Dyson ends the chapter with a brief historical overview of the Lower Ninth Ward, its concentrated poverty and the impact of Hurricane Betsy.
Michael Eric Dyson
In his second chapter, Does George W. Bush Care About Black People, examines how the federal government “failed to respond in a timely and life-saving manner” and the tragedy of this lack of response. (17)
As he answers that question about whether the residents were left behind because they were Black and poor, he reviews the historical and racial forces that have shaped our country.
Enslavement, 1619 – 1865
Michael Eric Dyson
Jim Crow laws spanned from 1877 to 1965. They were a way of life and part of social etiquette in addition to being the law.
https://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/what.htm
http://newsreel.org/video/the-rise-and-fall-of-jim-crow
Dyson revises his question from “whether race played a role” in the federal response to Katrina to “what role it played” because race pervades our culture.
Michael Eric Dyson
Some of the ideas Dyson asserts can be applied to broader discussions of race, racism, and representation. For example, though “one may not have racial intent, one’s actions may nonetheless have racial consequences.” (20)
He posits that “active malice” and “’passive indifference’ are but flip sides of the same racial coin.” (20)
He notes that Southern whites are demonized in comparison to Northern whites and Southern Blacks “especially poor ones, are viewed as the worst possible combination of troubled elements – region, race, and class.” (20)
Michael Eric Dyson
The stereotypes and visual images of African Americans created during enslavement and Jim Crow worked together with negative ideologies about Black people to justify their poor treatment.
Dyson observes that while President Clinton enjoyed Black support and affection, he caused “considerable damage to Black interest, especially those of poor Blacks, by signing a crime bill that viciously targeted them, and a welfare reform bill that heaped stigma, but no help, on the backs of the vulnerable.” (23)
Michael Eric Dyson
According to historian Fitzhugh Brundage, Southern whites would not acknowledge Black suffering. And Dyson ties this observation to a larger pattern of ignoring Black grief and pain.
Dyson suggests that poor Blacks “uphold, and expect in return, the social contract.” (26)
He then delineates the instance where Kanye West, appearing on a telethon for the Red Cross for victims of Katrina makes his infamous statement, “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.” (27)
Michael Eric Dyson
Dyson further breaks down how West “was not referring to the president’s personal sentiments about Black people.” (28) West’s statement was addressing Bush’s public persona (not private one) “as the face of the federal government and in his role of president of the United States.” (29)
Dyson compares visits Bush made to Florida, a Republican stronghold, when that state experienced Hurricanes Charley and Frances. “Bush visited hurricane victims four times in six weeks and delivered relief checks personally.” (31)
Michael Eric Dyson
During Bush’s presidency Black “poverty has increased” as did Black unemployment, and affirmative action was viciously attacked. (32) His administration paid a conservative Black commentator to “say good things about educational policies that hurt” Black people and gave tax breaks to the wealthy and froze the minimum wage to $5.15/hour. (32)
Dyson closes noting the differences in the perceptions of African Americans and European American regarding Katrina with most of the former stating the delay was because of race and class, 60%, 63%,and the latter with 12% and 21%. (32)
Chris Rock
“It’s a White Industry. It Just Is: One Black Man’s Big Hollywood Adventure”
Chris Rock
Chris Rock wrote this essay in 2014 (December 3rd) for The Hollywood Reporter. It is noted for being a “blistering” article.
Rock does not hold back starting with the title. He claims it’s a white industry.
He starts the article describing his experience in Hollywood. He knows that if Eddie Murphy, then the biggest star in the world, had not given him a chance, his ascension may not have happened. Rock also notes that Keenan Wayans and Arsenio Hall giving him chances as well.
Chris Rock
A statement that is emblematic of the essay is Rock’s comment on how he would give chances to white people and African Americans. However, in Hollywood he know that white people will have other white people take chances on them. For those of African descent, he knows that typically it is ONLY other Black people that will take chances on them.
He notes a few of the people he assisted: Wanda Sykes, J.B. Smoove, and Leslie Jones. With Jones, he mentions that she didn’t have what others would call the right connections, “she didn’t go to Second City, she doesn’t do stand-up at The Cellar, and she’s not in with Judd Apatow.” (1)
Chris Rock
Wanda Sykes
Chris Rock
J. B. Smoove
Chris Rock
Leslie Jones
Chris Rock
Rock believed that Jones was the real deal. He called four of the biggest managers in comedy and they all refused him. It wasn’t until a few years later, after he had told Lorne Michaels about her, that others got it but by then it was too late.
He mentors other young comics as well as keeps track of those he would like to work with such as Steve McQueen.
He claims that the type of Black people hired in Hollywood tend to be Black women with Ivy League educations. He hopes that his daughters will have those credential but knows that because of that they may not be the strongest candidates to run a Black division in entertainment.
Chris Rock
Rock’s description of the hypothetical jobs his daughters could be offered continues to delineate Hollywood’s whiteness. They would be heading the Black division of something not a more general executive position.
Based on his own experience, he observes Hollywood does not hire Black men in executive positions especially if that man has base in his voice.
He discusses the more subtle racism in Hollywood. While you probably won’t be called the N-word, “but just an acceptance that there’s a slave state in L.A.” (1)
Chris Rock
For Rock, part of this slave state is: “There’s this acceptance that Mexicans are going to take care of white people in L.A. that doesn’t exist anywhere else.” (1)
He goes onto state “You’re telling me no Mexicans are qualified to do anything at a studio? Really? Nothing but mop up? What are the odds that that’s true? The odds are, because people are people, that there’s probably a Mexican David Geffen mopping up for somebody’s company right now. The odds are that there’s probably a Mexican who’s that smart who’s never going to be given a shot.” (1)
Chris Rock
He points to the obvious racism inherent in executive positions are almost exclusively white and male and then he goes onto to examine other positions.
“This is a system where only white people can chime in on that [for Rock that are the jobs that are really just about taste, not levels of education or technological know how]. There would be a little naivete to sitting around and going, “Oh, no black person has ever greenlighted a movie,” but those other jobs? You’re kidding me, right? They don’t even require education. When you’re on the lower levels, they’re just about taste, nothing else. And you don’t have to go to Harvard to have taste.”
Chris Rock
Rock makes general observation about the industry. He believes there isn’t a lot of difference between white and African American audiences except the later group does not itself represented that often
He notes that many women went to see the Sex and the City films because they knew that Hollywood rarely makes these types of films and they didn’t care what critics said. And as we know most of the film critics are male and often savage female lead films.
He talks about the challenges of creating opportunities for college students to learn about comedy but economics being a hurdle. Many at traditionally Black colleges and universities cannot afford to intern without being paid.
Chris Rock
He observation about crossing over is important. He declares that Kevin Hart is the biggest thing in comedy at that time. Hart plays to 40,000 seats while John Stewart plays to 3,000. Yet it is Hart that is supposed to cross over because his audience is Black.
He posits that Black films are now expected to make money, though the fiction in the past was that these films did not make money when they did. And when films have Black leads, they are judged more harshly.
He feels that Black films made at studios often operate on stereotype. Rock’s film Top Five had been released and he states he could not have made his film at a studio; a studio would have made his film into a mediocre or bad comedy.
Chris Rock
His discussion of casting in Hollywood continues his criticism of the industry. He states that Hollywood will either cast a Black man or not, but they are never on a short list. Regarding Black women, he argues that they are not considered at all even though it would not impact the plots/narratives of most films.
“I go to the movies almost every week, and I can go a month and not see a black woman having an actual speaking part in a movie. That’s the truth.” (1)
Chris Rock
While things have changed in Hollywood, such as more respected Black actors, bias still exists.
His example is being offered the role of Huggy Bear not Starsky or Hutch.
Rock ends the essay talking about how change manifested in presidential candidates. When Jesse Jackson ran, he didn’t expect to become president; he wanted to shake things up. When Barack Obama ran for president, it was to be president. And no one stopped him.
Making History: Julie Dash
Author(s):
Patricia Mellencamp
Source: Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 15, No. 1, Women Filmmakers and
the Politics of Gender in Third Cinema (1994), pp. 76-101
Published by: University of Nebraska Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3346614
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Patricia Mellencamp
Making History: Julie Dash
If history is a way of counting time, of measuring change, then femi-
nists, whether white, black, brown, or red, are operating another tempo-
rality, questioning the timing of history. In an essay about Claire
Johnston,1 Meaghan Morris argues that because feminism is both “skep-
tical” (of history) and “constructive,” it is “untimely” for most histori-
ans: “To act (as I believe feminism does) to bring about concrete social
changes while at the same time contesting the very bases of modem think-
ing about what constitutes ‘change’ is to induce intense strain.”2
Feminism is untimely history that is ongoing, never over, or over
there, but here and now. For women, history is not something to be
recorded or even accepted, but something to be used, something to be
changed. But first, history must be remembered. As bell hooks so poi-
gnantly said, “As red and black people decolonize our minds we cease
to place value solely on the written document. We give ourselves back
memory. We acknowledge that the ancestors speak to us in a place
beyond written history.”3
Julie Dash calls her history what if, “speculative fiction,” what
Laleen Jayamanne, a Sri Lankan/Australian filmmaker, would call “vir-
tual history.”4 Cultural difference more than sexual difference provides the
context. (As hooks and many critics have pointed out, the concept of
“sexual difference” at the base of feminist film theory is “racialized”5.)
The local (differences of appearance, custom, law, culture) illuminates
the global (our commonalities of family, fiction, thought, feeling). The
local, women’s history, becomes the ground of the global, feminist the-
ory. Thus, we learn about differences and experience the recognition of
sameness. We feel history, as presence, passed on from grandmother to
daughters and sons, a living history that is nourishing, not diminishing.
Copyright 01994 by Frontiers Editorial Collective.
76
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FRONTIERS, VOL. XV, NO. 1
The result is cultural appreciation, not cultural appropriation, to para-
phrase hooks’s distinction.
Although much history is not recorded in print or film, it cannot
be erased. Like age, we carry our history, our forebears, on our faces,
their spirits indelibly imprinted in our memories. For Dash, history can
be reincarnated, recollected, its spirit given new life as living memory.
Nana Peazant is the historian, the great-grandmother of Daughters of
the Dust who keeps history alive. “We carry these memories inside us.
They didn’t keep good records of slavery… We had to hold records in
our head.”
Dash balances the experimental and the experiential, making
affective history, a history of collective presence both material and spiri-
tual. What I call empirical feminism – archival and activist – invokes
history and acts to alter the course of time.
By locating issues of race and gender within specific contexts that
are simultaneously historical and experiential, Dash’s films expand the
contours of female subjectivity – both onscreen and in the audience –
to include women of all ages and appearances, complex emotion, and
collective identification.6 When the enunciation shifts into women’s
minds and into history (which includes our experience and memory),
we cease thinking like victims and become empowered, no matter what
happens in the narrative. As Collette Lafonte (a woman of color) asks in
Sally Potter’s Thriller (1979), “Would I have wanted to be the hero?”
Like the films of Potter (a British independent filmmaker/performance
artist/theorist involved with Screen culture of the 1970s and early
1980s who has a successful feature commercial film in 1993 release,
Orlando), Dash’s films resolutely answer “Yes!” without hesitation,
knowing that “being the hero” is a state of mind as well as action, a
condition of self-regard and fearlessness. Being the hero is, precisely,
not being the victim.
Illusions
Mignon Dupree becomes such a hero. This light-skinned African
American passing for white in Julie Dash’s Illusions is an executive
assistant at National Studio, a movie studio. The film makes it clear
that Mignon has status and influence at the studio – which she is will-
ing to risk. She is given the difficult task of salvaging a musical that has
lost synch in the production numbers. A young Black singer, Ester
Jeeter, is brought in to dub the voice-over for the blond, white star,
Leila Grant. Ester recognizes Mignon’s heritage; they become friends
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and speak freely to each other. Mignon negotiates a fair deal for the
singer’s work. Meanwhile, Mignon is surrounded by racist comments
from the white bit players. She is also being pursued by the studio
boss’s son, a lecherous soldier on leave who hangs around the office
making passes. After finding a photograph of Mignon’s Black boy-
friend, Julius, he confronts Mignon with his knowledge of her secret.
Rather than back off, Mignon fearlessly acknowledges that she is pass-
ing. She speaks passionately against the industry that has erased her
participation. The point of view and the voice-over narration, which
frames the film, both belong to this beautiful and powerful character.7
The setting of this 1983 short film is a Hollywood movie studio in
the 1940s, during World War II. The historical re-creation of the time
period is remarkable for such a low-budget film. Historically, Mignon,
a sophisticated and stylish African American woman, resembles Lela
Simone, a sound editor with the Arthur Freed unit at MGM until the
early 1950s. This gorgeous, fashionable white woman, who also served
as executive assistant to Freed, was reportedly one of the best editors in
the business. She was given the arduous task of synching music with
the production numbers of the MGM musicals. In exasperation with
being asked to do the impossible, she finally walked off the team, and
out of film history, during the postproduction of Gigi. Unlike Simone,
Dupree determines to remain in the industry and change things.
However, like so many women in Hollywood, what she really
wants she is unable to get – film projects of her own. She wants the
studio to make important films about history, including the contribu-
tion of Navajos whose language could not be deciphered by the Japa-
nese code breakers during the war. Like Dash, Dupree is impassioned
about the importance of film: “History is not what happens. They will
remember what they see on screen. I want to be here, where history is
being made.”
Although Illusions has no illusions, no happily ever after of
romance, whether marriage or the climb to stardom for Ester Jeeter or a
promotion to producer for Mignon Dupree, the star of Illusions is a
Black woman who is powerful, ambitious, intelligent and supports
another Black woman. This is a film about women’s work and thought.
Mignon’s goal is to be a filmmaker and to change history. Unlike
women in 95 percent or more of Hollywood movies, she is not defined
by romance or flattered by male desire; neither is she bullied or
affected by the white male gaze.
Illusions revises Hollywood studio history, which erased African
American women from representation and history by synching their
offscreen voices to onscreen white women. Women of color were
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heard, but not seen or recognized. When women of color were there,
on the sound track or passing on screen, they were not remembered or
not recognized. Illusions inscribes the point of view missing from U. S.
film history, African American women (both onscreen and in the audi-
ence) granting visibility and audibility by synching image to offscreen
voice. Illusions also charges Hollywood, which did not make films
about people of color even during World War II, and the nation with
hypocrisy and racism.
Illusions is a substantial revision of Singin’ in the Rain (a 1952
MGM/Arthur Freed musical that mythologizes the coming of sound
in 1927 to Hollywood, turning economics into romance). While both
films concern the problem of synched sound, Singin’ gives us fiction as
history; Dash reveals history as fiction. She remakes history and
changes it. She reveals what is repressed by the “cinematic apparatus”
– and it is actual, not imaginary; in reality, not in the unconscious.8
Synchronization – the dilemma of holding sound and image together
in a continuous flow, of giving voice to face, of uniting the acoustic and
the visual – is not just a technique, and not just played for laughs as it
is in Singin’. Sound editing and synchronization are strategies9 that con-
ceal the politics of racism.
Illusions corrects absences in film theory. The disavowal of Singin’
(that some of Debbie Reynolds’s songs were dubbed by another singer)
becomes the repression of race in Illusions. Like the seamless continuity
style that conceals its work (e.g., editing, processing, discontinuity),
Hollywood cinema has concealed or erased (and prohibited) the work
of people of color, on- and offscreen. Thus, the psychoanalytic mecha-
nism of the spectator – disavowal, denial, and repudiation1o – at the
base of film theory, and the key to the feminist model of sexual differ-
ence, is revised and complicated by this film.11
Rather than the white male star, Don Lockwood/Gene Kelly, who
dominates Singin’ in center frame, close-ups, and voice-over, along
with performance numbers and the story, this film stars a Black
woman as a studio executive. She is given the voice-over, center frame,
close-ups, and the story. While the dilemma of the 1952 musical was
love at (first?) sight and romance – celebrating the coupling of the
proper white woman (the good girl) to the (white?) male star – this
film concerns women’s professional work and thoughts. Mignon
Dupree’s power does not come from sexuality but from talent, ability,
high purpose, and self-confidence. Unlike Cathy Selden, she makes it
on her own, not through the intervention of men.
Singin’ divided women against each other – Cathy Selden versus
Lina Lamont – and humiliated Lamont in public, whereas Illusions
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unites Black women. Men pursuing women is sexual harassment in
Illusions whereas in Singin’ it is romance. The problem in Singin’ was
synching the proper white female voice with the white female face,
staged as backstage film history. Illusions says this momentary repres-
sion is only the tip of the iceberg, which Singin’ conceals through its
partial revelation. Illusions declares that behind white faces were Black
voices – the source of pleasure and profit. Black performers were in
history, but they were not remembered, there and simultaneously
erased. The studios profiteered on this presence/absence, this lack of
stardom and publicity.
On the theoretical level, just as the work of the sound track has
historically been subservient to the image track, so were women of
color subordinate to white women. And in the rare instances when
actresses of color were onscreen, they could only fill stereotypical roles:
lustful temptresses, servants, or mammies, off to the side, marginal to
the star’s center frame and hence barely noticed. Often, masquerade
would make them white Anglo – as happens in Singin’ to Rita
Moreno who plays Zelda, the starlet. Being beautiful meant looking
white – young, thin, smooth.
The dubbing sequence in Illusions is thus a very powerful revision
of this white aesthetic: with Mignon looking on, and reflected on the
glass wall of the sound recording booth, Illusions intercuts the blond
actress with shots of the Black singer dubbing in her song. Jeeter is given
glamour shots and the last, lingering close-up, and the white no-talent
actress is only a bit part. Without voice, she has no substance. Dash
reverses the blond standard of the star system that defined conventions
of female beauty within a regimented, standardized uniformity.
For Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “the first deviances are
racial.” “Racism operates by the determination of degrees of deviance
in relation to the White-Man face.” Racism has nothing to do with the
other, only with “waves of sameness.” “The Face” represents “White
Man himself”; “the face is Christ”.12 (I think of the messianic ending of
D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, with the superimposition of the white
Jesus Christ hovering over the happily-ever-after couples and indeed
the entire nation. It is only recently that these conventions of represent-
ing race are beginning to be regularly challenged.13) While speaking of
difference, film theory has perpetuated sameness – whiteness (and
heterosexuality). However, film theory, if not film history, is richer than
its application. The theoretical base can also reveal blind spots. Thus,
the baby need not be thrown out with the bathwater.
Along with film (and national) history and the work of sound, the
“illusion” of the title is the practice of “passing”: Mignon Dupree is a
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Black woman “passing” as white.14 Illusions complicates the relation
between sight and knowledge, giving us a process of double vision,
double knowledge, a revision of the concepts of masquerade, camou-
flage, and mimicry. The film provides an inversion of John Berger’s
1972 distinction (in Ways of Seeing) of women seeing themselves being
seen. Mignon watches herself being seen incorrectly. In effect, she is
being seen but not always recognized. The story plays off misrecogni-
tion. She is not merely the object of sight but also the witness, the seer
more than the seen.
Mignon is “seen” in double vision – white characters see her one
way, African Americans another. At one moment, her concealment is
in jeopardy. Dupree looks apprehensive that Jeeter’s remarks will give
her away to the other women in the office. But she is immediately reas-
sured by Jeeter, who says, “Do you pretend when you’re with them?
Don’t worry, they can’t tell like we can.” For the spectator, who “they”
and “we” are becomes a question. When Mignon is talking to her
mother on the telephone, she says: “I am still the same person…. they
didn’t ask and I didn’t tell. I was hoping that after the war things
would change … and I wanted to be part of that change. If they don’t
change in this industry, then they won’t change at all.” The truth is, of
course, that she is the same person in spite of what they think.
In his “Seminar on the Purloined Letter,” Jacques Lacan describes
the connections between seeing and knowing, a system that extends
looks in time. The gaze in cinema has many permutations and
options.15 To Laura Mulvey’s triad of the looks of the camera, charac-
ter, and audience must be added seeing (and not seeing), interpreting
(and misinterpreting), and knowing (and not knowing). To the repre-
sentation and the audience (film spectators) can be added gender (men
at men, men at women, women at men, women at women), age, sexual
preference, race, cultural history, and class (although in the United
States, this can be amorphous). Seeing depends on knowing; scopo-
philia (the sexual pleasure of sight) is linked to epistemophilia (the sex-
ual pleasure of knowing).
Passing has to do with sight, interpretation, and knowledge –
with seeing (or not) what is visible (or not), there to be known (or not).
Near the end of the film, Mignon says: “Now I’m an illusion, just like
the films. They see me but they can’t recognize me.” Passing depends
on whites not seeing, misinterpreting, and not knowing. This igno-
rance says something about the reason for the practice of passing –
institutional and legal racism.
Passing is hiding, out in the open. Rather than being buried
beneath the surface, the secret is immediately visible but not seen. As
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Edgar Allan Poe and neocolonial subjects so well knew, the surface can
be the best hiding place. In “The Purloined Letter,” Dupin, the detec-
tive, discovered that the letter was hidden in plain view, amidst other
letters. “Because it was right out in the open, right in front of every-
one’s eyes, the letter was not noticed.” The “principle of concealment,”
to paraphrase Poe, is the “excessively obvious” – which escapes
observation. The “intellect … passes unnoticed considerations too
obtrusive, too self-evident.” Sometimes the most “sagacious expedi-
ent” is not concealing something. However, after someone shows us
what is there, its existence becomes obvious. We can see only what we
know, until someone shows us something else.
When the white soldier sexually bothering Mignon throughout
the film discovers the photograph of Julius, her Black boyfriend, his
ardor cools. His scopophilia depended on his lack of knowledge. Thus,
breaking the linkage between scopophilia and epistemophilia has great
possibilities for feminism. Rather than intimidating Dupree, the revela-
tion empowers her, concluding the film on a courageous and optimis-
tic note – although bell hooks would disagree with this interpretation.
When questioned by the GI, Mignon replies, “Why didn’t I tell you I
wasn’t a white woman? I never once saw my boys fighting…. You
have eliminated my participation in the history of this country. We are
defending a democracy overseas that doesn’t exist in this country.”
Perhaps when it comes to white men, history, the military, and power,
“we” could include white women.16
Showing us Ester Jeeter, the Black female voice behind the white
female image, is one revelation of the repressed of history. This tactic
reverses Poe’s second strategy: the contents of the incriminating letter
are never revealed within the story or to the reader. (This is akin to Sin-
gin’: Debbie Reynolds does not sing all of her songs in the film.) Thus,
the film issues a challenge to film history as well as theory. Whiteness is
not neutral, natural, or real -but a system, a “racialized” convention of
the continuity style of Hollywood cinema. In fact, race, its absence and
its presence as stereotype, might be a main attribute, along with hetero-
sexual romance, of the continuity narrative and style. Race is prominent
in the Motion Picture Production Code of 1933. This was the film indus-
try’s self-imposed, self-regulated code, which governed film content for
many years; under “Particular Applications, Item 11.6,” it reads: “Misce-
genation (sex relationship between the white and Black races) is forbid-
den.” Segregation has been the legal or operative rule for exhibition
throughout this century – with either segregated theaters or separate
spaces within theaters.
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Dash enriches feminist film theory through her model of double
vision/double knowledge, which she complicates by address – which
unsettles any easy assumptions about spectatorship, race, and gender.
Like Sally Potter’s Thriller (which also starred a woman of color) and
its key role in the formulation of feminist narrative theory, Illusions
provides an advanced modeling of representation and reception –
critically revising theories of vision through knowledge and sound.
Illusions makes intellectual arguments through the sound track,
including pronouns that define and address subjectivity. The white
female secretary says to Mignon: “You certainly are good to them. I
never know how to speak to them.” Mignon replies: “Just speak to
them as you would to me.” Who is “we” and who is “them” depends
on what one can see and understand, and on history, which includes
race. In this film, African American women are together, united, and
stars; white women are blond bit players, either big-boobed bimbos,
vapid stars, or prejudiced secretaries, subservient to and accomplices
of white men – unlike the intelligent Black stars, who know more than
the white men.
Illusions concludes with a prophecy, in voice-over: “We would
meet again, Jeeter and I. To take action without fearing. I want to use
the power of the motion picture…. there are many stories to be told
and many battles to begin.” Mignon Dupree is a film ancestor of Julie
Dash. And, indeed, they soon meet again.
Afterthoughts
Other critics, although fewer than one would imagine, have writ-
ten about this short film, with interpretations different from mine.
Manthia Diawara, however, recommended an essay with which, to my
chagrin, I was not familiar.17 (I am grateful to Diawara for his sugges-
tions – made, to a degree, with the presumption that I knew little of
film theory – he recommended critics who have written about femi-
nist film theory and race.18 He also suggested that I cut out a section on
Eisenstein/Deleuze on film affect.)
For S. V. Hartman and Farah Jasmine Griffin, Illusions’ critical
flaw is the use of Hollywood conventions of narrative representation
to critique dominant cinema. “Unless the form as well as the content
of the passing tale is challenged, [its oppositional] possibilities
remain severely limited”.19 This critique is predicated on the belief in
the radicality of artistic form, the notion that aesthetics can change
the world.
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Like many scholars who were influenced by Soviet film theorists,
Brecht, and Godard, and who participated in 1960s activism and 1970s
theory/organizing, I advocated this position, as did Laura Mulvey in
“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In fact, my belief in the radi-
cality of form was the reason I did not write about this film years ago.
Many of us – for example, Peter Wollen, Peter Gidal, and Stephen
Heath – believed that revelation of the apparatus, of the concealed
work of cinema, would result in political change, which has hardly
been the case. Thus, like many activists/critics writing about popular
culture, my position has changed and become more inclusive. I now
see radicality of form as one, not the only, option.
Yes, Illusions does imitate, does aspire to be, to replace, what it is
critiquing, Hollywood film. (And, for example, it doesn’t have the pro-
duction budget to pull this off, particularly on the sound track, where
editing is doubly denied, very intricate, and highly expensive, or in
the visual editing, which is off just enough seconds to make it awk-
ward. I would love to see Dash add more research and make a big-
budget feature from this version.) But Illusions also wants to change
things. And there are many tactics to bring about change. One of the
most effective is to tell the story in a familiar style but switch the point
of view and enunciation. Many viewers will not notice that the politi-
cal ground has shifted.
But this is only the first of my differences with Hartman and Grif-
fin. They see the synching sequence as emblematic of the film’s dis-
avowal, its central flaw: the voices of Mignon and Ester “become
unanchored from their black bodies and are harbored within white
female bodies….. their work requires the decorporealization of the
black female voice … to render docile, the threat of the black body.”20
On the contrary, I would suggest that this is true of Hollywood film,
not this film. This scene has double vision. By inscribing the presence
of Black women, the lie of absence is revealed. It is the white body that
is unanchored, particularly from the star system.
Black women are given center screen, the narrative, and voice.
White women are banal and boring, particularly Leila Grant. She can-
not sing or dance. Unlike Ester, she is not star material. While Black
women are given great dialogue, white women make only vapid or
racist remarks. Black women are beautiful, intelligent, and various.
White women are stupid and bland carbon copies.
The authors have serious reservations about the “passing tale”
because “blacks occupy subordinate and supplemental positions.” “The
traditional mulatta is a character for white audiences, created to bring
whites to an understanding of the effects of racism…. the passing tale
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FRONTIERS, VOL. XV, NO. 1
calls for agency on the part of the white viewer.” The tale “foreclos[es] a
discussion of black lives” and presents “an essential idea of blackness,”
defined as “a natural body.” The essay does concede that “Dash suc-
cessfully challenges the conventions of the traditional mulatta
melodramas…. Dash’s passing heroine realizes the possibilities of
some of her desires … nor does she cease to aspire toward power and
authority in the white man’s world.”21
Although Dash “attempts to make Mignon a figure with whom
black viewers identify,” “Mignon facilitates Ester’s consumption by
the cinematic apparatus…. Ester’s own agency seems confined to wit-
nessing and pretending.” The authors conclude that “to identify with
Mignon would be to accept our position as subordinate to her, to
engage in an act of self-hatred. Though Dash attempts to establish a
relationship of equality between Ester and Mignon, between the black
woman viewer and Mignon, that relationship is a farce. Mignon occu-
pies a space of privilege denied black women. Our only healthy
response to her is ultimately one of rejection.”22
This analysis caused me great consternation. Could this be true?
Was I so far off? Was my identification with Mignon’s courage and
compassion, and with the sisterly bond between the two women, the
proof of the film’s disavowal of Black women? Did the film ultimately
address white women, like the tragic mulatta tale? Was there a “white”
response and a “Black” response?23 But then I remembered that bell
hooks and I were in agreement. The next day, Diawara’s newly pub-
lished anthology, Black American Cinema, arrived at the bookstore. Toni
Cade Bambara seconded the positive response. She argues that
Mignon’s goal was not to “advance a self-interested career…. Mignon
stands in solidarity with Ester. Unlike the other executives who see the
Black woman as an instrument, a machine, a solution to a problem,
Mignon acknowledges her personhood and their sisterhood.”24
Coming across this essay almost two years after I wrote about the
film, I was pleased to find other commonalities: “The genre that Dash
subverts in her indictment of the industry is the Hollywood story
musical” (141). Regarding the humiliation of Jean Hagen (Lina Lam-
ont) in several scenes, particularly the film’s conclusion, she asks,
“Does the Reynolds’ character stand in solidarity with the humiliated
woman? Hell no, it’s her big career break. Singin’ provides Dash with a
cinematic trope…. The validation of Black women is a major factor in
the emancipatory project of independent cinema.”25 What she does not
mention is the strange displacement in Singin’: Rita Moreno, Lina’s
friend, passing as Anglo.
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Like Bambara, bell hooks argues that the “bond between Mignon
and … Jeeter is affirmed by caring gestures of affirmation … the direct
unmediated gaze of recognition.” Mignon’s “power is affirmed by her
contact with the younger Black woman whom she nurtures and pro-
tects. It is this process of mirrored recognition that enables both Black
women to define their reality…. the shared gaze of the two women
reinforces their solidarity.” She calls the film “radical,” “opening up a
space for the assertion of a critical, Black, female spectatorship … new
transgressive possibilities for the formulation of identity.”26
(“Subversion” is the flip side of the belief in radical action through
aesthetics. However, “subversion/transgression” is linked to popular
rather than avant-garde forms; it is derived from cultural studies, not
the art world. Of course, art and popular culture are no longer separate
turfs – if they ever were. And like radical aesthetics in “art,” I think
“subversion” overstates the effects of watching TV or seeing a movie,
particularly one that accepts and admires the Hollywood “mode of
production.” We can think, we can change, but “subvert”?)
Like many proponents of Black independent cinema (in ways,
recapitulating white critics’ 1970s embrace of avant-garde cinema),
hooks claims subversion for this film: a “filmic narrative wherein the
Black female protagonist subversively claims that space.” Dash’s repre-
sentations “challenge stereotypical notions placing us outside … filmic
discursive practices.” The film calls into question the “White male’s
capacity to gaze, define, and know.” “Illusions problematizes the issue
of race and spectatorship. White people in the film are unable to ‘see’
that race informs their looking relations.”27 But after the film, this is
what we all would understand (or “see”), if we were listening.
Daughters of the Dust
All the distributors turned it down. I was told over and over again
that there was no market for the film. …. I was hearing mostly white
men telling me, an African American woman, what my people
wanted to see … deciding what we should be allowed to see.28
In spite of delays and difficulties with financing and distribution,
Dash took the film on the festival circuit, beginning with Sundance in
Utah, in 1991. (After seeing an earlier trailer at a PBS “weekend retreat
at Sundance,” American Playhouse and the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting funded it to the tiny tune of $800,000.29) In the past two
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FRONTIERS, VOL. XV, NO. 1
years, this commercial release by a woman has attracted substantial
audiences and acclaim. Daughters of the Dust has made film history.
Unlike the contemporary features by African American men, this
tale is told from the multiple, intersecting points of view of women of
all ages – historical women, modem women – including the spirits
of the unborn. Daughters is about love, respect, acceptance, and beauty
rather than fear, hatred, and neglect. It embodies hope, not despair. It
celebrates harmony and life rather than disaster and death. No wonder
the distributors had trouble! From Grand Canyon (which I hated) to
Boyz N the Hood (which I loved), contemporary U. S. cinema, like televi-
sion news, hawks male fear and high anxiety.
History is the setting of Daughters – the Sea Island Gullahs off
the coast of South Carolina at the turn of the century. Dash calls this
the “Ellis Island for the Africans,” the “main dropping off point for
Africans brought to North America as slaves.” Due to its isolation,
Africans maintained a distinct culture that is re-created, recalled, recol-
lected. A voice-over, of Nana Peazant, the old woman, the powerful
head of the family clan, speaking through the ages, says, “I am the first
and last, I am the whore and the holy one…. many are my daughters.
I am the silence you cannot understand. I am the utterances of my
name.” After invoking the ancestors through speech, the spirits of the
unborn, we go to Ibo Landing, the Sea Islands of the South, in 1902.
The landscape is paradise, a splendid tranquillity composed of pastels,
the pale blue sky, the golden beach, the azure ocean, sounds of water.
The scene is a family celebration, a beautiful, bountiful feast for this
extended, rural community.
Yellow Mary, the prodigal daughter, is arriving, returning home
from the mainland. With her is Trula, her female friend/lover wearing
yellow; Mary’s Christian sister in grey, Viola Peazant; and a male pho-
tographer, Mr. Snead. The Peazant family – gloriously dressed in pure,
dazzling white – awaits her on the beach. Some revile Yellow Mary as
a prostitute; most accept and love her, particularly Eula, the young
mother of the unborn child. Mary accepts them all and her life. Hers is
the tolerance of experience seasoned with wisdom. This is a celebration
not of her homecoming but of the extended family’s departure from
this island for the mainland. Coming and going, their paths cross.
A young girl’s voice sets up the drama in voice-over: “My story
begins before I was born. My great-great-grandmother … saw her fam-
ily coming apart.” The girl continues as the storyteller, “The old souls
guided me into the new world,” as the camera pans the house. Thus,
the tale is of the past, of history, a story of memory, or remembering,
what Toni Cade Bambara calls “cultural continuity.” It is an ending and
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also a beginning – like life itself. There are no dualities in this film.
Things end only to begin anew. Like their ancestors from Africa, this
family is beginning a journey to a new land.
The film – poised at the moment of the move from agrarian life to
the migration to the city – reminds “us that there was some richness
to that agrarian life.” hooks refers to the sense of loss that came with
the migration, what she calls a “psychic loss,” which for her is
emblematized by St. Julian Last Child, the Native American in Daugh-
ters, who stays behind with his African American bride. This is a recov-
ery of the history of intermarriage between African Americans and
Native Americans. “That intermarrying has never been depicted on
the screen, a Native American and an African American mating, bond-
ing, creating a life together that wasn’t just built upon some lust of the
moment.” Dash later asks, “Where have you ever seen a Native Amer-
ican win in the end and ride off in glory? When have you ever seen an
African American woman riding off into the sunset for love … ?” For
Dash, film history exists in this film: “I was drawing on what I had
experienced watching films by Spencer Williams, films from the 1930s,
like The Blood of Jesus and Go Down Death.”30
Nana Peazant, the great-grandmother, is the historian, the guard-
ian of legend and the spirits. History comes from oral tradition, from
experience. This is remembered history that lives through stories and
through spirits. For Nana, age is wisdom, age is strength, age is to be
respected: “We carry these memories inside us. We don’t know where
our recollections came from.” But there is a tragic reason for recollec-
tion: “They didn’t keep good records of slavery…. We had to hold
records in our head. The old souls could recollect birth, death, sale.
Those 18th century Africans, they watch us, they keep us, those four
generations of Africans. When they landed, they saw things we cannot
see.” This is the history of survival, not defeat.
The spectrum of women spans several generations – they wear
white; Nana wears dark blue, as did her ancestors, slaves who worked
planting the cotton, dyeing the cloth, staining their fingers dark navy.
That past of slavery haunts the present, in scenes of dark blue intercut
into the pastel tranquillity of the family celebration. Although Dash’s
historical adviser on the film, Dr. Margaret Washington Creel, told her
that the indigo stain would not have remained on the slaves’ hands, “I
was using this as a symbol of slavery, to create a new kind of icon
around slavery rather than the traditional showing of the whip marks or
the chains.” For hooks, this is a tactic of “defamiliarization.”31
Nana Peazant believes in the spirit more than the body. “Respect
your ancestors, call on your ancestors, let them guide you.” Power
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FRONTIERS, VOL. XV, NO. 1
doesn’t end “with the dead.” Nana responds to her grandson’s anger
about his wife’s rape: “Ya can’t get back what you never owned.”
Nana’s attempt to fortify the family for their journey, to give them their
heritage, is also the film’s gift to the audience and to African American
history. “I’m trying to learn ya how to touch your own spirit … to give
you something to take north with ya. …. Call on those old Africans. Let
the old souls come into your heart …. let them feed you with wis-
dom.” Nana calls upon the spirits, carried by the wind. We glimpse the
young girl, as yet unborn, running. Then we see this spirit enter her
mother’s body. The spirits can be felt, experienced.
An aesthetics of history is inscribed on bodies that dance, stroll,
gesture, talk, and listen – a choreography of grace-filled movement,
poetic voices and words, one group leading to another, then shifting the
players. The beauty is a remarkable achievement in twenty-eight days
of “principal photography” shot with only “natural light – sunlight”
and 170,000 feet of film edited in Dash’s living room. The film is lush
with group shots and close-ups of beautiful African American women,
talking, listening, laughing. “I saw Africa in her face,” says Nana. The
film caresses these faces of many styles and ages, taking time to let us
see them, to cherish their presence and experience what they might be
thinking. They are so different yet connected, “unity in diversity.” For
hooks, the film “breaks new ground in its portrayal of darker-skinned
black people.”32 Dash: “We used Agfa-Geveart film, instead of Kodak
because Black people look better on Agfa.”33
The actresses in the film represent another history. “I really tried
to use the actresses who had worked … in Black independent films.”
Dash mentions Cora Lee Day (Nana Peazant) in Haile Gerima’s Bush
Mama; Kaycee Moore (Haagar Peazant) in Killer of Sheep; Barbara O
(Yellow Mary) in Diary of an African Nun; and Alva Rogers (Eula) in
School Daze. “These people worked months on films for little or no pay
at all; so, now that I was finally able to pay them … why look some-
where else?”34
Dash understands the affective quality of photography – of com-
position and the close-up. She uses still photography as an emblem of
turn-of-the-century technology coincident with the historical setting of
her film in 1901. A series of photos by James Van Der Zee of “black
women at the turn of the century” fascinated her. “The images and ideas
combined and grew.”35 The young photographer, Mr. Snead, has come
to record the auspicious event; this is modem history, abetted by pho-
tography, not memory; by images, not spirits or words. For Dash, Mr.
Snead had “a secret mission. He has another agenda” in which the peo-
ple are “primitive.” “For me, he also represents the viewing audience.”
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This feature film is a series of striking portraits, the faces of beautiful
African American women of all ages. Dash rewinds the camera to 1901
and begins another film history, from another beginning. This is history
as a becoming, where the photographs are brought to life, made to
speak, and surrounded by context.
Still photographs lead to sound and to story and make up an
affective logic. For John Berger, like Bazin, photographs are relics,
traces of what happened. To become part of the past, part of making
history, they “require a living context.” This memory “would encom-
pass an image of the past, however tragic … within its own continu-
ity.” Photography then becomes “the prophecy of a human memory
yet to be socially and politically achieved.” The hint of the story to
come “replaces the photograph in time – not its own original time for
that is impossible – but in narrative time. Narrated time becomes his-
toric time” that “respects memory.”36
The film begins from something remembered – as Freud says,
“Every affect is only a reminiscence of an event” – and then begins to
construct what Berger calls “a radial system” around the photograph
in “terms which are simultaneously personal, political, economic, dra-
matic, everyday, and historic.” In an interview with Zeinabu Irene
Davis, a wonderful filmmaker, Dash says: “The whole film is about
memories, and the scraps of memories, that these women carry around
in tin cans and little private boxes. … African Americans don’t have a
solid lineage that they can trace. All they have are scraps of memories
remaining from the past.” Dash thought about “what it would be like
to have a child … taken away, sold away in slavery. I mean, exactly
how would that feel? … How do you maintain after that kind of per-
sonal tragedy? What happens to you?”37
This film sketches what Deleuze calls a “geography of relations.”
This “geography” can recall what has been ignored, or gone unre-
corded, fashioning a “logic of the non-preexistent.” “Future and past
don’t have much meaning, what counts is the present-becoming.”
Nana Peazant is living history. The Self – of the maker, of the audi-
ence, and of ancestors – is invoked in a spirit of cultural continuity
rather than rupture. The focus is on becoming, on relations, what hap-
pens between experience and thought, between “sensations and ideas,”
between sound and image, between cultures, between women. This is
a logic of “and,” of connections, of actions. Becomings “are acts which
can only be contained in a life and expressed in a style.”38
What I have described in another essay as the empirical avant-
garde destabilizes history by the experimental, granting women the
authority of the experiential (which includes knowledge and memory).39
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FRONTIERS, VOL. XV, NO. 1
Embodying the mutuality of art and life, the empirical avant-garde con-
nects fiction and history in a manner comparable to Walter Benjamin’s
distinction between the story and the novel. For Benjamin, the story
comes from “oral tradition” and shared experience. Storytellers speak of
the “circumstances” they have directly learned or they “simply pass it
off as their own experience.” Thus, the listener has a stake in hearing and
in remembering the story that exists in “the realm of living speech,” of
shared “companionship.”40 This living speech, forged in mutual experi-
ence and placed within history, is intriguing for feminism – a hearing as
much as a seeing, a fiction as much as a fact, a life as much as a history.
These films exist in the intersections between sound and image,
history and experience, Art and Life. Affect and intellect emerge from
the relations between women. Rather than ontology or duality, the
logic is what Deleuze calls the “Anomalous,”41 and Laleen Jayamanne
calls hybrid, a tactic of assimilation, not, however, from the point of
view of the colonizer.42 As bell hooks reminds us, “White cultural …
appropriation of black culture maintains white supremacy,” which
occurs with the “commodification of blackness.”43 Which, of course,
relates to politics – these are films by women of color.
The past, a question of memory and history (which is intimate and
emotive), haunts the present like a primal scene. I am not thinking of
Freud but of something he could never understand – the mutual
struggle of women for independence, of mothers and daughters to love
and to let go, to be together and separate, to be alike and different. This
lifelong journey, away from and with the mother, is taken into history.
The film asks that we listen, carefully – there is much to hear on
the sound track. The screenplay, written by Dash, is brilliant, poetic,
instructive. Listening to these words, spoken from the heart, is inspir-
ing. The music is haunting, rich, composed by Butch Morris to “incor-
porate South Carolina field cries and calls.”44 The film respects its oral
traditions, it talks poetically, it speaks historically. hooks writes that
“talking back” meant “speaking as an equal.” In “the home … it was
black women who preached. There, black women spoke in a language
so rich, so poetic, that it felt to me like being shut off from life … if one
was not allowed to participate. It was in that world of woman talk …
that was born in me the craving to speak, to have a voice … belonging
to me. … It was in this world of woman speech … that I made speech
my birthright … a privilege I would not be denied. It was in that
world and because of it that I came to dream of writing, to write. Writ-
ing was a way to capture speech.”45
History is carried in the conversations that tell the story of our
lives. Mary talks about the rape of “colored women,” there as common
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FRONTIERS, VOL. XV, NO. 1
as fish in the sea. The voice-over spirit says she needed to convince her
father “I was his child.” The men recall the slave ships. Mary tells the
story about her baby, born dead, so she nursed another baby. Nana –
shown in close detail, often apart from the group, old, wiry, tough, a
survivor – cannot understand how the family can leave.
The family is divided, momentarily, historically, over spirituality
versus Christianity. Nana’s daughter-in-law says, “I am educated. I’m
tired of those old stories…. they pray to the sun, the moon, they ain’t
got no religion. I don’t want my daughter to hear about that stuff.” The
voice of the spirit girl: “We were the children of those who chose to
survive.” Shots of clothes drying are intercut. “I was traveling on a
spiritual mission, but sometimes I would be distracted. … I remember
the call from my great-, great-grandmother. I remember and I recall. I
remember my journey home.”
For many viewers, the film feels like “a journey home.” The film
comes to understand that “we are part of each other…, we are all
good women. We are the Daughters of the Dust.” Although the family
separates, four generations of women remain together. Yellow Mary
became active in anti-lynching. The spirit’s voice-over concludes this
extraordinary film: “My mommy and daddy stayed behind, with Yel-
low Mary. We remain behind, growing older, wiser, stronger.”
Bambara calls the film “oppositional cinema” – due to “dual nar-
ration” and “multiple point of view camerawork.” The style is a “non-
linear, multilayered unfolding” comparable to the “storytelling
traditions” of “African cinema.” Dash compares the film’s structure to
an African griot: “The story would just unravel … through a series of
vignettes…. the story would come out and come in and go out and
come in … go off on a tangent … and back again. Like a rhizome.”46
For Bambara, Daughters is “Africentric.” She says the “storytelling
mode is African-derived, in a call-and-response circle.” “The spacious-
ness in DD is closer to African cinema than to European and Euro-
American cinema. People’s circumstances are the focus in African cin-
ema, rather than individual psychology.”47
“I wanted the look of the film to come from a rich African base.”
The production design and set “were done by artists [e.g., Kerry Mar-
shall, Michael Kelly Williams, Martha Jackson Jarvis, and David
Hammond]…. All … are nationally known African American art-
ists.” The costumes (the way the scarves are tied meaning different
things) and gestures (turning the head “slightly to the left when listen-
ing to an elder”) all derive from West African culture. “The men have
these hand signals [that] were derived from secret societies in West
Africa.” “I wanted to have a connection to the past…. Afrocentrism
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FRONTIERS, VOL. XV, NO. 1
… is that your actions are derived from West African culture rather
than from … Europe.”48 For hooks, the film is an interrogation of
“Eurocentric biases that have informed our understanding of the Afri-
can American experience.”
Bambara’s analysis of the use of space is akin to that of Bazin on
Orson Welles – reaching very different conclusions. This is “shared
space (wide-angled, deep focus)” rather than “dominated space,”
space which portrays conflicts that are “systemic,” not merely “psycho-
logical.” Bazin contrasted what can be called “spatial realism” with
“psychological realism,” the conventions of Hollywood continuity
style. “Spatial realism” consists of shots in depth, of long duration, and
the use of the moving camera. Thus, the spectator has the freedom to
look around. In addition, cuts are not motivated according to the same
cause-effect logic of continuity style. Psychological character motiva-
tion is not the main logic of cutting; neither is point of view from, usu-
ally, a male perspective. Often, as with the films of Jean Renoir, this is
called the cinema of mise-en-schne, which resembles what Bambara
calls “shared space,” without, however, her political connotations.
What is significant, however, is the way this “technique” shifts when
women tell the story and are the protagonists. Dash’s shared space and
Bazin’s “spatial realism” are, paradoxically, worlds apart. What women
and men are doing in that space is one measure of aesthetic difference.
This debate over the politics of aesthetics is productive and important.
Daughters revises the history of photography and film, creating a
moving picture that shows what could have been, what might have
been, and now, what is on record. But this is not the same old story.
This story focuses on mothers and daughters. Their centrality remem-
bers the past and changes history. hooks writes, “To bear the burden of
memory one must willingly journey to places long uninhabited,
searching for traces of the unforgettable, all knowledge of which has
been suppressed.” “Reconstructing an archaeology of memory makes
return possible.” This is “history written in the hearts of our people,
who then feel for history.”49
Dash was addressing “black women first, the black community
second, white women third,” a hierarchy that is reflected in her empa-
thetic portrayal of Black men in the film. As hooks argues, “To de-cen-
ter the white patriarchal gaze, we have to focus on someone else for a
change…. the film takes up that group that is truly on the bottom of
this society’s race-sex hierarchy. Black women tend not to be seen….
Daughters de-centers the usual subject – and that includes white
women.” hooks also suggests that “people will place Daughters in a
world not only of black independent filmmakers, but also in the larger
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world of filmmakers.”5o I agree. I did not feel at all marginalized by the
film. A much stronger experience than “being white” drew me in –
that of being part of a large, rural family, of being an older sister, a
mother and a daughter, with a wiry, thin, powerful 102-year-old
grandmother who resembles Nana Peazant. Rose Sedlacek’s hands
were gnarled from heavy work in a house without electricity. She still
rules the family roost, although her eldest daughter, my mother, Mary
Margaret, is now seventy-eight. I see this independent, strong woman
every day – she is my support.
On the level of memory and affect, I felt kinship with the commu-
nity of this diverse family, the pain of separation, the wisdom of
aging, and the nourishing, loving companionship of strong women.
My mother’s parents were first-generation poor dairy farmers in
Northern Wisconsin who raised ten children during the depression.
All their work was God’s work. Hard, physical labor in the fields and
in the house was the source of happiness. They raised and preserved
all their food and made their clothing. Prayers were at 4:00 a.m., milk-
ing by hand began at 5:00 a.m., and bedtime came after evening
prayers, with darkness.
There was so much joy and faith and talk that I never noticed
there was no money. I recalled summer feasts on the farm during com-
munity harvesting (called thrashing); I remembered staying in a house
with straw mattresses and an outhouse. I recollected the differences,
including smell, taste, and touch, between rural life and the city. At
night, light came from only the stars. Night was an enveloping Black-
ness. Sunday on the farm was different from every other day. On Sun-
day, we got dressed up, went to church, and did no work other than
visiting, talking all the day long with “family.” Everyone in Drywood
was related by blood or marriage. My memory of Sunday is like
hooks’s – “Girlfriend, growing up as a Southern black woman, in the
1960s, my family felt that you should not work on a Sunday…. we
could not wear pants, for a long time. …. it was a day of rest.”51
hooks argues “that viewers who are not black females find it hard
to empathize with the central characters…. They are adrift without a
white presence in the film.” My response is surely different; I didn’t
need or want a white presence. On the contrary. I have much to learn
about cultural difference from women of color. And I agree with hooks
that it is wrong to assume “that strength in unity can only exist if dif-
ference is suppressed and shared experience is highlighted.”s2 How-
ever, experience shared can lead to differences understood. “I see” also
means “I understand.” As hooks so wisely says, there is a difference
between “cultural appropriation” and “cultural appreciation.”
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hooks wonders why “white women” are not starved for these
images, as she is. I, too, am starved for portrayals of strong, interesting
women of all colors, of women who love and identify with other
women, of women who are intelligent, powerful. White women have
few memories of these experiences in films. For me, Daughters has
much to teach women of all colors. Like hooks’s analysis of “contem-
porary black women,” the “struggle to become a subject” is also linked
to my “emotional and spiritual well-being.” I, too, come from a family
of fast-talking, hardworking women; I, too, believe that self-love is rev-
olutionary, for white women as well as women of color. Maybe we
have more in common regarding mothers and daughters than we have
imagined. Perhaps more than anything else, I, too, have a strong spiri-
tual life, rarely acknowledged in film and scholarly writing.
When hooks asks, “Why is it that feminist film criticism …
remains aggressively silent on the subject of blackness, … disallows
… black women’s voices? It is difficult to talk when you feel no one is
listening,”3 I sadly concur. The blind spots of white feminists, includ-
ing me, regarding women of color have been glaring. That is changing,
as Doane and Gaines and others have demonstrated. But most impor-
tant, we now have films to show us the way and books to point us in
the right directions.
In their conversation, hooks and Dash recall the “ritual of dealing
with hair grooming,” the pleasure of “sitting in” – “It was a joy.” Dif-
ferent West African hairstyles mean things; for example, “married, sin-
gle, menopausal.” The family “hairbraider” would braid “the map of
the journey north in the hair design.”54 Nana Peazant’s most powerful
gris-gris was a lock of her mother’s hair – often the only thing chil-
dren had of the mothers during slavery. I didn’t know this. I loved the
learning. In fact, learning has always been my greatest pleasure. Now,
as I look at a lock of Grandmother Rose’s red hair, which still reaches to
the small of her back, as it did when she was a girl on a farm in north-
ern Wisconsin, I understand much more. With understanding comes
acceptance and love – and these are the gifts Daughters of the Dust ulti-
mately gives to us.
Afterthoughts
I wrote about this film after seeing it in February 1992, in New
York, with my daughter, Dae. It came at a turning point in our relation-
ship – to let go and to come together. The film addressed us on many
levels. In the last few months, several insightful analyses have
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FRONTIERS, VOL. XV, NO. 1
appeared. Although my interpretation has changed little since my first
wondrous encounter with the film, an experience that included the
audience’s love, respect, and gratitude for the film, these important
critics deserve mention.
In the introduction to his superb anthology, Black American Cinema,
Diawara posits two types of Black American cinema, one based on a
model of time (linear, not simultaneous), the other on space. “Spatial
narration” reveals and links “black spaces that have been … sup-
pressed by White times,” and validates “black culture.” “Spatial narra-
tion” is “cultural restoration, a way for Black filmmakers to reconstruct
Black history.” In contrast, the “time-based narratives” are “perfor-
mances of Black people against racism, and genocide,” linking the
“progress of time to Black characters.” This structure is linear, the other
is circular; Boyz N the Hood compared to Daughters in the Dust.55
This distinction resembles that advocated (for different political
reasons and predicated on different philosophical and aesthetic princi-
ples) by Andre Bazin between the continuity style and spatial realism.
It also shares an attitude with Deleuze’s distinction between time/
movement and space/movement. However, Diawara disputes my ten-
dency to interrelate disparate thinkers: “Is this not a way of effacing?
The universal, being like Deleuze/Bazin, obliterates the local, the orig-
inality of Dash’s films?” and, one could add, hooks’s or Diawara’s
writing. I hear what he means. For me, however, it’s not a question of
either/or, with women granted the local and male theorists the global.
The global also belongs to women. For me, hooks is of the same magni-
tude as Deleuze. This is what comparing them means for me.
Diawara emphasizes what he calls the film’s “religious system,”
which he states is African, leading to “a Black structure of feeling.” He
links what I call the film’s spirituality (which is African and resembles
Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, and what I practice, Kasmir Shaivism), a
mode of self- and historical empowerment, to Cornel West’s recent call
for a politics of conversion, of feeling, which Dash’s system of “ances-
tor worship” resembles.56 For me the spiritual basis of the film is unify-
ing – providing another way to think and feel and change history.
Spirituality, the character of the unborn child, the wind, the sound
track of noises, music, voice-overs, enables an identification with
forces within each individual that are greater than the material world,
powers that are indestructible and eternal. The spirit within each
human being outruns the limits and prejudices of Western rationality
and history.
In “Reading the Signs, Empowering the Eye: Daughters of the
Dust and the Black Independent Cinema Movement,” Toni Cade
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Bambara’s brilliant analysis of this film posits three qualities of
Dash’s work: “women’s perspective” and “women’s validation of
women”; “shared space rather than dominated space” (like hooks,
she sees Mignon “in solidarity with” Ester Jeeter); and “glamour/
attention to female iconography.”57
For Bambara, the island setting is complex: “Occupying the same
geographical terrain are both the ghetto, where we are penned up in
concentration-camp horror, and the community, wherein we enact daily
rituals of group validation in a liberated zone – a global condition
throughout the African diaspora, the view informs African cinema.”58
For her, the beach is not “a nostalgic community in a pastoral setting.
The Peazant family is an imperiled group. The high tide of bloodletting
has ebbed for a time, thanks to the activism of Ida B. Wells.”
“The Peazants are self-defining people. Unlike the static portraits
of reactionary cinema” (where characters never change but remain
their stereotypical essence) “the Peazants have a belief in their own
ability to change and in their ability to transform … social relations.”59
Bambara concludes by arguing that the next stage will be “pluralistic,
transcultural, and international,” with an “amplified and indelible
presence of women.”
These are exemplary analyses, particularly the emphasis on space,
time, history, memory, and activism. “Looking and looking back, Black
women involve ourselves in a process whereby we see our history as
counter-memory, and use it as a way to know the present and invent
the future.”60 However, in addition to these critics’ visual analysis, I
would emphasize sound – the issues of enunciation/address, music,
voice, and authority. In Illusions, Mignon possesses authority. She
speaks up, fearlessly. Her voice-over claims history and a place in it.
For me, Mignon/Dash outruns theoretical models predicated solely on
vision. Dash’s films enable all of us to move forward.
Notes
1. Johnston was a British feminist film theorist and critic, considered by many to be a
founder of feminist film theory. She committed suicide in the 1980s.
2. Meaghan Morris, unpublished talk/manuscript on Claire Johnston. Morris takes
Gilles Deleuze’s model of the “minor,” derived from Franz Kafka’s work, as a strat-
egy of/for feminism.
3. bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 193.
4. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues (New York: Columbia University Press,
1987). In Australia intellectuals have been influenced by Deleuze for a long time,
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FRONTIERS, VOL. XV, NO. 1
unlike in the United States, where many scholars are just beginning to take note.
For my analysis of Jayamanne’s film theory, see The Fugitive Image, ed. Patrice Petro
(forthcoming from Indiana University Press).
5. hooks, 122.
6. Freud posits three modes of identification – having, being, and group. It is the
third instance so applicable to the public exhibition of film that is paradoxically
ignored in film theory.
7. S. V. Hartman and Farah Jasmine Griffin, “Are You As Colored As That Negro? The
Politics of Being Seen in Julie Dash’s Illusions,” Black American Literature Forum 25:2
(Summer 1991); 361-375. Here is their description of the story:
The film’s narrative, set in the 1940s, focuses on Mignon [Dupree], a beautiful,
fair-skinned movie executive who is passing for white. Mignon has come to
Hollywood to “make the world of moving shadows work for” her. However,
she winds up developing escapist entertainment fare. In the course of her
duties at National Studio, she befriends a dark-skinned singer, Ester Geeter [the
name is spelled Jeeter by others, including me], who has been hired to dub the
voice of white film star Leila Grant and thereby save the studio’s Christmas
blockbuster. Ester’s presence makes Mignon realize that she has become “an
illusion just like the stories here.” … After [her race is discovered by the boss’s
son, home on leave], Mignon confirms her desire … to tell real stories about
real Negroes, and use the power of the film industry to present honest represen-
tations. (363-364)
8. I am referring to the influential essays by Jean-Louis Baudry and Jean-Louis
Comolli on the apparatus – theoretical models that came to the United States in the
late 1970s.
9. I am referring to Michel de Certeau’s distinction between strategies and tactics,
with strategies being institutional, dominant practices.
10. Disavowal, the maintenance of contradictory beliefs, is usually the only mechanism
in film theory. However, in Queer Theory, Liz Grosz has complicated this to include
denial and repudiation. For more on this, see my book High Anxiety. Repudiation
explains how Black voice/white face would work. We know something to be true,
in reality, but block it out.
11. Homi Bhabha applied the theory of fetishistic disavowal to colonial subjectivity,
without, however, noting women. For another critique of Bhabha, see Manthia
Diawara, “The Nature of Mother in Dreaming Rivers,” Black American Literature
Forum 25:2 (Summer 1991): 283-298.
12. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “Year Zero: Faciality,” A Thousand Plateaus: Capi-
talism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 167-191.
13. In “The Re-Birth of the Aesthetic in Cinema,” Clyde Taylor discusses how aesthetics
(often argued as “excess”) were a cover-up for the film’s “evil” racism. “It is this
mystifying aura orchestrated by the art-culture system that has deterred the recogni-
tion of The Birth of a Nation as one of the most accomplished articulations of fascism,
of twentieth century evil” (28). He notes, but doesn’t emphasize, the film’s linkage
between rape and racism, the way the white woman becomes the pawn for lynch-
ing. (He even refers to Griffith’s obsessiveness for young white girls in jeopardy.) In
the film’s prologue, Africans are the problem. In the film’s epilogue, Africans have
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FRONTIERS, VOL. XV, NO. 1
gone, replaced by white Christianity and couples. Wide Angle 13:3/4 (July-Oct.
1991): 12-31.
14. Unlike Jeanne Crane, a white actress and 1950s star impersonating a Black woman
in Pinky, a feature film about “passing,” Mignon is played by a Black actress.
15. Jacques Lacan, “Seminar on the Purloined Letter,” in French Freud, ed. Jeffrey Mehl-
man, Yale French Studies 48 (New Haven: Yale University, 1972).
16. Like the film, pronouns are revealing, difficult. I can’t fully claim “we” or “us” if I
have not had the experience.
17. Hartman and Griffin, 361-374.
18. Diawara recommended Mark Reid, Jacquie Jones, and Jacqueline Bobo. He also rec-
ommended that I read essays by Mary Ann Doane and Jane Gaines. Both women
have been friends for years.
Mark Reid’s book Redefining Black Film has a chapter on “Black Feminism and the
Independent Film,” previously published as an essay. Reid takes his cue from liter-
ary criticism, specifically that of Alice Walker, and distinguishes feminist films from
Black womanist films, a concept that “refers to … reading strategies whose narra-
tive and receptive processes permit polyvalent female subjectivity” (110). Reid
endorses Alile Sharon Larkin’s analysis of triple oppression (economic, racial, sex-
ual) for Black women, unlike white feminists. “I cannot pick and choose a single
area of struggle….. Feminists … do not have to deal with the totality of
oppression…. Feminism succumbs to racism when it segregates Black women
from Black men and dismisses our histories” (118-119). “Black womanist films”
include Illusions (with only a paragraph analysis) and Nice Colored Girls by Tracey
Moffatt (without mentioning her name). Daughters of the Dust “dramatizes woman-
ism in a female-centered narrative with a pan-African sentiment” (129). Troubling,
however, is that a Black womanist viewing position “acknowledges that the goal of
Black feminist theory is a revision of gender relations and an open-ended sexual-
ity.” What, exactly, is “open-ended sexuality”? Redefining Black Film (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1993), 109-124. This chapter was published as “Dialogic
Modes of Representing Africa(s) in Black American Literature Forum, 25:2 (Summer
1991): 375-388. This was a special Black Film Issue, edited by Valerie Smith, Camille
Billops, and Ada Griffin.
Jacquie Jones, the editor of Black Film Review, has a short and terrific review of
Daughters in African American Review, 27:1 (1993): 19-21. “African American life is
freed from the urban, from the cotton picking….. the complexity and shaded histo-
ries of Black women’s lives take center stage. There are no whores or maids … no
acquiescent slaves. No white people …. The film does have a certain preoccupation
with beauty”(19).
19. Hartman and Griffin, 371.
20. Ibid., 368.
21. Ibid., 370-371.
22. Ibid., 371-372.
23. Ultimately, of course, the authors and I are both wrong – essentially speaking.
There is no such thing as a unified “Black female subject” or a singular white female
subject with built-in responses.
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FRONTIERS, VOL. XV, NO. 1
24. Toni Cade Bambara, “Reading the Signs, Empowering the Eye: Daughters of the Dust
and the Black Independent Cinema Movement,” in Black American Cinema, ed. Man-
thia Diawara (New York: Routledge, 1993), 118-144.
25. Ibid., 141.
26. bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” in Black Looks, from
which I quoted earlier, reprinted in Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara,
288-302.
27. Ibid. hooks, like Diawara, also quotes from Mary Ann Doane but few other theo-
rists involved in feminist film theory. I am thinking of Teresa de Lauretis on narra-
tive (in Alice Doesn’t), and Kaja Silverman on sound (in Re-Visions: Essays in Feminist
Film Criticism, ed. Doane, Mellencamp, and Linda Williams).
28. Julie Dash, Daughters of the Dust (New York: New Press, 1992), 25.
29. Zeinabu Irene Davis, “An Interview With Julie Dash,” Wide Angle, 13: 3/4: 110-119; 112.
30. Dash, 42, 42, 47, 28, 28.
31. Ibid., 31.
32. Ibid.,10, 13,54.
33. Davis, 115.
34. Ibid., 113, 114.
35. Dash, 4.
36. John Berger, “Uses of Photography,” On Looking (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 56-63.
The essay is subtitled, “For Susan Sontag.”
37. Davis, 112.
38. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, 56.
39. See “An Empirical Avant-Garde: Laleen Jayamanne and Tracey Moffatt,” in The
Fugitive Image, ed. Patrice Petro, forthcoming from Indiana University Press in 1994.
40. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Neskov,”
Illuminations (New York; Schocken Books, 1969), 83-110.
41. For Deleuze, the Anomalous is “always at the frontier,” the “Outsider,” Dialogues, 42.
42. See Manthia Diawara on hybridization/creolization, “The Nature of Mother in
Dreaming Rivers,” 293-294.
43. hooks, Black Looks, 32-33.
44. Davis, 114.
45. bell hooks, “Talking Back,” Discourse 8 (Fall-Winter 1986-1987): 124. When reading
this, I identified. My experience with my mother, her five sisters (and four broth-
ers), and their mother was constant talk, never silence.
46. Dash, 39.
47. Bambara, xiii, 124,136.
48. Davis, 114,116.
49. hooks, Black Looks, 172,173,183.
50. Ibid., 40, 65.
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FRONTIERS, VOL. XV, NO. 1
51. Ibid., 43.
52. Ibid., 130,51.
53. Ibid., 124-125.
54. Ibid, 53.
55. Manthia Diawara, “Black American Cinema: The New Realism,” Black American Cin-
ema, 3-25. The essays are divided into “Black Aesthetics” and “Black Spectatorship.”
56. Diawara, Black American Cinema, 18-19.
57. Bambara, “Reading the Signs,” 120-121.
58. Ibid., 121.
59. Ibid., 123, 143.
60. hooks, Black Looks, 302.
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- Contents
- Issue Table of Contents
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Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 15, No. 1, Women Filmmakers and the Politics of Gender in Third Cinema (1994), pp. i-xii+1-202
Front Matter [pp. i-xii]
Introduction [pp. 1-19]
“Al Cine de las Mexicanas”: “Lola” in the Limelight [pp. 20-50]
Cuban Cinema: On the Threshold of Gender [pp. 51-75]
Making History: Julie Dash [pp. 76-101]
Reclaiming Images of Women in Films from Africa and the Black Diaspora [pp. 102-122]
In the Shadow of Race: Forging Images of Women in Bolivian Film and Video [pp. 123-140]
The Seen of the Crime [pp. 141-182]
Selected Bibliography [pp. 183-186]
Back Matter [pp. 187-202]
Figure 1. Julie Dash and Charles Burnett at the Pan African Film Festival. 2008 (Photo by Frances-
Anne Solomon, 2008).
“I Do Exist”: From “Black Insurgent”
to Negotiating the Hollywood Divide-
A Conversation with Julie Dash
¿ by MICHAEL T. MARTIN
CO ‘ ‘
^ Abstract: This extended conversation with Julie Dash concerns her work as a filmmaker
£ and projects in development since the release of her masterwork, Daughters of the Dust
i (1992). It examines Dash’s film practice and ambivalent relationship to Hollywood, along
^ with her take on black independent filmmaking from the 1950s to the present and its
I prospects during Spike Lee’s ascendancy.
Miehiul T Marün is director of the Black Ftbn CenUr/ArcMif imdproßssor of Afücrn Amencan anä.Afhcan Diaspara
Stmäis ai Indiana Unu’frsity, Bloomingím. His edited and cotét^ anlholegies imlutü Redress for Historical Injus-
tices in the United States: Slavcrj-Jini Crow, and Their Legacies (DuJu I’nivmitr B^s, 2007). Cinemas of
tbe Black Diaspora: Diversity; Dependence, and OppositioniiLry (Wayne Sidle IJmvmit« Press, 1995), and
New I^tin Ameriran C^inenia (IVímn Stair Universily Presi 1997). Ht also directed and u>prodiM¿ Ute awará-
umningfiíüim doaonmUny m .Vteatagua, In ihe . ^ s e n c c of Peace (1989). His most recent u.wk is on the films of
G^ fíjtUtconio and Hailt Gerima.
www.cm5tudies.org 49 No. 2 Winter 20
10
1
Cinema Journal49 ; No. 2 I Winter 2010
[Julie Dash] consistently intervenes in and redirects Hollywood images of African Ameri-
can women, offering aesthetically complex and compelling chajacters and returning to spe-
cific historical moments to recover and revalue the nuances of black ivomen’s lives and
professional contributions. Joanna Hearne, 2007′
A
raconteur of extraordinary’ discernment and vision, Julie Dash was born and
reared in the Queensbridge Projects of Long Island City. New York, alihtiugh
lier parents came from South Carolina, where on her father’s side of the family
the Gullah culture wa.s practiced. In 1968, durinji her senior year in high school,
she attended a film workshop ai the Studio Museum in Harlem, which amused her
interest in filnmiaking. in 1974. she earned a BA in film production at the City College
of New York., then moved to Los Angeles to find work and learn to writt? screenplays.
There she met and worked with Charles Burneti. Billy WfW)dbenT, ajid Haue Gerima.
In 1975, she became a producing and writing fellow at the American Film Institute,
and in 1986, she completed an NÍFA in motion picture and television production at the
University ol California-Los Angeles fUCL,’\).
It was during the UCLA period that Dash’s filmmaking and political concerns co-
alesced to contest Hollywood’s conventions of storytelling, a.s well as its complicit}’
in American racism. Dash became p a n oí’ a “study'” group of” black student film-
makers at UCLA, dubbed the “black insurgents” by Toni Cade Bambara (a.k.a. the
“Los Angeles School” or “LA Rebellion”). The group. a.ssert.s Bambara. “engaged in
interrogafing conventions of dominant cinema, screening films of socially conscious
cinema, and discussing ways to alter previous significations as they relate to Black
people.”^
T h e intellectual and cultural commitments of the first wave of thi.s group were
“inseparable from the political and social struggles and convulsions of the 1960s,”
contends Ntongela Masilela.^ In contrast to Hollywood, members of the group en-
gaged and were inspired by the writings of Third World theorisis, the cultural texts
and practices of the Black Arts Movement, and the anticolonial and postrevolutionary
films and political tracts of the New Latin American Cinema movement. Tiie group’s
project was to conceive and practice a film form appropriate to and in correspondence
with the historical moment and their cukural and aesthetic concerns. For Masilela, a
central preoccupation and organizing theme of the first cohort of what arguably con-
stituted a movement—comprising Charles Burnett, Haue Gerima, and Larry Clark
among others—was the “relationship of history^ to the structure of the family.”^ This
1 Joanna Hearne. “Julie Dasii,” in Schirmet Encyclopedis of Film. su. Barry Keith Grant (Detroit, Ml: Schirmer Référ-
ence, 2007), 376.
2 Toni Cade Sambara, “Reading the Signs, Empowering the Eye: Daughters of the Dustanü the Black Cinematic Mowe-
nient.” in Black Cinema, ed. Uanthia Diawara (New York; RouUedge. 1993!,
11
9. According to Ntongela Masilela.
Dash was among the “second wave” m this movement, which included Alrle Sharon Larkin. Bemard Nichols, and
Billy WOodberry. See Ntongela Masilela, “Tbe Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers.” m ibid.. 107.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., 1 1 1 . Note that Charles Burnett’s films, Killer of Sheep 11977). My Brothers Wedding il’SSS). 77» Worse
(1973), Serera/Frtencfe (1969). and m i e / i / f f f a / / i 5 ( 1 9 9 5 ) , were released in a box set by Milestone Filnfis (20071.
Cinema Journal 49 No. 2 Winter 2010
theme is perhaps best epitomized by Burnett’s neoreaüst take on urban ghetto black
working-class life in Killer of Sheep (1977) and, I would argue, b>’ Michael Roemer’s
NolMng but a Mart (1964), a seminal study of black family life and race relations in the
rural South in the late 1950s to mid-1960s. Dash, a member of tiie gniup’s second
wave, along with Billy Woodberry [Bless Thár UttU Hearts, 1984), would address this
famiha] theme, as well as the southern rural black encounter with modernity, in her
most original, experimental, and complex film, Daughters of iJie Dust (1992).
Dash’s eariy films reveal the originality of her artistry and the themes that would
inform her more mature work. For Diary of an Afriiati Nun fl977), adapted fnim a
short story by Alice Walker and shot on Super iJmm, Dash received a Director’s Guild
of America Award. In 1982, she made Illusions, the stor>- of two African American
women—one passing for white—in the Hollywood film industry’ during World War 11,
for wliich she later received a Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame Award. With her criti-
cally acclaimed grand opus, Daughters of the Dust—selected by the Library of Congress
for the National Film Registry in 2004, and the first feature film by an African Ameri-
can woman to have a national theatrical release—Dash is assured membership in the
pantheon of African American filmmakers.
Despite the critical success of Daughters of the Dust, Dash continues lo experience
resistance in Hollywood to financing her projects. In ihe mid-1990s, she migrated
to television, directing projects for CBS [The Rosa Parks Story, starring Angela Bassett,
2002), M T V [Uve Song, 2001), BET Mmies/Encore/Starz3 [Fumiv Wlmänes, 1998),
and HBO [Subway Stories, 1996). She also produced shorts about health issues and mu-
sic videos, including Tracy Chapman’s Give Me One Reason, which was nominated tor
an M T V Music Video Award in 1996. In 2004. she completed Brothers of the Borderland,
a short film scheduled to run tor tour years at the National Underground Railroad
Freedom Center Mtjscum in Ohio.
This extended interview with Dash occurred on two occasions: during her visit
to the Indianapolis Museum of An on October 29, 2006, where Daughters of the
Dust was screened as part of the musetmi’s “Film with Ardst Talk Program,” and at
Indiana Llniversity-Bloomingion on October 3^4, 2007, when Dash gave the kcy-
nole address, “My Narrative; Experiences of a Filmmaker,” and screened her film
The Rosa Parks Story as part of a month-long celebration of the university’s archives
and special collections. The interview is organized in two parts. T h e first concerns
Dash’s work since Daughter of the Dust, including her current projects in develop-
ment; the second, her film practice, the prohibitions of Hollywood and attitudes
of executives that constrain black filmmakers’ creative impulse and “magic,” and
her views about Spike Lee and black independent filmmaking from the 1960s to
the present.
On the Margins of Hollywood
M M : Reiiewing your Web site, I touk note thai you’ve worked on productions for CBS. MTV,
BET Movie^/Encore/StarzS, and HBO. Together, tliey substantiate your increasing presence and
prominence in Hollywood. Apart fiom exceptional artistry and professionalism, how do you account
for your success?
Cinema Journal 49 No. 2 Winter 2010
J D : I sec myself working in and outside of” Hollywood. Hollywood is still not quile
open to what 1 have to offer. Angela Bassett was one of the executive producers of Tke
Rosa Parks Story. She said, “I want Julie Dash to direct this film and to do some rewrit-
ing of the script.” So it happened. The same thing occurred with Funny Valentines. 1 di-
rected il because Alfre Woodard was one of the executive producers. She said, “I want
Julie Dash on this.” It’s people like Bassett and Woodai-d who have helped me because
Hollywood is still slow about hiring me to direct and write. They’re curious, however,
and like lo keep up with me. I can have lunch with anyone and visit with executives,
but they have not hired me. Some were put off by Daughters of ifie Dust because they did
not understand it, although people in the .\irican American community seem to have
an affinity for it. In fact, they [executives] rarely want to talk about Daughters. Once I
was at Universal Studios preparing to do Funny Valentines and a producer said, ‘Just
don’i do Daughters of the Dust.” He actually said thai. Another Hollywood executi\’C
said, “I’ve seen your movie—Daughters of the DILÜ. Let’s not even talk about it, let’s move
on from here.” You know, it’s like having a skeleton in your closet, it’s like we won’t lalk
about thai. It’s interesting, and 1 would like someone to tell me what it means.
M M : Given the demands of executives and tiieformtdmc conventions of HoltywoodJare, haneym
Imd to compromise your vision and artislry?
J D : I love making movies. I’m a filmmaker. I’ve been a filmmaker for a very long time.
I know how to come at it from different angles. I will always maintain the integrity of
the subject matter whatever I’m doing. I could do a music video, a very intellectual or
highbrow porno film if I chose to. In production, I fight very hard to keep historical
events and issues accurate. It’s important to me because I don’t really enjoy films that
aren’t multi-layered, that don’t resonate, or are inaccurate. Of course, you can take
dramatic license and stretch things to make them more interesting. AH filmmakers do
that. But I will not manipulate certain things that have to do with my culture to please
someone else. lVe been asked to do that and I have refused. Perhaps I’m seen as dif-
ficult. 1 see it as being true to myself.
What’s needed is financing from outside sources. From venture capitalists and
private funds. j\& a people, we must finance the films we want to see. These kinds
of changes have already begun with Tyler Perry, from people in the music industry,
and with actors like V\ll! Smith producing the successful film 77ie Pursuit of Happyness
(Gabriele Muccino, 2006), and now with Danny Glover—cofounder of Louverture
Films-—who is producing and directing the film Toussaint (2009).
New and Unrealized Scripts
M M : Lei’s talk about your projects in development. Digital Diva was ori^nally intendedjbr CD-
ROM. I’Vkat’s it about and when do you expect to complete it?
J D : I’ve worked so long on Digital Diva thai it would now have to be a DVD. I went
from a screenplay lo graphic novel and to pile hing the screenplay lo every major stu-
dio, mini-studio, independent, black-owned, what-havT-you. They declined it.
Digital Diva is about a yoting black woman who is a third-generation computer en-
cryption specialist. She’s the digital diva. Her grandfather was a mathematical genius
Cinema Journal 49 I No. 2 Winter 2010
who worked for tlie Allies during World War II. And her father, a Carnegie Mellon
Fellow, was a Black Panther.
I heard that during World War IJ they had Nigerians working in tlie Black Tower,
which was a secret code-breaking site in Washington., DC. Why would they have
Nigerians? Perhaps because the Igbo language is very difficult? I researched and
found out that, while they acknowledged having employed chess masters, gypsies, and
gamblers to break the codes, they omitted the Nigerians [from the official record].
So, I mixed this all together in the narrative. I put some Nigerians at Oxford—one
of whom is ihe grandfather in thr siory—and had Lhem go through the .Man Turing
thing at Bletchley Park and then with the yMlies in Washington, DC. Twenty years
later, his son, a Black Panther allied with SDS [Students for a Democratic Society]
and the Weathermen, is killed because he has become a very dangerous person. His
daughter, the digital diva, is opposed to black militancy because she lost the father
she never knew.
MM: There are aspects of Digital Diva thai resonate uiih The Spook Who Sat by the Dtwr
(Ivan Dvcon, 1973), w/ach was adapted tofilmßom the novel by Sam Greenlee.
J D : Absolutely. .\nd the novel The Man PfTt« Cñed I Am (1967) by John A. Williams. I
read it in high school and thought it was really good. Why hasn’t the novel been made
into a film? Time is running out to make Distal Diva because I have to tell the story
within these time locks. 1 have not been able to get it financed.
In 1994, J was asked, “Don’t you Uiink it’s a little confusing^'” It’s been picked up
several times as an option by several .sources who always want to make it something
other than what it is. You biow, there was one black company that said, “Why don’t
you make it an AIDS iilm?” Then there was another that said, “Well why don’t yoti
make it a white film?”
M M : It’s not about that
J D : Right! We already have that. What’s new? It’s not just Julie Dash who has trouble
getting films iinanced. It’s also Charles Burnett and Neema Barnette and many, many
otliers—including white filmmakers with a ditVerent voice. Everyone who works in
the industry is working on this narrow channel. The Rosa Parks Story was made after
fifty years had passed, and then they didn’t want to tell it correcdy. They said. “Add
this lo make her more likeable, do this, change that.” No, while black filmmakers
have progressed, we have a long way lo go. Films are being made but they tend to be
comedies.
M M : Negroes in Hollywood?
]D: Negroes in Hollywood. They now watit buddy films. Ï don’t know how to say it
nicely; it’s not about us. It’s a ver\̂ difficult situation, bul it appears not to be so because
now we’re seeing more black romande comedies, which is wonderful. They’re very re-
laxing, but who’s deciding on which films will be made and which will nol? Wliat kinds
of films are being made and why? Who is the audience? Are we still just performing
for white audiences? Are we being funny, are we dancing, are we singing, or are we
now the love interest?
Cinema Journal 49 [ No. 2 | Winter 2010
MM: At what stage of development M The Colored Conjurers.^
J D : Same situation.
M M : / / .sounds like a story thai revisits the theme of passing inyour earlier film Illusions, which I
recall is a semiautobiographicai work based onyour aunt Delphine?
J D : The Colored Conjurers is a period piece. FOT years, I’ve been told that period pieces
don’t sell, especially period pieces about African Americans. Recently; there’s been
nothing but period pieces irom Hollywood. Jt’s like approaching die Wiz in The lVÍ4:ard
o/” O^ (Victor Fleming, 1939). T h e wizard: “Oh, today we’re not doing this, today we’re
doinf̂ the other. Today the color is green, tomorrow blue'” T h e rules change by the
day and sonietime.s by tbe hour. The same companies have told me that they cannot
do a period film and, before I hit the door, there’s a period film being made. These
companies claim the demographics show that they cannot afTord to do films with a
female lead. They can’t do films about magicians because they can’t sell them, then
The Illusionist (Neil Burger, 2006) is released. T h e problem i.-i tliat African American
films are only allowed to be “this” or “that,” depending upon when they need “this” or
“that.” There’s not much variety. Wiiat’.s un my mind is not what’s being produced or
financed at the moment. And that’s been going on for fifteen years now.
M M : E n e m y of the S u n , another work in development, exemplifies the range of your interests
and appears to have more general appeal and commercial ambitions than T h e C o l o r e d C o n j u r –
ers. This is suggested in the description on jour Heb site: ‘A sophisticated and sexy siLipense thñlier
reminiscent of Entrapment (1999), Body Heat (I98IJ, and T h e Thomas Crown Affair
(1968, 1999). ”
J D : ^\ very well-known producer flew me to New York to talk about doing Enemy of the
Sun. His development person, who also had TTie Colored Conjurers screenplay and Digital
Diva script, said she didn’t know any African Americans like that. I replied, “Well,
where arc you from?” She said from the Midwest and that was not her experience with
African Americans. I said, “You could go to Atlanta or DC, we come in all colors, all
shades, and we do many different things.” I hate to say this but “they”—the people
in development—^have a very myopic view of who we are and what we are and what
wf want to do. If we don’t fall into place exacdy where and how tbey imagine us, as
in Daughters of Ihe Dust, it’s like “What do you mean Gullah, I never heard of Gullab!”
I’ve had people ask me why I didn’t do a documentar) about the Gullah before doing
Daughters. Why do I have to do a documentary first? Some people insisted that Daughters
is a documentary. It’s strange. Or they’ll say things like, “Was there a script?” No, we
just met e\’ery morning at sunrise, and ever>’one knew exactly what to wear and what
we were goijig to be performing that day. [I..^ughs] It’s unbelievable. Tbey think it
all fell together, but if it all falls together and works but is something they don’t know
about, then they want you to “put that away and let me focus on what I know about
you.” It’s very patronizing, but ver\’ interesting. If I were to do a remake of another
film, maybe they’d be more interested? You know, just take a white movie and remake
it with black characters.
MM: What’s Enemy of the Sun about?
Cinema Journal 49 I No. 2 , Winter 2010
J D : It’s about two con artists who travel around the US getting very wealthy women
to give ihem their money And when they hit Atlanta, one of them decides that they
could continue iheir scams legally by becoming entrepreneurs and working within ihe
system. T h e other argues, “We’ve got to stay on tlie run.” So, the story addresses the
pull and tension between them.
\ L M : The other project in development, T h e R e a d e r . . .
J D : That’s a remake of La Lectrice ( 1988) by Miehel Deville and based on the Raymond
Jean novel of the same title.
M M : T l i e R e a d e r .fiam,i’ more grounded in black life and Ihe challenges and compromises of
an artist. The protagonist, Denise LaMarge, has Uierary interests, along with extraordinary musical
compéleme. She’s jugging the evetydtry as well as tfie personal, while stripling to make career ded-
sions thai workfor fier. BetzLven these demands and roles is a complex identity. Tlie close of tfießbn
(Act 3) visualizes a montage of and homage to cultural hyhridit)í What ú it you want to convey in
Ad 3?
J D : That you can be a commercial success and maintain the integrity of your art
or, in her case, performance skill, because she is a singer. It’s also delving into magi-
cal realism because we never hear LaMarge sing, when shf does, because her voice
is angelic. It’s a remake of the French film but with a lot of my own issues because
she has a boyfriend who is a filmmaker and who can’t get his films made. He loves
to watch Russian movies, but all he can do to eam money is make music videos with
dancing gíris. And then you have the foreign business people telling LaMarge and her
group that they’re not really singing like African Americans, that they need to sing like
African Americans.
M M : Aßican Americans?
J D : I experienced this direcdy. It was a foreign distributor who said Daughters of the Dust
wasn’t an authentic African American film. It wasn’t, like, from the hood, which is in-
teresting to me, having grown up in the huod. Ironiciilly, those filmm;ikers who make
ihe “hood” films haven’t necessarily grown up in the hood. It’s exotica to them. I hope
to be around when history takes a look back at all of this. I think it’s time for some
black social scientist to step in and ask some pertinent quesdons.
M M : Given these four distinct projects in development, uào is your aiuHence?
J D ; Anyone looking to see a great story! Everyone looking to experience the talent of
and new worlds by Airican American actors.
M M : Has your audience changed asyou ‘ve worked increasingly in Hollywood?
J D : I think my audience has increased.
M M : But not changed?
J D : With all of the new films being written and directed by African .American film-
makers, including dynamic documentaries like Rize (David LaChapelle, 2005), otir
audiences are growing, and the demographics are changing.
Cinema Journal 49 No. 2 I Wrtitef2010
Practice and Thematic Concerns
M M : I umdd Hke to focus now on your practice as a filmmaker. Which do you prefer, narrctíivefiction
or documentary?
J D : I prefer narratives to documentaries because of my mother. She’d come home
from work and I’d say, “Would you come downtown? There’s going to be a film show-
ing that wo made.” She’d reply, “Is it a documentary?” And I’d say, ‘”Yeah.” “Oh,
fll see it later,” she’d reply. So.. I never forgot that. She was tired and wanted to see a
movie. [Laughs]
M M : So the choice of fiction over documentaiy was to please your mother?
J D : Yes. You never tbrgct something like that: “I’ll see il later. Bring your (ape home.”
Il was jusi like “Til see it later becau.se I’m not getting up out of this bed to go down
the street to see a documentary” She wanted to see a story. She wanted a beginning,
a middle, and an end.
M M : What’s your method of ruirratíve filmmcüáng?
J D : I try ditierent things. Each film has its own history and personality: T h e narrative
depends on the stor): The stor)’ tells me how I’m g<}ing to lell it, what it's going to be.
When 1 wrote Digital Dina I didn't set out lo do a suspense tliriller, but it became one.
When yuu're writing you hone the script and then tweak it to fall within the genre be-
cause you know there are certain points—post points—that you want to hit once you
find out it's a suspense thriller. Maybe I shouldn't be saying this. Maybe I should say, "I
set out to writf . . . " No, for Digital Diva. 1 ¡ust wanted to write a slor)' about ctxies and
ciphers, evoking W. E. B. DuBols's "double consciousness" and black people speaking
and moving in coded ways. Transfer that, the same aesthetic and sensibility, to math-
ematics, and you have something really marvelous going on.
M M : Do your films refiect a partindar aesthetic style or sensibility that distinguishes them from other
black filmmakers, particularly other black uwnen filmmakers?
J D : I think so. I think that it’s closer to Euzhan Palcy’s work than anyone else’s.
MM: Palcy ‘s early and most original work—Sugar Cane Alley (Rue cases nègres, 1983)?
J D : Yeah, that one. When you’re directing, it’s all about choices—a thousand choices.
Every day you have what cürectors call the “fottr hundred questions” posed to you by
different departments that you have to answer. You also hiwe lo pian ahead how you’re
going to address those questions when they come up. Otherwise, you just go “hmmm”
and easily acquiesce to a Eurocentric point of view. You have what we call the “locus
of creativity'” people artnmd. questioning you: “Why did you pul the ramera here?” or
“Well, the camera’s silting right over there, so why don’t you move it over there?” And
you sa)’, “No, I’m not going to move the camera over there.” [Laughs]
The thing lo do is be prepared for it. I always return to the black aesthetic. That’s
how 1 sort out and resolve my pn>bleins—from a black aesthetic and from a woman’s
aesthetic point of view.
Cinema Journal 49 i No. 2 Winter 2010
M M : ïbu’re not makiitg decisions by committee.
J D : Exactly, although it can easily become thai. A lot of directors work with the actors
and not the technicians. My fault is tbat I work more with the technicians than the ac-
tors, although I give the actors hisror>’ sheets, summations of their character, etc. But
there is so much to be done with the technicians, especially if you haven’t made the de-
cisions in preproduction, for example, of what color the cup is going to be. Otherwise,
it becomes everyone else’s decision—a niishma.sh of whatever that could be wrong or
inappropriate. The director has lo make these decisions.
M M : Among the unten who discuss your work, .several register butßui remark upon the people who
have influenced your mode qf stotytetlmg I’m going to invoke their names and askyou—in a sentence
or two—to explain why or how they influenced you. First, Randy Abbott (a.kcu Omar Mubarak}?
J D : My first film teacher. Through him my first questions about filmmaking were
uttered.
M M : Larr^> Clark?
J D : There are two Larry Glarks. There’s the white filmmaker Larry Glark and the
black one from U G I A .
MM: Vie latter.
J D : Among the reasons I went to UGLA was to work with Larry Clarit, Haile Gerima,
and Gharics Burnett. I did my firsl film test witli Larr\’ Glark in the se:\’enties.
M M : Haik Gerima?
J D : 1 met him at the \JK Film School. I never worked on any of his films, but I went to
a lot of his screenings during the early UGLA days.
M M : Alara Kurosawa?
J D : That’s when I realized that you make films fixim within you.
M M : Vittorio De Sica and the Italian neorealists?
J D : Their films reminded me of H a r k m .
M M : Charles Burnett?
J D : He reminds me of the neorealists.
M M : St Clmr Bourne, whomyau liave acknowledged became a model”for you?
J D : I worked for him through work study when 1 was at Ghamba Productions in New
York. It was the first summer of my first year in college. I became his slave. He only
once took me out on the sel. I had to stay in the office and go to the store. [Laughs]
M M : Paid your dues.
J D : Yes, I did. But I aJso was able to meet the Ghamba brothers: Gharles Hopson, Stan
Wakeman, and Stan Lathan, whom Kathleen GoIHns was editing ihr. And, earlier at
Cinema Journal49 , No. 2 Winter 2010
the Studio Museum of Harlem, I met African American female filmmakers who had
come before me. I saw Madeline /\nderson’s documentaries and Jessie Maple’s first
feature film {WiU, 1981).^ They were unable to distribute them broadly
M M : Wasn’t Stan Latíian with Black J o u r n a l at the time?
JD: Yes. and he was one of the “Chamba brothers.” They were working directors.
M M : Making documentams?
J D : Yes.
M M : Has Kathleen Collins mßuencedyam filmmaking?
J D : Kathleen Collins had her editing suite and was editing something for St. Clair
Bourne. She would let me come in and watch her edil. She was so eificienl and with a
baby in one hand. We became friends and she taught me about editing.
M M : Wliat about the blmk women uniten that influenced you? You said, fifken years ago in an
intemiew unih Houston Baker, that Toni Cade Bamhara irifluencedyour approach to narratii^e.^ Has
‘Toni Morrison influenced your approach ta storytelling?
J D : Her writing, whether in Song of Sohmati (1977), Tar Baby (1981), TJie Bluest Eye
(1970), or even .ßiÄ?iW( 1987), is so visual that I would talk back to the pages and visual-
ize the movie. You sit there crving, pat j-otir eyes with the towel, and pick up the book
again. I mean, it’s very interactive when reading Toni Morrison because you’re en-
gaged/ I sometimes reread her novels, especially the Song of Solomon, through the audio
book. Someone said to me. “Oh. that could ne\er be made into a film because it’s so
complex.” So I listened to her voice as she read it and was able to visualize the story:
M M : ¡n an interview with Felicia R. Lee in the N e w York T i m e s nearly a decade ago, you .said
thai “I’m tired of seeing films about ourselves as victinu… reacting to external forces.. .. I hate the
urban testosterone films. “^ Would you elaborate on this genre?
J D : I’m getting myself into trouble here. Actually, I suggested that in ///M.nV/n.i [ 1982)—
how we’re portrayed in films to entertain other people (Figure 2). Less so now because
of Spike Lee. But Spike is one person. You want me to elaborate on the testosterone
films? Because they’ve changed; it’s romantic comedies now.
M M : What’s a testosterone mome?
J D : T h e young “urban male” films made in the 1990s. I can look at these films and
say, “well done, bravo,'” but I’m nol a guy. I grew up in the Queensbridge Projects and
cotild watch the same thing by looking out die window. 1 did not grow up in a middle-
class environment, so I don’t see poverty; drag abuse, \iolence, and i.gnorance as being
exotic or something worth imitating. I did not sit up al night worrying about Dracula
5 See the Jessie Maple Collection at the Slack Film Center/Archive, Indiana Universily-Bloomington.
6 Houston Baker Jr, “Not Without My Daughters” Transition57 (1992); 1 5 1 .
7 Fof mofe on Dash’s thoughts abod! Morrison, see ibid.,
15
1-152.
8 Felicia R. Lee, “Where a Filmmaker’s Im^ination To(A Root,” New Vort ïïmes, December 3 , 1 9 9 7 .
10
CinemaJoumal49 No.2 I Winter2010
Figure 2. Lonette McKee in Illusions (Julie Dash, 1982).
either, becau.se growing up I knew
vampires would not pass
12
th Street
in Quecnsbridge. To me, a horror
movie is watching a stor>’ about lam-
üies suffering from drugs, poverty,
etc. Perhaps that’s why I want to sec
a lot more when I attend a moue
theater or purchase a D\T).
M M : What kind of films doyou want to
see about Aßican Americans?
J D : I want there to be more of ev-
ery type of film you can imagine. I
want to be able to see us in Middle
Earth. We don’t get to go beyond
certain boundaries. We liave to stay
in this country and do this, that, and
the other. Maybe we can run around
in war a bit, but we’re largely por-
trayed working that plow, walking
the street.-i selling dnigs, or being vic-
tims of drugs. I want to fly to the moon. Where’s our Lord of the Rings (Peter Jack.son,
2001-2003) trilogy? Where’s our JVornia (Andrew Adamson, 2005, 2008)? As a child,
we grow up knowing that we can’t go there, and if we do, we’ll get shot. We can’t
imagine ourselves running with antelope. We have to be practical. We only get to be
young until we’re old, and often we’re old as very young people- Where’s our magic?
We’re not allowed this magic, this space to explore. How do you grow up to be a
lull human being? I didn’t have that space wben I was growing up. 1 knew that you
couldn’t be this, you couldn’t be that. So, many of us don’t even try. And the result can
be disastrous. Today there’s more of us to see in mo\ies, but it’s largely tbe girlfriend
with the turkey neck.
M M : Have your views about Hollywood clianged since lite interview unth Lee?
J D : What did I say then? [Laughs]
M M : ïbu said it was a bad scene.
J D : Let me say this: It’s now an even more complex scene than ever before. With the
success of Tyler Perry, F. Gar\’ Gray, Gina Prince-BKihwood, Will Smith, Tim Story,
Mara Brock /Vkil, and Shonda Rhime.s, one wonders why it is still so difficult to con-
vince the powers that be that we do, in fact, have an audience. It’s a constant fight.
You will have to fight for your ground and how you see the wodd, for not only your
own mind’s eye, but also for your children and their children. We need to be dedicated,
witb a concerted and focused effort to demand more balanced images of ourselves out
there. People say things have changed. They bave changed, but in many ways they
have not.
11
Cinema Journal 49 I No. 2 i Winter 2010
M M ; What waiyour e.^erimce transiäoningßom filmmaker to novelist to producer and now to all of
the above? Are there differences and similarities between literary and visual modes of narration?
J D : I think it’s easier to be a filmmaker than a novelist. IVc been a filmmaker longer
than a novelist. Last summer, I was working on a no\-cl, and I can’t express myself
through words like I can through images., thnnigh pictures, I’m n(.)t as Huid.
M M : In W h y We M a k e Movies,_>ioii were queried about Forrest Whitaker’s direction of Waiting
to E x h a l e (1995). You replied, “I think he did afinejob¡ but it would hme made a big d^rence had
a woman directed it.. .””^ h there a woman’s sensibility to filmmaking that is differentfiom a man’s?
J D : I think it would have made a difference in the directing and there is a difference of
sensibilities between men and women. It’s in the tiny specifics. I know it sort of Hows
from the top down. You need a strong woman in the producing, writing, directing, as
well as editing areas to retain the tiny specifics and integrity of the film. The director
now supervises the editing because it’s easy to cut something out. A director can shoot
something and it’ll never make it into the finished film because someone else says,
“What is that? We don’t need that.” It’s always “we.” or my favorite line . . . , “it goes
oH’ story, it’s off stor)’.” But men and women think differently. They want to see diHer-
ent things. If you have an all-male team working on a woman’s film it will be missing
some things. Like music, if it’s the beat, the beat is just off, but that doesn’t mean tbat
men cannot direct women’s movies and that women cannot direct men’s movies. I’m
saying, if it’s going to be an all-male team—producer, director, writer, and editor—you
better bring in some women to say, “Hey! You missed a beat here.”
MM; What wouldyou have changed hadyou dinxted Waiting to Exhale.’
JD: I’m gonna stay out of it.
M M : Regarding the Rosa Parks Story, j ‘ o u said that you were ^’determined to get a more womanist
vision, a female version of what was going on because it was a very male-centered script.'”^^ WhaCs
a ”momanist vision”?
J D : T h e script I was handed was more about Raymond Parks and his point of \’icw
than Rosa Parks. It wa.s not about her. And I think that’s why Angela [Bassett] wanted
me to massage the script by Paris Qualles—the writer of record. Together, we made
the appropriate changes.
M M ; îbu were also especially aitieal of how the meaning of independent film has been appropriated
and co-opted by Hollywood. Regarding companies like Miramax, you said that it’s “not independent.
It’s not a filmmaker’s vision. TJiey’re not signature films.”^^ H’fiat doyou mean by “signature fibns,”
and are they differentßom auteur films?
J D : A signature film is like an auteur film. It implies the director has control over
everything. However, filmmaking is a collaboration, unless the fiUn is some kind of
surveillance with one camera.
9 George Alexander, Why We Make Movies (New York: Harlem Moon/Broadway Books, 20031, 236,
10 Ibid.. 2 4 1 ,
11 Ibid., 236.
12
Cinema Journal 49 | No. 2 | Winter 2010
MM: li time a Julie Dash stature?
J D : I hope so. I’m working toward one. I think each project develops organically, even
if you’re handed a script as with the Rosa Paás Story You sit with it and walk the site.
You do your own research, which I did and discovered wonderful things like putting
additional period buses in the ftim, changing locations to enhance the drama, and
sometimes narrowing the foeus of the story beats.
M M : If isaiv any one of your films, is there something about it that would identißiyou as the author?
for example, I think Euzhan Paky’s S u g a r C a n e Alley is /ler most original film. Once she migrated
to Hollywood, her unique .-¡tfle was less discernible and apparent, in my vim:
J D : She has made other films that they have not distributed in the US, including a
musical. There’s a film about a little g r̂l who sees a ghost or is a ghost of a little girl.
They did not release it here because tiie>- said. “Il’ll confuse people with subtitles.”
/Vnothcr factor is when you have four hundred questions and lui people with the legal
right to tweak a film after >ou ha\e completed it. They own the film and have a right
to tweak it, so they say.
M M : You hai>e asserted on seoeralocassions that you “want to see authenlidty’-^”^ What do you metm
by “autiienticity”?
J D : By that, I mean you can feel that it comes out of the filmmaker, out of the commu-
nity, out of the issues, out of the events, out of history: You don’t want somethingjust
grafted onio a film. You don’l put a hat on a person without feeling a namraJ sense that
it’s right, it means that you know that something is fkming and moving right and that
ihe history is there and recognizable to you. When you know that the parallel streams
of information, symbolism, and metaphor coming together are nol silly or stupid. We
kiTow, we feel the natural rhythm of the stoiy situation, or event. U’s a glorious feeling,
Unfortunately, I feel it more with foreign films than I do with those made in the US.
M M : Can a filmmaker retain a critical and independent stance in Hollywood ^en the pressures
we’ve talked aboul?
J D : Beyond the overused arçument about ‘”commerce vs. art,” I think the main goal
we have to keep in focus is that we can have both. E\’eryone else does. Why do we
have to remain especially limited in our thinking and doing? It’s not jusl about putting
black folks in front and behind of the camera. If you hire people who tell the same
stories ihe same ways that other folks do, then what’s the point? I see that happening a
lot. They are fulfilling quotas. ¡\xià it’s like, “Well we have to do it this way because this
is the way we’ve always done it.”
M M : Let’s reidsit the interviewj-ou had with Houston Baker in 1992. I want to read a statement
that you made because J think that it it as reUvant today as it was fifteen years ago. Regardingyour
narrative approach to D a u g h t e r s of t h e D u s t , you rejected ”the male western narrative for Üie nar-
rative mode based on oral tradition as exemplified fry the Aßican credo. “‘^ Since D a u g h t e r s , have
you changedyour view about this mode of narrahon?
12 Ibid.. 242.
13
Baker, “Nol Without My Cöughiers,” 1 5 1 .
13
Cinema Journal 49 No. 2 Winter 2010
J D : I think there was some confusion there, and my statement was misrepresented.
1 was saying then, that before Daughters qf lhe Dust, I was not using the Western male
narrative based upon the “tall tale of the once upon a time'” and the linearity of Act
1, Act 2, and Act 3. Now, in some of my other films, Vm working within the Western
narrative because it is easily grasped by audiences. Bui you can insert other things in
there to make the audience consider and feel ihat there’s something more that you’re
tr)ing to tell.
Black Filmmaking: Making Progress?
M M : }t>u haue noted ¡hat dtaing tke 1U6O.\ and 70s, black filmmaking on the East Coa.it was largely
deiioted to docu/nentary. while on the llht Coast, to narrative film. Apart Jrom the dominance of
Hollyuiood, its commercial concerns, production practices, and narrative consentions, were there other
factors that account for this difference?
J D : 1 think the West Goast got lucky, first with Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song ÍMelvin
Van Peebles, 197!) and then with Sluift (Gordon Parks, 1971). “Hey we’ve got a good
thing going, let’s make some blaxploitation films.” They really took off.
M M : And why the documentary on the East Coast?
J D : Because East Goast filmmakers were more interested in authenticity, the truth,
answering que.stioas, and exposing situations. Of course, the budgets for documenta-
ries were smaller than for narrative features. You don’t need a large crew; )’ou can do
it faster and more efficiently. I came out of that East Goa^t filmmaking tradition and
\\ ound up on the West Goast trying to apply that same aesthetic to narrative films.
M M : Have the dynamics and procaces qf filmmaking now changed ihe trajectory qf the West Coast
narrative, East Coast doairnentary?
J D : Yes, there are many narrative films being made on the East Goast, even in the
Midwest, including here in Indiana. The playing field is now leveled by digital
technology.
M M : ïi>u haue (userted that during ¡he nineties the climate for black filmmakers it’ct more difßadt
and competitive- You said, “‘ílé don’t even .see ourselves right now ai a movement, i don’i think t/iese
filmmakers are thinking in terms qf history and progression. ‘”‘”‘ Is the climate ßr black filmmaking
any better today?
J D : During the nineties it was very competitive, I now realize that the competitive
climate for black filmmaking was created by Hollywood determined to make “testos-
terone films.” Hollywood made sure that when they took pictures of these homeboy
films from the hood that they didn’t include women. 1 remember .someone said, “Well,
they didn’t know where you were.” I was with Mario Van Peebles in Germany at-
tending a film festival. My entertainment lawyer also represented the Hudlin brothers
and Mario, so how could he say they couldn’t find me? Til never forget that tbey got
14 Ibid.. 159,
Cinema Journal 49 , No, 2 i Winter 2010
a black woman and cultural critic—Karin Grisby-Bates—to say that these were the
[male] filmmakers making it and that my movie [Daughters] was a television movie. She
wrtjte tliat in the JVew York Times, and people repeated that it wasn’t theatrical. I said,
“No, it’s not a television movie.” It was American Playhouse that coprodticed my him,
along with Straight Out of Brooklyn (Matty Rich, 1991) and Stand and Deliver (Ramón
Menéndez. 1988). But Daughters became a “tele\’ision movie’* because it suited their
purposes. At Sundance, we were all interviewed, bui all the interviews were skewed to-
ward the black male filmmakers while the female filmmakers were tossed aside. I now
understand that it was a concerted effort to promote black male filmmakers, while they
ignored c\’er)-one else, as if we didn’t exist. We do, and I am still arotmd.
M M : Are black filmmakers as self-serving and opportunistic today asyou, seemingly, have .suggested
that many were in the nineties?
J D : What was going on back then was frightening. I recall an incident at the Sundance
Film Festival when the director Matty Rich said, “He\; Julie. 1 was wanting to meet
you.” I replied, “Hey, Matty, how you doing?'” A publicist immediately cut in and said,
“You two don’t talk.” I was, like, when did this happen?
^Wl: And now?
J D : It’s not like that now, but it’s certainly not like the way it was in the eighties when
everyone would meet at the film festivals. It was the only time we got to .see ever>’one,
and it was great. I think we’ve learned that the competitiveness of the nineties didn’t
help anyone; no one got to make any more movies. Since the eighties, the only one
who’s been consistent is Spike Lee.
M M : You said to Houston Baker t/mt in She’s G o t t a H a v e It (1986), Spike Ue “brought life back
into the black indefiendentfilm movement. “^^ Now. ivith Spike Lee ensconced in Hollywood—except
for occasional departures., like his recent take on the Katrina debacle—is the US black independmtfilm
movement overshadowed by his prominence in Hollywood?
J D : No. And we need more filmmakers like Spike Lee. He just keeps exploring and
stretching the envelope. People don’t understand how much battering he took. He just
keeps coming back, putting blinders on and doing what he’s going to do. I low that
he takes chances. If we had ten more Spikes, we’d be in good shape. And some female
Spikes, too. T h e documentary on Katrina [ÍI-TWTI the ÏM’ees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts,
2006] had you weeping. I understand that he’s going to do a dramatic film on Katrina.
Then he had the thriller bank mbbery movie {Inside Man. 2006), although it didn’i feel
at all like Spike. I won’t let anybody talk badly about him. He look a chance with Slie
Hate Me (2004). It was five different movies in one and had a little Spikeness in it. O K ,
it was French.
M M : Is there another Spike Lee out there to revitalizf the black independent film rnovemenl?
J D : I know there are many Spikes who have that drive and sense of wit.
15 Ibid.,
16
1.
15
Cinema Journal 49 | No. 2 _ Winter 2010
MM: Doyou have anyone in mind?
JD: Shola Lynch, Sylvain White, Darnell Martin, and Antoine Fuqua.
M M : Let’s corulude here with jour current project. IVhat’s it about?
JD: There’s a Nancy Wilson song: “Now Vm a woman.” Everything i.s music. You
carry tbat around and one day you say, “Hey, I’m going to do a film about ‘first I was
a child, now I’m a lady.”” [Laughs] It’s a runiantic trilogy. The main character—a
woman^is a perfumer and her life has been influenced and informed by three distinct
fragrances.
MM: Thankyou, Julie Dash.
JT): And thank you too. Hf
I am indebted to Ihe mottjrmous C i n e m a J n u r n a l readersßr Iheir aitictit commmls on an emher draji
16
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Conversations with Ava DuVernay—“A Call to Action”: Organizing Principles of an
Activist Cinematic Practice
Author(s): Michael T. Martin
Source: Black Camera , Vol. 6, No. 1 (Fall 2014), pp. 57-91
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/blackcamera.6.1.57
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Michael T. Martin, “Conversations with Ava DuVernay: ‘A Call to Action’: Organizing
Principles of an Activist Cinematic Practice,.” Black Camera: An International Film
Journal 6, No. 1 (Fall 2014): 57–91.
Conversations with Ava DuVernay
“A Call to Action”: Organizing Principles of
an Activist Cinematic Practice
Mi chae l T. MarTi n
I consider my films forward movements, each one on a step to the next one.
—AvA DuvernAy
It’s fair to say that Ava DuVernay is among the vanguard of a new genera-tion of Af ri can Ameri can filmmakers who are the busily undeterred cata-
lyst for what may very well be a black film renaissance in the making. This
claim is substantiated by an extraordinary and compelling corpus of crea-
tive work and, arguably more important, DuVernay’s mission and “call to ac-
tion.” The “call” constitutes an actionable strategy intended, as she emphati-
cally puts it, “to further and foster the black cinematic image in an organized
and consistent way, and to not have to defer and ask permission to traffic our
films: to be self- determining.”
Like others Af ri can Ameri can filmmakers, in clud ing pioneers of past
generations, DuVernay subscribes to the ethos that art serves a social pur-
pose, debunks demeaning and normative assumptions about black people,
and renders black humanity in all manner of genres and complexity. Situ-
ating DuVernay his tori cally extends to the early 1900s, when “race movies”
were first exhibited in segregated theaters, and to the 1960s and 1970s, when
black independent cinema heralded a new realism in the documentary work
of William Greaves, Madeline Anderson, and St. Claire Bourne, among oth-
ers. No less important were the largely narrative works of fiction by that mot-
ley group of filmmakers- in- training who comprised the L.A. School (aka
L.A. Rebellion), in clud ing Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, Billy Woodberry, and
Haile Gerima, or the filmic experiments by prominent fig ures in the Black
Arts Movement such as Larry Neal and Amiri Baraka. In her or his own way,
each filmmaker counseled a social advocacy role for film on behalf of black
self- empowerment. DuVernay continues in this advocacy, practicing the on-
going precept and tradition in the long history and struggle for black repre-
sentation (fig. 1).
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58 BLACK CAMERA 6:1
Two core themes distinguish her creative work. First, like Julie Dash, Du-
Vernay’s sustained interrogation engages with black women’s agency and sub-
jectivity. Second, she foregrounds the family as site and source of resilience,
memory, cultural transmission, generational continuity and dissonance, and
as purveyor of all things affirming of black identity. In this way her work es-
pecially resonates with L.A. filmmakers Dash (Four Women, 1975; Daugh
ters of the Dust, 1992), Burnett (Several Friends, 1969; Killer of Sheep, 1977;
My Brother’s Wedding, 1983; To Sleep with Anger, 1990), Woodberry (Bless
Their Little Hearts, 1984) and, in less schematic and didactical terms, Gerima
(Bush Mama, 1975).
A former film publicist and marketer, DuVernay’s filmography is com-
pelling and varied. Her credits include This Is the Life (2008), a feature-length
documentary on hip- hop that won audience awards at the ReelWorld Film
Festival in Toronto, the Los Angeles Pan-African Film Festival, the Holly-
wood Black Film Festival, and the Langston Hughes African American Film
Festival in Seattle. She wrote, produced, and directed her first narrative fea-
ture, I Will Follow, in 2010. And in 2012, she won Best Director Award at
Sundance for Middle of Nowhere—in doing so becoming the first Af ri can
Ameri can woman to win this award. She also won the African American Film
Figure 1. Ava DuVernay. Courtesy of Brigitte Lacombe.
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M i c h a e l T . M a r t i n / C o n v e r s a t i o n s w i t h A v a D u V e r n a y 59
Critics Association Best Screenplay in both 2011 and 2012, as well as both
the Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award and Tri beca Film Institute’s
Affinity Award in 2013. She has also directed and produced network docu-
mentaries for ESPN, BET, and TVOne, as well as corporate projects in 2013
for Prada (The Door) and Fashion Fair (Say Yes).
At this stage of her meteoric rise and achievement, DuVernay unequivo-
cally asserts, “I’m concerned with my own house…I’m going to carve out an-
other place. That’s what I’m all about—moving forward.” Indeed, one such
formation of her strategy for self- empowerment is founding the collective
AFFRM (African- Ameri can Film Festival Releasing Movement) in 2011.
This extended conversation comprises two parts and occurred during
DuVernay’s visit to Indiana University in fall 2013.1 In Part One, she enun-
ciates six organizing principles of her practice, the raison d’être for and mis-
sion of her production company Forward Movement, and distribution col-
lective, AFFRM. In terms of engaging with filmmaking as it is complicated
by race and by marginalization within the industry, these six principles ad-
dress the practicalities of “doing it on our own” and include
• establishing the storyline as the first order of business;
• knowing something about potential funders before soliciting sup-
port for your project;
• working with what you have, rather than what you want;
• engaging with cinematic aesthetics, no matter the filmmaking con-
text, as a means of signifying something personally and/or po liti-
cally meaningful;
• avoiding working in isolation; and
• being self- determining.
In Part Two, DuVernay discusses I Will Follow and Middle of Nowhere
(fig. 2). Both films conjure the complexity of black life and family dynamics
and gesture towards the circumstance of grief and agential authority from
the vantage of Af ri can Ameri can women protagonists.
•
Part One: Against the Odds
Interview with Ava DuVernay by Michael T. Martin, as part of the Jorgensen
Guest Filmmaker Lecture Series at Indiana University Cinema, on Sep tem
ber 20, 2013.
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Michael T. Martin (MTM): What occasioned your decision to make movies?
Ava DuVernay (AD): I can’t remember exactly the moment when I decided
to write screenplays. Through publicity work, my proximity to filmmakers
sparked awareness that normal people could direct films, because until then
it was magic.
MTM: By “normal people” you mean . . .
AD: People like me, black folk, women. I never thought that I could actually
make a film. I had no context for that until I was on sets working as a publi-
cist, a job I pursued so that I could be near to film and filmmakers, and trav-
eling the world with them. I realized then that, if this guy can make a film, I
could probably make one, too.
MTM: Perhaps even better?
AD: Hey, why not? Let’s try! These are moments when I wish I could remem-
ber the day that I said, “I’m going to write a screenplay” because it’s amaz-
ing that in the midst of a successful career doing something else, you would
have a cockamamie idea to go write a screenplay. It might not be as amazing
in Los Angeles because everyone is writing a screenplay [laughter].
MTM: How do you start?
AD: You got to get the story down first [first principle].
MTM: You know that up front?
AD: Yes, absolutely. A lot of times it’s starting with images that I see in my
head. For the film I’m now working on, Selma, I’m seeing things but don’t
know what they are. Things that people say to each other are popping into
my head, like full scenes, lighting, all of that. For me [the question] is how
to put that into a screenplay and fig ure out how it fits. Maybe it’s not going
to be there. Maybe it leads to something else?
MTM: Is your cameraperson giving you the visual possibilities?
AD: Yes. I work closely with the cinematographer and usually prep before we
get there. I have a clear idea of what I’m doing when I walk into a space. But
a lot of things are created in the moment, especially in low- budget films,
which are what I basically make. I may not know what the space is going to
be until that day. There’s a scene in Middle of Nowhere that I haven’t watched
in almost a year where the two sisters, Ruby and Rosie, are in a kind of ham-
burger stand with the nephew and her husband’s ex [Gina] comes in. We
were supposed to shoot it in this really iconic place in South Central called
Earl’s Hotdogs. Everybody knows Earl’s in the hood. When we got there, we
were told “No, you can’t shoot here today.” “What? I’ve got a crew!” So, my
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M i c h a e l T . M a r t i n / C o n v e r s a t i o n s w i t h A v a D u V e r n a y 61
producers Paul [Garnes] and Howard [Barish] and I went across the street
and gave this guy a couple hundred bucks and he shut down his place for us
to shoot. Bradford Young, the cinematographer, and I had fifteen minutes to
fig ure out how to do the scene. When you’re working in the indie film space,
you have to adapt. So, sometimes I plan it out with the cinematographer, and
sometimes it’s on the fly.
MTM: Does another space alter the dialogue as well as the outcome?
AD: Yes, absolutely, although preparation is the safety net.
MTM: Backup?
AD: Yes, it’s a foundation and net. If I have a net beneath me, which is the
preparation, then I might want to do a flip in the air because I know I’m go-
ing to land in that net.
MTM: Do you of en “flip in the air”?
AD: Yes, in both features, but because you know that you’re going to land on
what’s been prepared and predetermined.
MTM: That’s smart.
AD: If you don’t have it, then you’re just jumping and you’ll be less willing to
take a risk. So, yes, I find that being prepared helps me to be more free writ-
ing. Having an outline of where I know my beats are, I might deviate from
it. But if all else fails and I can’t work it out, I can go straight to what I’ve de-
termined before, same on the set with actors.
MTM: You’ve learned that as a publicist, where everything has to be on step?
AD: I never thought about that, but definitely the PR background helps. The
publicist is the net. We make sure the i’s are dotted and t’s crossed. So, I prob-
ably carry some of that, yes.
MTM: In an interview with The Root, you said, “I’m really making films on in
stinct.” 2 What do you mean by that?
AD: Well, I’m not formally trained, because I didn’t go to film school. Every-
thing I’m doing feels like it is the right thing to do. I’ve just realized that I’m
carrying the practices and habits of my PR life that are instinctual because I
don’t know how it should be done otherwise.
MTM: Is that a handicap or advantage?
AD: I saw it as a handicap until I started making films and talked to other
filmmakers. There are some things that just are closer to the way that it’s nor-
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62 BLACK CAMERA 6:1
mally done than I thought, and just because it’s always done that way doesn’t
mean that it’s the right way to do it.
MTM: You make your own way?
AD: Yes. It’s falling in line with what most filmmakers do. They find their
own way, what works for them.
MTM: You’re also a woman, an Af ri can Ameri can woman, in an industry domi
nated by men—primarily white men. How do you navigate this terrain?
AD: There was a time when I was knocking on doors and concerned with be-
ing recognized in dominant culture. I’ve found a space where the terrain is
different, where I’m embraced by people like me, and where I’m building new
ways of doing things, as opposed to trying to insert myself in a place that
might not be welcoming. So, I’m concerned with my own house. If people
want to visit from other houses, that’s great. It was something about turning
my back on those desires and concentrating on what was in front of me and
what was really beautiful, and organic within my own community and cul-
ture that started to ignite interest from the outside in.
MTM: Any stories to tell when you knocked on those doors?
AD: I can tell you on what doors not to knock. I was a publicist for many
years. I had an agency—the DuVernay Agency—specializing in marketing,
publicity, studio product, TV, film.3 I would find myself sitting in rooms lis-
tening to all kinds of bizarre things about what black people do, and who
we are, and how to reach us. I’d be like, “Wow, this is crazy.” When I started,
I was very clear that either my films were going to end up with people in a
room like that, or they would not be let into those rooms at all. Either way
wasn’t good. So, I had to fig ure out, even before making them, what would
be the fate of my films. And that’s what got me looking, as a black woman,
to our own community. I started filmmaking from that place. I never took
my films, reels under my arm, knocking on unwelcoming doors. And it was
only because I had the knowledge of a publicist that I knew what that place
was like. And that’s a unique experience because most new filmmakers have
never been in those rooms listening to those conversations. So, there’s a sense
of hope that your films are going to transcend preconceived notions of black
people, or women, or what this film’s going to be, or should be. And hav-
ing been in those rooms, I said, “I’m not going to go that route, I’m going to
carve out another place”.
MTM: That’s foundational to your working practice that we all have something to
learn by: before you go knocking on the door, know who’s there [second principle].
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M i c h a e l T . M a r t i n / C o n v e r s a t i o n s w i t h A v a D u V e r n a y 63
AD: Yes, know what’s on the other side for sure.
MTM: Is there a method to your film practice?
AD: This speaks to an idea I have about filmmaking: the film is not done
when you’ve finished production and post- production. A film is done when
it’s presented to an audience. If it’s not a new way of thinking, it’s a more pro-
gressive or modern way of thinking about filmmaking in 2013. With tradi-
tional models collapsing, we have to really focus on the presentation and sur-
vival of our films. For so long, as film students and filmmakers, you’re taught
to focus on the cinematography, production design, and working with your
actors. Very rarely are we taught and given tools to help our films survive to
meet an audience, which is what makes whatever you’ve shot and whatever
story you’re telling a film. It has to be seen. And that’s a big problem, par-
ticularly for filmmakers of color and women.
MTM: Give us an example: How did you put together your first feature, I Will
Follow—and now hear this, everyone in the audience—for $50,000?
AD: I did my first documentary feature for about twelve grand; my first nar-
rative feature, fifty grand. It’s hard for some people to wrap their mind around
this. You can live a whole year on fifty grand. That’s a lot of money. But it’s
really like parking fees for one day on Jurassic Park. I had $50,000 in my bank
account that I was saving to buy a house and decided instead to buy a film. I
had to back into that number. I created a film and wrote a script that I could
make for that amount. And that’s how I do a lot of things. It’s really predi-
cated on what I have. I think a lot of emerging filmmakers focus on what they
don’t have: “I need this money. I need this person. I need this. I need that.” On
the other hand, I consider what I have. Like, “I have access to this camera. I
have this much money. We can do it with what we have.” That goes into my
business mantra and starting a film, as opposed to “I need press, I need that
money, I need that contract, I need that award.” Well, I have access to black
film festivals around the country. I have some know- how to market films. I
have a little bit of money to invest. I have friends who have made great films.
These are the things I have. What can we do with that? And that’s the place
I work from, whether it’s filmmaking or film distribution. From a place of
what I possess and how to move forward within that more positive space as
opposed to one where you start to reek of desperation.4
MTM: And immobilizing despair?
AD: It’s easy to get into a certain depression when you’re an artist and you
feel like you can’t move because you don’t have what you need.
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64 BLACK CAMERA 6:1
Figure 2. Ava DuVernay on the set of the Sundance Award–winning Middle of Nowhere.
Courtesy of @AFFRM.
Figure 3. Gabrielle Union in The Door for Prada. Courtesy of Brigitte Lacombe.
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M i c h a e l T . M a r t i n / C o n v e r s a t i o n s w i t h A v a D u V e r n a y 65
MTM: Would be filmmakers in the audience, here’s another fundamental orga
nizing principle: work with what you have [third principle]. This transitions nicely
to your production company, Forward Movement. I like the sound of it.
AD: I do, too. Thank you.
MTM: When did you create it? Why? And how does it work?
AD: Most filmmakers have a production company. Some work for hire. But
I wanted to have a place for my productions.5 And that’s what I’m all about—
moving forward. I’m always trying to move it ahead and keep creative energy
around me. And so, Forward Movement was the name I gave the production
company. I consider my films forward movements, each one on a step to the
next one. And, yes, it works with a bunch of ragtag people who love film and
don’t have money. And we find what we need to make movies. It really is that.
So, when an opportunity comes along and Prada says, “We like what you’re
doing with peanuts. Why don’t we give you a few more chips. What can you
make?” I’m not in a place where I can say no because I want to tell stories.
I want to make films. And, if I can carve out my own vision, my own story
from a corporate request—a great brand but not one that’s particularly as-
sociated with black women—if I can bring some luxury and some beauty to
the black female cinematic image through this job, I’m going to find a way to
do that. I’ve tried to do that with some of the corporate work. When women
saw The Door online, which is where it was debuted, it was just sisters watch-
ing, saying, “Wow, we’re beautiful! And look at our skin tones, look at how
we’re supporting each other and, wow, look at that bag, those shoes! Dang,
she looks good” (fig. 3). It just makes you feel good and it didn’t feel like a
commercial. And I loved that the point of the story got across. That was col-
laboration between Prada and Forward Movement. The Door also recently
played at the Venice Film Festival. So, Forward Movement is really my as-
sertion of my narrative point of view and the stories that I want to tell within
any context, whether I’m working for ESPN on a documentary about sports,6
to fashion film,7 to my own work. It’s the way that I have my say.
MTM: It struck me watching The Door that, however much a corporate brand, you
insinuated your own story in the film; a story with social purpose affirming sister
hood and the beauty of the black women [fourth principle]. And that’s to be com
mended because it’s rare for a filmmaker, however principled, not to defer to such
base commercial interests.
AD: Thank you.
MTM: Ms. Prada hosted you when The Door was shown at the Venice Film Festival.
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AD: Yes, there was a fabulous party there on the Grand Canal in honor of the
collection of films she commissioned by women filmmakers around the
world. Two of us were present, and it was an extraordinary experience. Last
summer I was invited to Skywalker Ranch, George Lucas’s property in north-
ern California. I saw these rolling hills and asked the shuttle driver, “Is this all
Skywalker Ranch?” [He replied,] “Yes, for as far as you can see.” Film made
it possible for me to go and share stories with other filmmakers there. Film
moves me around the world. Film is what’s brought us together and with
such an eclectic audience of races, cultures, and ages here this evening. And
it’s the power of films that’s palpable and meaningful for me, and that’s why
we congregate around these images.
MTM: Is there something to be learned about Forward Movement that distinguishes
it from other production companies?
AD: I think it’s different because it’s headed by a black woman. There are oth-
ers, but not a lot though. I’d love to see more black women-led production
companies. But, yes, when you’re moving lights and putting lenses on cam-
eras, production is production. So, I don’t think the way we do it is differ-
ent except that the director, the head of company, likes to put lipstick on in
the morning. Our distribution company AFFRM, however, is very different.
MTM: You’re known in independent film circles as “a maverick businesswoman.” 8 I
assume they’re referring to the Af ri can Ameri can Film Releasing Movement. What
is this thing called AFFRM?
AD: It’s an idea. I didn’t want to make a film about the interior lives of black
people and not know where it was going to land. That just doesn’t make
sense for someone who had been in business as a publicist. I had to bridge
the gap between what happens when I make a film and how does it actu-
ally reach an audience. I know that behind those “doors” I referred to ear-
lier they won’t put a lot of value in the film until I show them value, and they
may not understand it. It’s hard to embrace something that you don’t under-
stand. So, I had to fig ure out how to bridge the gap. And I had these relation-
ships with black film festivals around the country. While they’re not the ones
that you hear about in the papers—Sundance, Toronto, or Tribeca—they’re
beautiful. One of my favorites is the BlackStar Film Festival in Philadelphia.
Another is the Langston Hughes Af ri can Ameri can Film Festival in Seattle,
led by these dynamic sisters who have a background in theater and the arts
and come together every year to show films from around the country. The
UrbanWorld Film Festival in New York is another that was started by a for-
mer black film executive. And in Philadelphia, there’s a brother named Mike
Dennis, a filmmaker who wanted to carve out a place for black film there,
so he started Reelblack.
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M i c h a e l T . M a r t i n / C o n v e r s a t i o n s w i t h A v a D u V e r n a y 67
All these amazing people, who I knew separately, but who didn’t know
each other, and whose concerns were similar to mine as an aspiring film-
maker, showing their films that then don’t go anywhere. And so the idea was,
if we could band together and work as one unit under one umbrella, calling
ourselves AFFRM, we could be stronger than we are in dividually.
Our idea was to release films in these cities at the same time, or around
the same time, with national publicity and marketing, which I would do from
L.A. Instead of individually traveling to these cities, they would be released
under one entity and name: AFFRM. By dissecting what distribution is and
how a studio does it—without becoming a studio—and without money, we
created a distribution company. And we have elbow grease. We have connec-
tions. All of these festivals have mailing lists of people in their city who love
film. Who love black film and who’ve come and bought tickets. So what if
we can’t buy TV ads? We know exactly how to reach the audiences in Phila-
delphia through their inbox, phone, what have you. What we don’t have is
billboards, but we have volunteers we call “mavericks” that instead of a bill-
board walk up to you and say, “Michael, there’s a great film playing here. I’ll
come pick you up at this time because we’re going and make sure that you
have three people with you.” These are the kinds of things that we do, and
that’s how we’re distributing our films without money. The films are there,
right! Many are worthy of being seen. It’s just how to get them to audiences,
and AFFRM is a collaboration among people interested in the same thing
who hold hands and make it happen.9
MTM: For the audience and student filmmakers among us, another organizing
principle: Don’t work in isolation [fifth principle]. Link yourself to an infrastruc
ture or apparatus that has shared common interests and work through that net
work to distribute your films.
AD: Good one.
MTM: You’ve referred to AFFRM, and I’m going to quote you, “not so much a busi
ness as a call to action.” 10 Are you on a crusade of sorts?
AD: Yes, I guess so. It should be a business. I’ve had conversations with wiser
people about making sure that our films have a strong business founda-
tion, which is something I need to focus on more. But the driving force
of the organization is activist, and I’m trying to negotiate that—the mis-
sion—with the business. So yes, we are by definition on a mission to fur-
ther and foster the black cinematic image in an organized and consistent
way, and to not have to defer and ask permission to traffic our films: to be
self determining [sixth principle]. Yes, there’s definitely an activist spirit in
the organization.11
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MTM: What are your expectations for AFFRM, say, five, ten years from now?
AD: I’d like for it to be self- sustaining and have a foundation that can last.
That’s my real concern. It’s like a parent concerned for their child when they’re
not around, giving it everything you can while you can, and then, at some
point, it’s going to outgrow you. And so I’m just trying to imbue AFFRM with
a “founder’s imprint.” By giving it all I can now, whether it’s my own personal
funds, passion, curation, ideas, time, along with many others who are doing
the same thing. Hopefully, in five years we will have a solid enough business
foundation to ensure that AFFRM will be around for a while and that it will
match our philosophical mission.
MTM: You describe in the New York Times piece last year, and it relates to what
you’re saying regarding the financing of indie films, that, and I’m quoting here, “it’s
not about knocking on closed doors; it’s about building our own house and having
our own door.”12 Is building that house sustainable?
AD: Yes. I know we’re in the early stages, but at some point, the idea has ar-
chitecture and becomes a structure. Right now, we’re in the foundational
stage. By next year, hopefully we will have one wall built, and then another,
followed by a roof, porch, and whatever else is needed. So many organiza-
tions, especially organizations in marginalized communities, never make
it beyond the idea or foundation stage to become a structure with walls
that can stand on its own. And so, we’re hoping that we can keep it going
long enough to create that structure so everyone can come inside, have a
seat, and relax. I look at institutions like the Sundance Institute and how it
started and now you can’t imagine it not being there. I hope AFFRM gets to
that point.13
MTM: In 2011, you wrote a compelling piece in The Huffington Post titled, “Watch
the Throne: A Militant Masterpiece.”14
AD: Oh my god! Does the audience know what Watch the Throne is? It’s a rap
album by my friend Jay- Z. Yes, some people are horrified, but I like hip- hop.
There’s someone back there [in the audience] giving me the Jay- Z fist. Yes!
MTM: Here’s what you said: “Who speaks of LOVE OF BLACKNESS with a swag
ger that feels wonderfully dangerous. A swagger that feels militantly proud. This is
something that has fallen out of favor among those truly in the spotlight. To be loud
and proud about one’s Blackness. To be bold and brash with it. Is that so wrong?
Feels that way sometimes. But not on Watch the Throne.” Are you suggesting that
with celebrity militancy declines?
AD: Yes, I think so. Yet, Mr. [Harry] Belafonte and others in the midst of suc-
cess, power, pleasure, and luxury have retained the urgency of and associa-
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M i c h a e l T . M a r t i n / C o n v e r s a t i o n s w i t h A v a D u V e r n a y 69
tion with community needs. But it’s hard. I imagine it’s hard when you’re in
rooms where you’re just Harry, or Jay- Z, or Magic, or just Jamie or Denzel
and not black. Do you know what I mean? Your identity is more your celeb-
rity than your race, LGBT, or whatever the other is. I think that as you gain
celebrity you move further and further away from the things that might have
you questioning and demanding.
MTM: Does it become a condition for further advancement to mute your politics
and social concerns?
AD: Yes, I think it does. In some ways, if you’re quiet and you make it more
comfortable for the people around you, then it’s easier to be accepted and to
move forward. This is not just a celebrity issue. It’s faced in academia, in cor-
porate America, in all places where any kind of disruption of the status quo
becomes dangerous to advancement. But if we’re talking about celebrities—
which I am not and don’t consider myself to be—I think in some ways being
that rabble-rouser serves their persona to a certain point. Don’t take it too
far. Don’t take it too serious. Now that I’m working on Selma, I’m doing re-
search on the civil rights movement and voting rights campaign, and consid-
ering how King, who a year after the “I Have a Dream” speech was courted
by the White House and offered ambassadorships and who had just won the
Nobel Prize, decided to go to Selma and face violence for a principle. While
we still have such examples, they are much harder to find now. Speaking for
myself, if I find myself in a studio or fancy room, I’ll bring up those issues
because I’m in it. I’m not removed from it. While I can’t say what will hap-
pen, I hope I can be like Mr. Harry Belafonte and others who stay grounded
in what really matters while being catered to.
MTM: With your success, is there vantage for other Af ri can Ameri can women
filmmakers?
AD: Yes, I hope so. My success is relative to white male counterparts who at
Sundance and other festivals got better offers. Regardless, I felt happy being
there, not thinking of what I don’t have. In the real landscape of the industry,
to say that I’m successful would be a bit of an overstatement. But for black
women, women interested in making films, making art, I think anyone that’s
doing it is a success story. And for anyone—me—to be able to live off of my
work, pay my mortgage and not have checks bounce, that’s success to me.
And I will be able to somehow make another film, and what I want to make,
because my hands are not tied behind my back. And, my work is seen in the-
aters. I have to put them out myself, right. It’s hard and you get exhausted.
But just to be able to continue to make films is success for me personally and
may inspire others. So, if you’re looking to be an artist, sustain your craft, and
be consistent with work, I think I’m doing okay in that regard.15
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70 BLACK CAMERA 6:1
MTM: Next stop, Scandal,16 followed by Selma.17 While you’ve worked expertly to
render nuanced portrayals of black women in tight interiors and even tighter so
cial spaces, Selma is his tori cal and on a much larger scale.
AD: Yes. This is a project I never thought about or would have gone after. I
thought I knew everything about the subject until I drilled down and started
thinking about how I would approach it. You know Martin Luther King, Jr.
was a bad- ass guy. He was great, nonviolent. He’s got a statue and a holiday.
What else do we need to know? That’s such a homogenized view of this
radical activist who was a strategist able to construct campaigns and create
coalitions with a bunch of people with different ideas about how to reach
goals under the threat of violence and loss of life. It’s incredible. The story
needs to be told and, once people know even a little bit of the truth, they will
be riveted as I am. So my hope is I can get it done and tell the story. And we
don’t have to construct characters because the truth is jaw- dropping enough.
And if I can just stay true to that, I think it will be okay.18
MTM: The budget?
AD: Around $20 million. It will be the first major feature film in theaters that
has anything to do with King’s essential character. It’s a low budget to make
a film of this stature, but we take what we get and we make the best we can.
MTM: Both projects, Scandal and Selma, would scare the hell out of me, but I’m
not Ava DuVernay.
•
Part Two: Beating the Odds
Continuing the conversation at the Black Film Center/Archive at Indiana Uni
versity, Sep tem ber 21, 2013, DuVernay discussed her two feature films. I Will
Follow takes place during a day in the life of Maye (Salli Richardson Whitfield)
as she packs up the family home following the death of her aunt, Amanda
( Beverly Todd). Maye encounters objects as well as people from her past, trig
gering memories and emotions that help her move forward. Middle of No-
where centers on Ruby (Emayatzy Corinealdi) and her struggle to come to
emotional terms with the incarceration of her husband Derek (Omari Hard
wick). The film contemplates the challenges of maintaining a relationship and
staying true to oneself.
MTM: In this continuing conversation, I would like for us to engage with your fea
tures I Will Follow and Middle of Nowhere—both extraordinary films that merit
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M i c h a e l T . M a r t i n / C o n v e r s a t i o n s w i t h A v a D u V e r n a y 71
distribution. Certainly, their availability on Netflix, via on demand Internet, will
make them accessible to audiences worldwide.
AD: Absolutely.
MTM: I Will Follow is autobiographical.
AD: Yes. I was a caregiver for my aunt, Denise Sexton, in the last year and a
half of her life. She was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. She was a
fighter and was active in her treatment to the end, which was different than
the character in the film who wants to fight in a different way.
MTM: But her daughter Fran doesn’t understand that, while Maye knows her aunt
wants to go out in her own way.
AD: Right. It’s really about imposing our will on other people and how in
these vulnerable moments it might be best to let them do what they want
to do.
MTM: But before we go there, you were talking about the real life upon which the
film is based.
AD: Yes. The core of it is the time I spent with my aunt during the last year
or so of her life. I don’t think I was articulate enough then to be able or ready
to make a film about that period and honor caring for her. So, I distilled it
down to one day shortly after her death—a transition period where Maye has
to move on. And that personally was really hard for me. I wanted to make a
first film and had only $50,000. I knew that the way to do that was to make it
in one location, thinking of the one place that meant a lot to me. It was really
my mother who helped me remember the house. I wasn’t brave enough to
tell everything that happened, but I started to just think about that day and
articulate it all in that house.
MTM: Did your approach or stance as director change because you were invested
personally in the story?
AD: It was the first personal film I made, so I can’t compare it to anything
else. When I was making I Will Follow, I was not thinking about my Aunt
Denise. I couldn’t. I was so stressed out with the day in front of me. Maybe
there was one occasion on set I had a moment. In those fifteen days shooting,
and the prep for it, and the post, I wasn’t thinking of it as a separate story. I
had written it with a full heart. But when I was actually making it . . .
MTM: You distanced yourself ?
AD: I had to. There’s no way to make it in that emotional place. It really was
about these characters and I had purposefully changed a lot of things in the
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72 BLACK CAMERA 6:1
film so it wasn’t too close. A lot of the feelings are right. A lot of the relation-
ships and the things that happened are certainly true.
MTM: Are you there in relationship to your aunt more now than when you made
the film?
AD: I see us in there. One of the things is our mutual love of U2.
MTM: U2, the musical group?
AD: Yes. I’d like it to be noted that Michael Martin said U2 is some kind of
“musical group.”
MTM: How ignorant I am. [laughter]
AD: They’re just the biggest band in the world. But yes, some of that stuff is
in there and we’re definitely there in the script and film. But during the mak-
ing of I Will Follow I had to step back and get some distance and that’s why
you have a script.
MTM: Was casting Salli Richardson Whitfield as Maye a difficult decision?
AD: Yes, but not because I was thinking this person was playing me. It was
difficult because this was my first film. It was my own money and I had to
get this right. Salli was definitely not the obvious choice, but in the end she
was the perfect choice.
MTM: “Perfect choice”?
AD: Not only for the performance she gave, which I think is lovely. She’s not
an overly emotional person, which, otherwise, may have made the piece
whiny. She has strength about her. But even more than the performance, it
was her presence on set and what she gave to me by way of experience mak-
ing my first film. I didn’t know her before the film. She was the most gra-
cious, lovely, and giving sister on set.
MTM: Was she the choice from audition?
AD: No, from a meeting that we had. The experience of making the film was
just as important to me as the film itself. That’s a year of my life. I don’t want
to be sharing that year with people that I don’t like and that I don’t feel safe
with, and who don’t feel safe with me. When I think about what Salli brought
to it, her patience, graciousness, and dealing with the very low budget—these
were gifts she gave me.
MTM: Financial losses, beginning with you?
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AD: Everyone did. They gave their time and talent, but got the experience
back. It really starts with the director and the person who’s number one on
the call sheet, and that was Salli. I get emotional thinking about it because
even more than the film itself, it was she who gave me the confidence to
make films. The confidence to say that the way I do it may not be the way
that everyone else does it: “I may not have as much money, but this is a valid
experience and this is okay that you’re doing it like this. And it’s okay that we
don’t have a trailer, that our craft services aren’t really good and that we’re eat-
ing Taco Bell. It’s okay because we’re making art and we’re together.” So yes, I
think it comes out in the film and she’s become a great friend.
MTM: This back story of sisterhood is moving and instructive. I was at first un
certain of Maye’s character because of Ms. Richardson’s understated presence and
beauty. Would these attributes nullify the gravity of her role? No doubt you were
aware of this possibility and relied on the fact she is such an accomplished actor.
Did you work to mitigate the distraction—“Yes folks, she’s a fine looking woman
but let’s keep to the story”?
AD: I disagree. I did not do anything to make her less beautiful. I treated her
like I would any other actor. I think a lot of times people highlight the beauty
by super close- ups, special light, all of that. I shot her as I shot the other ac-
tors. And I think the challenge with Salli, and a lot of our sisters—look at
Halle [Berry]—explains why they always want to mess themselves up and
make themselves look ugly, so that they can just act.
I think Salli doesn’t play it up, and that’s the difference. It’s there. I think
a lot of times you see women playing up to beauty and it distracts from char-
acter. She’s not playing it down. She’s just being in her skin in that moment. So
she’s catering, leaning into the beauty, as opposed to having to have a pony-
tail and no makeup. That could easily have been done. Her hair is done. She
has makeup. She has on designer jeans. It just wasn’t, “Let’s make you down-
trodden to focus on the script.” It was, “We’re not going to put a beauty light
on you and you’re not going to be wearing lipstick through the whole thing.
And so, the challenge is how you look, sis.” Do you know what I mean?
MTM: I do.
AD: And, “You’re the lead in the story. You got to live with it. You’re drop-
dead gorgeous.”
MTM: Had you considered closing the film afer the call to [Maye’s lover] Evan?
AD: [chuckle] He likes to end my movies in different ways. I really resist the
idea that her ending is locked in a frame or in the context of a conversation
with Evan because that’s not what the film is about. It was about a woman
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74 BLACK CAMERA 6:1
who was trying to move on from this space. She had a boyfriend. She had a
lover. She has a cousin. She has a nephew. She has these memories. She was
leaving much more than him, who was just one part of the story.
MTM: Maye speaks to us through Evan, saying, “Listen, I’m going to get sick, I’m
going to vomit on the ground. . . . Are you going to be there, are you going to under
stand, are you going to count for me?”
AD: Right.
MTM: Is Maye freed the moment she realizes that she’s alone and that she can’t ex
pect Evan, or any other man, to be there at the end?
AD: Right.
MTM: There are no romantic illusions lef for her. Evan says “I fucked up” and she
walks out the door knowing that she can never trust him.
AD: Yes, and I’ve not heard a lot of people telling me new places to end the
film, so this is new. I don’t hear it as criticism. [laughter] No, it’s something
to think about. Both films end with women kind of saying where they are.
So Maye’s doing it through the YouTube video and by evoking the memory
of Amanda driving and the anecdote about what makeup can do for you,
which ties into what Salli does for a living and her choices as she moves on.
You’re hearing Salli tell you where she is now. Ruby does it through a letter
to Derek. And so in that way, the two films are in conversation, these women
self- narrating and self- determining their lives.
MTM: Why the title, I Will Follow?
AD: “I Will Follow” is a famous U2 song. But a lot of people don’t know that
it’s about the death of the lead singer’s father. It’s one of their early songs and
ties into the theme of the film.
MTM: Opening scene: two women, we don’t know what the connection is except
that they’re of different generations and that their gestures appear affectionate
(fig. 4). Amanda is putting herself together. The camera renders their differences
as it suggests mutual and abiding love. Is Maye the link between two generations,
Amanda and Raven’s [Maye’s nephew] generation? Is she the bridge between two
cultural moments? Maye’s encyclopedic about that past moment while Raven is
fixed in the present unaware of the connection and continuum between these two
moments. Is Maye educating us as she passes on her aunt’s cultural legacy?
AD: Absolutely. We’re charged with being the custodians of the generation
that came before us, especially the ones that you remember and that you
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M i c h a e l T . M a r t i n / C o n v e r s a t i o n s w i t h A v a D u V e r n a y 75
had proximity to. And I know that it’s only me who’s going to tell my niece
who my aunt was, apart from pictures and anecdotes of and about Amanda.
So, I think Maye does serve that purpose in the film. And, although we of-
ten think young folks don’t care, Raven is of a generation that wants to know
about the past. He’s inquisitive. I recall being that way. So, I wanted to make
him a kid who’s texting and doing all of that, but he’s also wondering and
putting things together.
MTM: By recovering memories of Amanda, is Maye recuperating the cultural con
text of that period?
AD: Yes, absolutely.
MTM: Is I Will Follow also complicated by Fran, Amanda’s daughter? Her jeal
ousy, guilt, and competition with Maye, that was parked in the closet now revealed
in the afermath of Amanda’s death?
AD: Right.
MTM: Is everyone complicit in Amanda’s story as Ruby is in Middle of Nowhere?
AD: Yes.
MTM: So, how do we get through and past this?
AD: Well, I mean that’s great. These aren’t simple and straightforward cause-
and- effect relationships. The question of “how do we get through this?” is
about a black family.
MTM: But what we want is to keep it simple and blame someone.
AD: That’s right. Last night, at the end of screening Middle of Nowhere, a
woman in the audience said, “What happened this? What happened that?”
The goal was to present complexity within the black family dynamic. Yes,
you have the big love story. You have in I Will Follow grief, and in Middle of
Nowhere, separation through incarceration followed by separation through
grief. These are the big social issues, but at the core of each film is the black
family. And they’re families of predominantly women.
MTM: I got that. Are you also saying, “Look, family stuff isn’t simple.” That we
must be aware that stuff goes on and may never get resolved and we’re going to
have to live with it and move on. And that stuff doesn’t always get settled as it does
in the movies?
AD: Right.
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76 BLACK CAMERA 6:1
MTM: Is that your project?
AD: That’s part of the project. We’re not making films in Hollywood so we
can do what we want. And, it speaks to the real mission to portray nuanced
black family life. To make Maye the niece and not daughter. To speak to the
complex ways black families function where your mother might not be your
biological mother, and someone who you think of your child might not be
your biological child.
MTM: And your uncle may be the lover of . . .
AD: Exactly, and you go along with it. . . .
MTM: Your so called uncle.
AD: Right, exactly. [laughter] Yes, your aunties and that’s my third cousin.
All of that. To be able to speak to that, complicate it, and present it to black
audiences. And in no Q&A I’ve done with a black audience was there ever
a question of why did the niece live with the aunt. Because we know why
someone’s living in someone’s house, and why everybody’s with Big Mama,
right? And so, we start from that place of understanding of how black fami-
lies are constructed in ways that may be different. I’m thinking about the re-
lationship between Ruby and her mother in Middle of Nowhere, their passive-
aggressive behavior and relationships that exist before the movie begins that
don’t have to be resolved before the movie ends. These are things that are
really important to me.
MTM: What was the segment about with Barack Obama in I Will Follow?
AD: We shot it the month after he won the presidency. I was just happy. And
we were the first ones to use it. We were still in the glow of that moment
when we made the film.
MTM: You were giving him some play?
AD: Yes.
MTM: Did it fit the story?
AD: No. I wrote the script while he was on the campaign trail. It’s something
that we added later. Something had to be on the TV, right? It was just a mo-
ment in time.
MTM: What about that roof scene and intimate exchange between Maye and the
cable repairwoman?
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M i c h a e l T . M a r t i n / C o n v e r s a t i o n s w i t h A v a D u V e r n a y 77
Figure 4. Salli Richardson- Whitfield as Maye and Beverly Todd as Amanda in I Will Follow.
Courtesy of @AFFRM.
Figure 5. Salli Richardson- Whitfield as Maye and Omari Hardwick as Troy in I Will Follow.
Courtesy of @AFFRM.
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78 BLACK CAMERA 6:1
AD: In a couple of films I’ve made there are scenes where my intentions are
overshadowed by whatever is going on in the frame. And people interpret
them in different ways.
MTM: What did you want to say because you weren’t filling space?
AD: I wasn’t filling up space. I was focused on Maye interacting with a sur-
vivor of what her aunt didn’t survive. Yet, whenever people talk about
that scene, they never talk about that. They talk about these two women
and . . .
MTM: Sisterhood stuff ?
AD: No, not sisterhood stuff, but like are they attracted to each other?
MTM: Sexually?
AD: Yes.
MTM: I didn’t make that association.
AD: I’m telling you, Michael, it comes up so much. And I was like, “Really?
Is that what you got from it?”
MTM: Here are two people who don’t know nothing about each other up there on
that roof meditating about there’s life afer death or near death. That’s what it was
about for me, not that they have a sexual attraction for each other.
AD: Right. I’m clear. So, while it’s interesting to hear other views, that’s one
of the reasons why I resist telling people what things mean, because some
took away a different meaning that had nothing to do with the way I in-
tended it to mean.
MTM: But should you, as author, respond, since their views are at odds with your
intention?
AD: No. I never explain. They got something from the scene that was beau-
tiful and meaningful for them. It’s their interpretation. It’s valid. And, if it
gets them to the end of the film feeling a certain way, then it’s . . . because the
minute I say that, it negates what they brought to it. I think that’s horrible to
correct someone’s interpretation.
MTM: Let’s move to Troy in I Will Follow. His character, among other things,
speaks indirectly to class differences between Maye and him. Why make the dis
tinction and not develop it?
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M i c h a e l T . M a r t i n / C o n v e r s a t i o n s w i t h A v a D u V e r n a y 79
AD: I think there are some other points in the film where we touch on class.
She has a fabulous celebrity friend who comes by. But you’re talking about
something else?
MTM: Yes, in the sense that class takes on a different meaning and saliency when
it involves intimate relationships (fig. 5).
AD: Right.
MTM: Maye appeared to transcend the class difference between them.
AD: I don’t think she did, though.
MTM: It was all about sex?
AD: Yes, that’s what it was about. He wanted more and she didn’t. Was that
based on class? I mean, it’s easier to have a fling with someone who drives a
tow truck and just is a hunk of a guy?
MTM: Meat?
AD: Yes. And you don’t have to have a lot of conversation. Maybe it was easier
because of what he did and who he was?
MTM: But then she momentarily reconsiders and suggests something more than a
hook up, but it’s too late and they both know it. And yet, he doesn’t exploit the mo
ment by way of farewell.
AD: Right. Maye’s reevaluating, but I don’t know if she would go through on
what she said in that moment. It’s kind of like thinking, “What if I came back?
What if I changed my life? I could make a life here.” It’s all in the air as fan-
tasy. It’s something that just came up in that moment (fig. 6).
MTM: Why did you make Middle of Nowhere?
AD: It started from an interest in exploring the lives of partners of the incar-
cerated. It was an area that I have always been fascinated with, about women
who wait. What we wait for. What we deem acceptable within a relationship.
MTM: Is it also your way of speaking for the incarceration of a generation of black
men in this country?
AD: Yes, I think so.
MTM: Why did you choose to set your story in prison and a black working class
neighborhood?
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80 BLACK CAMERA 6:1
Figure 6. Salli Richardson- Whitfield as Maye and Omari Hardwick as Troy in I Will Follow.
Courtesy of @AFFRM.
Figure 7. Emayatzy Corinealdi as Ruby in Middle of Nowhere. Courtesy of @AFFRM.
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M i c h a e l T . M a r t i n / C o n v e r s a t i o n s w i t h A v a D u V e r n a y 81
AD: I don’t think the story would be true to the majority of the people who
are incarcerated if you set it in any place that’s not working class. You know
that a disproportionate number of people who are incarcerated are from
working class communities.
MTM: Why the title Middle of Nowhere?
AD: You know what—I now think that I probably could have done a differ-
ent and better title.
MTM: No criticism intended.
AD: “Middle of Nowhere” was what I put in the script when I was writing it
because I felt it captured the place Ruby was in (fig. 7).
MTM: Ruby herself says, “You know, I’m in the middle of nowhere.”
AD: Yes, a kind of transition place where things are uncertain. That’s where
I wanted to put Ruby’s character, whereas in I Will Follow, Maye is at a point
where the person that she looked up to is no longer present. So, will she fol-
low the spirit, energy, and intention of her aunt, or go her own way? That
was the big question in I Will Follow. In Middle of Nowhere, the big question
was being caught between two worlds, two ways of being. But yes, I prob-
ably could have come up with something snazzy.
MTM: It alludes to something beyond the immediacy of the story itself.
AD: It’s fine. As a marketer, I could have done better. My next film after Selma
is going to be really esoteric. I mean, “Come on, Daughters of the Dust.” You
want to watch it.
MTM: The camera works with great effect in Middle of Nowhere. For example,
you deploy flashbacks and close ups to poignantly render intimacy and individuate
characters. Ruby’s embrace at the end with Derek is a case in point. I felt I was wit
nessing a good bye not informed by anger and denunciation but rather enduring
love and regret as Ruby moved on. Why your decision not to bring closure then
to the film?
AD: Ruby deserves her own frame because this is her story without either
man in her life.
MTM: I hear that.
AD: And so that wasn’t the closure for me. This is a story about her being in
a family of women. I wanted to show the women. And I always knew that
the last frame of the film was her alone at the bus stop going to work in the
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82 BLACK CAMERA 6:1
morning that a lot of people don’t get. Up until that point she had been work-
ing at night. Someone says “good morning,” and she says “good morning.”
While it appears as a very small change, it’s a new start and outside of the
context of her relationship with either man. But you’re a man, so you would
have stopped it with the scene with Derek?
MTM: But not because of the man thing. I read it as courageous assertion of her in
dependence and delusion about the aferlife of prison with Derek, though my own
[male] gaze has likely over determined Derek’s authority (fig. 8).
AD: Right!
MTM: Are flashbacks your frame and signature for intimacy?
AD: I’ve played with them in both films, but I don’t think of them as flash-
backs. I think of them as memories—fragmented memories. In I Will Fol
low, it’s the same. I didn’t realize until after I made the film that it was the
way I was telling the story.
MTM: And not background context for your audience?
AD: No, in neither one of the two scripts. They came out as we were in the
editing room. In I Will Follow, Maye was experiencing this fragmented memory
of an important moment with her aunt, putting on the makeup when she
walked out the door. You see that memory in different stages, in the way that
we really remember things. It’s not always a full memory. It’s not always ac-
curate. It’s what we want it to be and what we need it to be at the time. And
so, at the beginning of that film, it opens with a piece of the memory, and
at different times jumps back to that one moment. By the end of the film,
you’ve seen the full memory of her walking out the door, and you under-
stand then, in the context of the larger story, why that might be important
to her.
The same can be said for Middle of Nowhere. In the first part of the film,
Ruby continues to have this flash, this flicker of a memory of her husband
nestled over her shoulder, kind of kissing her cheek. As we flash to it, at differ-
ent points in the film, it elongates. And by the time she has the full memory,
you see that the kiss and nuzzle that look so romantic were the beginning of
the end.
And so, I don’t use flashbacks as a device to further the story in terms of
exposition. I use it more as emotional touchpoints in the editing room. We
say jokingly to my editor, Spencer Averick, “Let’s look at the memory; let’s
see how that could affect this moment.”
MTM: But do they also work to punctuate between scenes?
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M i c h a e l T . M a r t i n / C o n v e r s a t i o n s w i t h A v a D u V e r n a y 83
Figure 9. David Oyelowo as Brian and Emayatzy Corinealdi as Ruby in Middle of Nowhere.
Courtesy of @AFFRM.
Figure 8. Omari Hardwick as Derek and Emayatzy Corinealdi as Ruby in Middle of Nowhere.
Courtesy of @AFFRM.
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84 BLACK CAMERA 6:1
AD: In I Will Follow, it’s not used as transition so much as to punctuate a mo-
ment that’s just happened. So, in several parts of both films, the memory is
inside a scene and not taking you from one scene to another. At some points,
it’s used as punctuation for a moment within a scene or a beat. But I think
it’s different from a flashback because that device is used as an expository
technique to show you something, tell you something that you can’t say in
the present. They are more like emotional echoes that parallel or punctuate
the story [in real time].
MTM: The fact that they happen within the present, within the scenes themselves,
do they serve this other function of bringing the past and the present together in
the moment?
AD: Yes, absolutely for sure.
MTM: It’s interesting that you take conventional terms for concepts and revision
them with another purpose in mind.
AD: Right.
MTM: What I’m lef with at the end of the day in both films is Maye carrying the
load and Ruby walking away from it. To put it in pedestrian terms, her husband
Derek is a loser.
AD: He’s not a loser.
MTM: He’s an absolute loser.
AD: Are you kidding? He’s not a loser. I’m just doing what you said earlier:
defending my intention, how about that! [laughter]
MTM: The term may not express my meaning?
AD: But I don’t think that he’s a bad guy and loser.
MTM: A loser isn’t a bad guy in my book. A loser is someone who’s constantly stum
bling over themselves. They can’t get out of their own way. Derek means well. Every
thing he promises Ruby he surely intends but will never deliver. And Ruby finally
gets that it just ain’t going to happen.
AD: Okay.
MTM: And all Derek’s apologies and explanations just don’t cut it anymore. That’s
why last night on stage I said, afer the screening of Middle of Nowhere, that even
if Derek wants to be a man, he can’t be a man because he inhabits a space where
“men—black men—can’t be men and who don’t know how to be men.”
AD: Right.
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M i c h a e l T . M a r t i n / C o n v e r s a t i o n s w i t h A v a D u V e r n a y 85
MTM: Derek thinks Ruby wants the big house. To get it he’s out there selling stuff
he goes to prison for. And Ruby later says, maybe I should have let him under
stand that this isn’t about what I need, or what we should be pursuing. And in that
sense, both Derek and Ruby are complicit. So, is he a caring loser dragging Ruby
down with him?
AD: Right, that’s better. A nice loser. [laughter]
MTM: Another aspect of your treatment of men—black and white—in both films
is that you render their complexities in an evenhanded way. I have in mind the
white guy who’s constrained by his circumstance but then comes back and apolo
gizes to Maye in I Will Follow.
AD: The neighbor.
MTM: In a poignant gesture of understanding, Maye acknowledges this, when he’s
kneeling down and she passes, touching him on the shoulder. In Middle of No-
where, Brian, the bus driver who becomes Ruby’s love interest, is portrayed as
someone who wants more than a hook up. Alone and lonely he longs for a rela
tionship (fig. 9). To your credit, you give him that space and respect and render cir
cumstances where men can be at their best and very worst. Okay?
AD: No, it’s great to hear.
MTM: And who bears the weight? Women who are lef caring for kids, paying
them bills, alone in bed at night pretending there’s a future that from day one
was doomed. Even Derek acknowledges that and so, too, does Ruby in declaring,
“Haven’t we all selectively seen what we want to see?” So, for me you depict the men
in their frailties and complexity marked by the limitations of their circumstances.
AD: Yes. [chuckle] I’m glad to hear your interpretation of my treatment of
men, though these are films centered on black women—but I don’t think that
black men have to be condemned. And my goal is to make every character
have their own reason for being the way they are.
But it’s about Ruby’s relationship to herself and the way that it’s mirrored
to her through the disappointment in the eyes of her mother, the expecta-
tions of her sister, adoration of this new love interest that sees her in a dif-
ferent way. All of these people, in clud ing her husband, were mirroring her
back to herself until she could see herself clearly; see what’s not right and start
to correct it (fig. 10). Even Gina, the ex- girlfriend [and mother of Derek’s
daughter], is mirroring something to her: “You’re not as smart as you think
you are. You’re not.”
MTM: Suggesting that Derek may be running a game on her?
AD: Yes, she alludes to it. So, each of the people she encounters are showing
her herself.
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86 BLACK CAMERA 6:1
MTM: Is Gina also signaling by Derek’s daughter that she can leverage stuff against
Ruby?
AD: Yes.
MTM: She’s working it.
AD: Yes, she’s working a lot of it, for sure.
MTM: Why is Derek’s sexual encounter in the prison the precipitating event for
Ruby to act in her own self interest? Is that credible?
AD: Ruby’s living in her own world as far as Derek’s incarceration. She feels
she has control of what’s going on. She makes the bargain at the top: you’re
going to do five years with good time and you are going to be out of prison
early. And I’m not going to medical school and we’re going to get through
this and pick up where we left off. But the situation is variable: Derek acting
up, hitting somebody with a pipe, starting a fight.
MTM: Who’s initiating? Who’s reacting?
AD: We don’t know what’s going on. But the change in Derek’s situation is
not in her plan. Her devastation, like a death knell, is realizing this is not a
normal marriage and you do not have control over this.
MTM: But wasn’t she ready to go before Derek’s infidelity?
AD: You think so? You think she wanted an excuse to walk?
MTM: I think she was ambivalent and that it was just waiting to happen (fig. 11).
AD: That’s an interesting interpretation. [chuckle]
MTM: As I think more about the protagonists in Middle of Nowhere, they appear
archetypal in the real or actual world, as some of your earlier comments suggest.
Are they intentionally cast with this in mind?
AD: Yes, they are definitely intentional. It strikes me as wonderful that those
constructions are coming through.
MTM: Speaking of that, you render Brian the capacity to be part of Ruby’s life on
Ruby’s terms. He’s clear about his intentions. That scene in front of the car was mas
terfully scripted, visually depicted, and acted by both characters when he lays it out
and says, “Look, my pride is not going to be at the head of the line.”
AD: Right.
MTM: Even there, you’re envisioning the possibility within a heterosexual context
for black men and black women to convene, negotiate, exchange, and evolve as
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M i c h a e l T . M a r t i n / C o n v e r s a t i o n s w i t h A v a D u V e r n a y 87
Figure 10. Emayatzy Corinealdi as Ruby in Middle of Nowhere. Courtesy of @AFFRM.
Figure 11. Emayatzy Corinealdi as Ruby in Middle of Nowhere. Courtesy of @AFFRM.
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88 BLACK CAMERA 6:1
equal partners. Brian’s giving. He’s working hard to accommodate. He’s trying to
understand. What comes of that is for us to ponder?
AD: Right.
MTM: So, relationships are not doomed?
AD: Yes, absolutely. [chuckle]
MTM: For me, the authority and utility of Middle of Nowhere is largely the so
cial and his tori cal circumstance and setting for the story. How this family mirrors
problems common to black workingclass families and communities. And while
the story is personal within the family context, your frame is societal. What’s your
reading of audiences’ reading of Middle of Nowhere? Are they aware that some
thing bigger is in play and at stake?
AD: I think so. People are smart. They may be getting it at different levels.
They may be getting something subconsciously. Some people are attuned to
the mother/daughter story. Some people are attuned to the love story. Some
people are attuned to the social issues. They’re all intertwined. So, I don’t think
that you can get one without getting some of the other. And that’s my hope.
MTM: Here’s what you do that so many filmmakers don’t do: You respect your au
dience. You don’t pull punches. You engage with them as adults. That’s distinct
and admirable.
AD: I appreciate that. That’s a great compliment. I think with independent
film we see that happen more and more. The idea of ambiguity embraced to
allow audiences to fill in the spaces. This happens more, too, in foreign films.
I think that it’s really the [Hollywood] sys tem that suppresses that narrative
instinct in a lot of filmmakers. In contrast, in the independent space film-
makers can and do so.
MTM: You’ve got the last word.
AD: It’s lovely to be able to sit here with you. So oft en when I talk to people
and interview, it’s usually with the press and very much about identity, be-
ing black, and being a black woman filmmaker. I’m happy to talk about those
things, but I rarely have a chance to sit down and talk about the work, and
the story lines, and the intentions behind the characters, so this is really nice.
Just this kind of analy sis and thought about the work that we’re doing as black
independent filmmakers in this moment is rare and wonderful. And I take
this conversation as a gift, and all of the conversations that I’ve had while
I’m here, truly. We don’t get that kind of analy sis and that kind of attention
to our work like this, and so this is one of the few places that’s doing it, and
it’s really nourishing.
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M i c h a e l T . M a r t i n / C o n v e r s a t i o n s w i t h A v a D u V e r n a y 89
NOTES
1. Ava DuVernay’s campus visit to Indiana University was made possible by Indiana
University Women’s Philanthropy Council; Brian P. Graney, senior archivist, Black Film
Center/Archive; Tilane Jones, AFFRM; and Jon Vickers, Indiana University Cinema.
Thank you to Mark Hain for editorial suggestions.
2. Nsenga K. Burton, “Ava DuVernay: Win at Sundance ‘a Big Hug,’” The Root, Feb-
ruary 22, 2012, http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2012/02/ava_duvernay_talking
_sundance_win.html, accessed June 14, 2014.
3. Founded in 1999, DVA Media + Marketing.
4. In a question- and- answer session after IU’s screening of Middle of Nowhere, Du-
Vernay elaborated on the distribution of I Will Follow: “I made the film with $50,000.
And then relied on this collaborative distribution idea. All organizations I work with
have leaders, offices, fax machines, phones, and mailing lists. They’re fully functioning
organizations. It’s like if I came to IU and said to Jon [Vickers, director of Indiana Uni-
versity Cinema], ‘Can we show a film here? Can you help me get some students? Can we
get the word out? Can we use your mailing list?’ It was just that. And there’s not a lot of
money needed for that. We had to make a little bit to make the poster, shipping the prints,
FedEx, things like that. I had done a quick PR job for The Help [2011], so we had a little
bit of funds. The Help helped me. So I put that money into those kinds of fees and the little
things we needed, but the main work was done by sweat of people volunteering and say-
ing, ‘We can do this. We think we can do this. Let’s try.’ When I look back, we were run-
ning on energy and good vibes, and hope, and it worked out.”
5. Started by DuVernay in 2005.
6. Venus VS (2013).
7. In addition to The Door, DuVernay directed Say Yes (2013) for Fashion Fair.
8. Indiana University Media Relations, “Independent filmmaker, distributor Ava Du-
Vernay to screen films, speak at Indiana University,” IU Newsroom, Sep tem ber 4, 2013,
http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news- archive/24536.html, accessed Sep tem ber 10, 2013.
9. Again in the Q&A, DuVernay discussed the distribution of Neil Drumming’s film
Big Words (2013), providing a case in point of AFFRM’s project and strategy: “ AFFRM
distributed Big Words. We saw it at Slamdance and thought it was really interesting how
Drumming was dealing with hip- hop and Obama’s election. And so we said, ‘Look, do
you want to work together? We want people to see this.’ We released it this summer in L.A.
and New York and a bunch of cities in the middle. . . . Its future will be on Netflix later
in the year, so folks can access it that way. Its future is availability to people who want to
see a good black film, and for so oft en black independent films have been in the drawers
of their markets because there’s nowhere for them to go. And AFFRM’s goal is to make
sure you see it. . . . It’s now played over forty cities. That’s wide distribution for a black in-
dependent film. It opened in Times Square and downtown L.A. It had its UK premiere
a couple of weeks ago. It’s played in Trinidad and Sierra Leone because of this model of
holding hands and trying to get black films in theaters.”
10. Michael Cieply, “Building an Alliance to Aid Films by Blacks,” New York Times,
January 9, 2011. C1.
11. Here DuVernay demystifies the fortunes of filmmakers lacking savvy: “Many
filmmakers think ‘I’ve got it made. I made this movie. I’m going to sit back and wait for
somebody to give me a check for four million dollars.’ This is not the reality of the mar-
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90 BLACK CAMERA 6:1
ket. We’re looking for amazing films by black independent filmmakers and producers who
are realistic about the market and understand that Harvey Weinstein is probably not go-
ing to write you a big check for that. Everyone is waiting for this dream we’ve been sold
as independent filmmakers of color about how it works. It just doesn’t work that way any-
more. So, not only are we looking for a certain kind of film, high quality film by a black
director with a certain strong voice, something that we feel should be seen, we are also
looking for partners in a way that makes financial sense.”
12. Carrie Rickey, “She’s a Graduate of an Unusual Film School,” New York Times,
Oc to ber 5, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/movies/ava- duvernay- and- midd,
accessed April 16, 2013.
13. To a query from the audience about social networking and word- of- mouth dis-
semination on her role as a publicist, DuVernay responded, “It elongates our strategy as
marketers and is perfect for independent filmmakers. Even ten years ago, if I wanted to
reach you, I had to buy an ad in something that you read, or buy an ad on the radio, or
put a billboard where you passed. All of those things are not possible for the indepen-
dent filmmaker or that small distributor. I had to get a review in a paper that you might
read, or reach someone you knew who could bring you to the showing. Now you can
click on a Facebook page. Whenever something goes out you get a notice, or I know the
sites someone like you goes to, so I’m placing editorials, or even an electronic ad which
is much cheaper than an ad on the magazine on that site. And we have Tumbler, Twit-
ter, Foursquare, Google Hangout, Sound Cloud, Instagram. Every day there is something
new. My intern says, “There’s a new thing, it’s called X”; “Get on it, we’ll fig ure out how it
works, let’s try to reach some people through that.” So there’s this whole new suite of in-
struments that we can use to reach you. And they don’t cost anything. There’s nothing
better than that. So, we pay a lot of attention and use them because they are revolution-
izing the way that independent artists—not just filmmakers—of all kinds are reaching
their audience without permission.
14. Ava DuVernay, “Watch the Throne: A Militant Masterpiece,” The Huffington Post,
October 28, 2011.
15.Consider DuVernay’s more sobering statement in Burton’s article for The Root
when asked what her best director award at Sundance means for black women filmmak-
ers: “I don’t think it means much in that regard. . . . We might start to lose track if we put
too much into these honors and prizes, because the only thing that matters is the work.
I’m not on some new age humility kind of vibe, but realistically it doesn’t mean that much
for black women filmmakers. We’ve seen people who have won Oscars in the past for ex-
traordinary performances, but what does it mean now? It’s a personal triumph, but does
it equate to forward movement for black filmmakers, black people and the culture? I
think not.”
16. Directed by DuVernay, the episode “Vermont Is for Lovers, Too” was aired on
ABC No vem ber 21, 2013. See Tambay A. Obenson, “Ava DuVernay- Directed Episode
of Scandal Nearly Beats CBS & NBC Combined in 10PM Hour,” Indiewire, No vem ber
22, 2013, http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/ava- duvernay- directed- episode- of-
scandal, accesssed No vem ber 25, 2013.
17. See Mike Fleming Jr, “Ava DuVernay Now Aboard to Direct MLK Biopic ‘Selma,’”
Deadline Hollywood, July 29, 2013, http://www.deadline.com/2013/07/ava- duvernay
– director- selma- movie- martin- luther- king/, accessed Sep tem ber 2, 2013.
18. While at Indiana University, DuVernay elaborated on the backstory of Selma and
said, “Selma has been around for a while. A British screenwriter wrote this film on spec.
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M i c h a e l T . M a r t i n / C o n v e r s a t i o n s w i t h A v a D u V e r n a y 91
Spec means nobody paid you. You just were crazy enough to start writing on your own,
which is what most of us do to get started. It ended up on something called the ‘Black
List’ in Hollywood, which is like the list that newer screenwriters want to be on because
it’s like the hottest scripts in town. Every year Franklin Leonard publishes the Black List,
which is the most talked about unproduced scripts in Hollywood. So, this film script
landed on that and a lot of buzz surrounded it. Everyone started circling the script be-
cause he did something really interesting. He zeroed in on this period of King’s life, so it
didn’t have to be a cradle to grave, cram in everything. It’s like four months. This says it
all. Who King was, where he was going, where he had come from, and what he was really
about under duress. You can make one about Memphis. You can make one about Mont-
gomery. It’s like nine episodes in the life, but this one was super interesting. And so that’s
what we did, find the window and go from there. The filmmakers who touched the script,
or been around the project, or thought about making it, or at one point were attached in-
clude Michael Mann, Paul Haggis, Stephen Frears, Spike Lee. So a lot of people at some
point were like, ‘I’m making Selma,’ right. It’s been moving and around for a while. The
last incarnation was with Lee Daniels, who directed Precious and The Butler. He was going
to cast David Oyelowo as King. David played the son in The Butler and preacher in The
Help. And in Middle of Nowhere, Ruby is his love interest. David was the one, after Lee,
who said ‘I’m not going to do Selma.’ He said, ‘you need to call Ava, she’s the one that’s
going to get it done.’ He really got me the job. So he’s King and he’s fabulous. That’s where
it is right now, finishing up the script and is supposed to be in preproduction in Janu ary.
I’m excited and eager.”
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Chapter 2
THE STRUCTURE AND HISTORY OF
HOLLYWOOD FILMMAKING
This chapter examines what Hollywood film is and how it
developed
.
Hollywood film can be identified by a specific
set of formal and stylistic structures as well as by a set of
historical, industrial, and economic determinants. These
underlying structures affect how Hollywood films
represent America, and how they conceive of issues of
race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. Because
Hollywood film is so prevalent in American culture (and
world culture), many people think that the way Hollywood
makes movies is the only way to do so – that there are no
other possible methods for making films. However, there
are many types of movies and many different ways to
make them. As we shall see throughout this book, these
other, non-Hollywood movies often present different
representations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and
ability than do Hollywood films. Both Hollywood and
non-Hollywood films have evolved since the beginning of
the twentieth century, in conjunction with the broader
social, political, and cultural events of American history.
This chapter broadly addresses those concerns, and will lay
the basis for future chapters’ more detailed analyses of
how these issues relate to specific cinematic
representations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and
ability.
Hollywood vs. Independent Film
73Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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Hollywood film refers to movies made and released by a
handful of filmmaking companies located in and around
Hollywood, California. The names of most of these
companies – Universal, MGM, 20th Century-Fox,
Paramount, Warner Brothers, etc. – have been recognized
as cinematic brand names around the world since the
1920s. These companies have produced and distributed
tens of thousands of films, films that have found long-term
success at the box office, and often make it seem
(especially in other countries) that Hollywood film is
American film. Hollywood’s global predominance
obscures its historical development, and in effect works to
naturalize the structure and style of its films. This is itself
another example of ideology working to erase the socially
constructed nature of a specific cultural institution:
Hollywood gains strength and power by making its form
and practice seem to be basic common sense. This tends to
hide the fact that Hollywood form and practice developed
over time in response to specific socio-political factors,
and it also works to erase awareness that there are other
ways of making (and understanding) film as a cultural
artifact.
Hollywood films so dominate American theaters (and
video-store shelves and cable programming schedules) that
US citizens have relatively little access to other types of
films – films often made by minority filmmakers that tell
stories and express viewpoints and that are ignored or
underexplored in Hollywood movies. These
non-Hollywood films are sometimes broadly referred to as
independent films. For example, avant-garde or
experimental films explore the multiple formal
possibilities of cinema (not just storytelling), and they are
74Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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often tied to specific movements in the other arts, such as
Surrealism. Documentaries are films that use actual
events as their raw material – they are usually made
without actors or fictional stories, and attempt to convey
these events as realistically as possible. Americans classify
films made outside the United States as foreign films.
They can be fictional films that look more or less like
Hollywood films, or they can be avant-garde or
documentary films. Finally, the term “independent film”
also describes fictional feature films that are made in
America, but outside the usual Hollywood channels.
Broadly speaking, independent, foreign, avant-garde, and
documentary films tend to represent a broader spectrum of
humanity than do Hollywood films.
Sometimes, to audiences weaned solely on Hollywood
films, these types of films can seem weird, boring, or badly
made. If avant-garde films (for example) were trying to
play by the rules of Hollywood film, such judgments might
have merit, but these films have consciously decided to use
other rules. These types of films make formal choices (in
mise-en-scène, montage, sound, and narrative design) that
often differ vastly from those used in Hollywood films.
Most of these films are also produced in different ways
than are Hollywood films – they can be funded and filmed
by a collective, for example, or by one individual working
on his or her own project over a number of years. Unlike
Hollywood filmmaking, sometimes these types of films are
even made without the intention of turning a profit.
Avant-garde and experimental films usually only play at
museums, or in film classes at universities. Documentaries
might play on television or at film festivals, or
occasionally be screened at independent or art-house
75Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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theaters, theaters usually located in urban areas that
specialize in off-beat, non-Hollywood film fare. A
well-stocked video store or an Internet DVD service are
other places one might find these films.
Experimental films, documentaries, and independent
fictional films are an important part of American film
history and culture, even though they are quite frequently a
lesser-known part. As might be expected, these types of
films often differ from Hollywood films in the ways that
they depict issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and
ability (as well as a host of other topics that are often
considered taboo by Hollywood filmmakers). However,
while one may in practice contrast fictional Hollywood
film with fictional independent film, the distinction
between these two terms is not always so clear cut.
Frequently there are similarities and connections between
independent films and Hollywood. Sometimes successful
independent filmmakers go on to sign deals with the major
Hollywood companies, and many Hollywood employees
dabble in independent filmmaking. A popular independent
film such as Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1991)
may seem somewhat different from most Hollywood films,
but it is much closer to a Hollywood film (in both subject
matter and style) than most experimental films.
For the purposes of this book, Hollywood and independent
film practice might best be understood as the end points of
a continuum of American fictional film production, and
not as an either/or binary. One of the best ways to
distinguish between independent and Hollywood films is
to see where the film is playing. If it is playing on 3,000
screens in America at once, at every multiplex across the
76Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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nation, it is probably a Hollywood film. If it is playing at
one theater in selected large cities, it is probably an
independent film. Because Hollywood films reach far
wider audiences than do most independent films (much
less avant-garde films or documentaries), it might be said
that they have a greater ideological impact on American
culture (and arguably, the world). And although
Hollywood film is not as popular a medium as it once was
(having been surpassed by television and even now
competing with video games and the World Wide Web),
Hollywood film remains a very powerful global influence.
Indeed, most of the stylistic choices developed by the
Hollywood studios during the first half of the twentieth
century have strongly influenced the “rules” of how TV
shows and computer games make meaning. As we hope to
show, many of Hollywood’s representational traditions
have also carried over from its classical period to the
present. The rest of this chapter examines how the style,
business, and history of Hollywood have structured and
continue to structure cinematic meaning, specifically the
various meanings of race, class, gender, sexuality, and
ability.
The Style of Hollywood Cinema
Over the first few decades of the twentieth century,
Hollywood filmmakers developed a set of formal and
stylistic conventions that came to be known as the
classical Hollywood style. (Recall that film form refers to
specific cinematic elements such as mise-en-scène and
editing; the term style refers to a specific way in which
those formal elements are arranged.) Classical Hollywood
style is not rigid and absolute – slight variations can be
77Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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found in countless Hollywood films – but this way of
cinematically telling stories is basically the same today as
it was in the 1930s. And because Hollywood’s business
practices have dominated both American and global
cinema, classical Hollywood style is often considered the
standard or “correct” way to make fictional films.
The main objective of classical Hollywood style is to
“spoon feed” story information to the spectator, thus
keeping everything clearly understood by the audience.
Hollywood filmmakers believe that that if some plot point
or stylistic maneuver is too different or challenging, the
audience will become disoriented, dislike the movie, tell
their friends not to see it, or even demand their money
back. Classical Hollywood style is sometimes referred to
as the invisible style, because it does not call attention to
itself as even being a style. It permits the viewer to stay
emotionally enmeshed in a film’s story and characters,
instead of being distracted by obvious formal devices (or
thinking too much about the ideological meanings of the
text). Indeed, when classical Hollywood style is working at
its best, audiences are barely aware that any formal choices
are being made at all: most untrained spectators don’t
consciously notice the lighting of the sets or the edits
between shots. Obscuring the formal decisions not only
keeps the viewer centered rather unthinkingly on following
the story, but also limits the viewer’s choice in what she or
he is meant to find important. Say, for example, a film
shows a white business tycoon praising American
capitalism while his black butler brings him a mint julep.
A viewer might be interested in learning the butler’s
reaction to the tycoon’s statement. However, if the camera
does not keep the butler in focus, or never cuts to show the
78Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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butler’s reaction, then it becomes impossible to see what
his reaction might be. In helping to keep things
understandable, Hollywood’s invisible style subtly
eliminates complexity, and in this example, implicitly
makes the white tycoon more important than his butler.
All of the formal aspects of cinema under the classical
Hollywood style work to keep the story clear and
characters simple and understandable. Lighting, color,
camera position, and other aspects of mise-en-scène
consistently help the audience remain engaged with the
story. The most important details are the ones most
prominently lit, kept in focus, and framed in close-up
shots. Hollywood films also employ various rules of
continuity editing, a system of editing in which each shot
follows easily and logically from the one before. If a
person looks over at something, the next shot is of that
something; if a person walks out of a room through a door,
the next shot is of that same person coming through the
door into a new room. Sound design in Hollywood films
also keeps audiences aware of the story’s key points, often
by making the main characters’ dialog louder than the
noise of the crowd around them. And the Hollywood film
score is there to tell an audience exactly how they are
supposed to feel about any given scene.
Style is thus subordinated to story in classical Hollywood
style. The way Hollywood films structure their stories is
referred to as (classical) Hollywood narrative form.
Hollywood stories usually have a linear narrative – they
have a beginning, middle, and an end, and story events
follow one another chronologically. (Flashbacks are an
exception to this format, but they are always clearly
79Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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marked – often with a shimmering dissolve – so as not to
confuse the viewer.) Hollywood narrative form usually
centers on a singular character or protagonist, commonly
referred to as the hero. Sometimes the protagonist might be
a family or a small group of people. The narrative is driven
by carefully and clearly laying out the goals and desires of
the protagonist – the desire to get home in The Wizard of
Oz (1939) or to kill the shark in Jaws (1975). Obstacles to
this desire are created, usually by a villainous force or
person, called the antagonist (the wicked witch, the
shark). Hollywood narrative also usually pairs the
protagonist with a love interest, who either accompanies
the main character in reaching the goal, or functions as the
protagonist’s goal.
The differences between heroes and villains in Hollywood
film are obvious and simplified. Sometimes, as in
old-fashioned Westerns, the good guys even wear white
hats while the villains wear black. Even when dealing with
complex social issues, Hollywood usually reduces them to
matters of personal character: in Hollywood films there are
rarely corrupt institutions, merely corrupt people. In
seeking to make conflicts as basic and uncomplicated as
possible, the antagonist is often “pure evil” and not the
bearer of his or her own legitimate world view.
Protagonists and antagonists are not the only ones
simplified in a Hollywood film, as other roles are also
represented by quickly understood stock characters such as
the love interest, the best friend, or the comic relief. Such
“instant characterization” often draws upon pre-existing
social and cultural stereotypes. Some may seem benign,
like villains wearing black. Others, like repeatedly casting
Asians as mysterious mobsters, or Hispanics as gang
80Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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members, can have vast effects on how those identified as
Asian or Hispanic are treated outside the movie house.
In the linear design of Hollywood narrative form, each
complication in the attempt to reach the protagonist’s goal
leads to yet another complication. These twists and turns
escalate toward the climax, the most intense point of
conflict, wherein the antagonist is defeated by the
protagonist. In the final moments of the film, all the
complications are resolved, and all questions that had been
posed during the film are answered. This is known as
closure. Hollywood’s use of the happy ending, a specific
form of closure, ties up all of the story’s loose ends and
frequently includes the protagonist and the love interest
uniting as a romantic/sexual couple. Even when the couple
is not together at the end of the film (as in Titanic [1997]),
the narrative is designed to make that separation
acceptable to the audience. In Titanic, the ending may be
sad, but the mystery of the diamond necklace has been
resolved, and the film suggests that Jack and Rose will
reunite in heaven. Closure is a potent narrative tool in
managing ideological conflict, because closure makes it
seem as if all problems have been solved. Any actual
ideological issues or social strife that may have been raised
by a film are allegedly resolved by narrative closure, and
thus there is no longer any need for spectators to think
about them. Closure in Hollywood film tends to reaffirm
the status quo of American society.
Since the ideological status quo of American society is
white patriarchal capitalism, it should come as no
surprise that most Hollywood films (throughout its history
and still today) encode white patriarchal capitalism as
81Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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central and desirable via both Hollywood narrative form
and the invisible style. First, the protagonist of most
Hollywood films is constructed as a straight white male
seeking wealth or power. He emerges victorious at the end
of the film, proving his inherent superiority over those who
challenged him. In consistently drawing audience attention
to and celebrating his acts, the invisible style reinforces his
“natural” abilities while not allowing the audience to think
about the often far-fetched qualities of those heroics. Since
the white male commands the most narrative attention, the
(usually white) female love interest is relegated to a minor
or supporting part. Whereas the male is defined by his
actions, job, and/or principles, the heroine is defined
chiefly by her beauty and/or sex appeal. Their romance
affirms patriarchal heterosexuality as well as the
desirability of same-race coupling. If homosexuals, people
of color, or disabled people appear in the film at all, they
might be associated with the villains or relegated to
smaller supporting parts, in effect supporting the
dominance of the white male hero and his female love
interest.
Imagine any of the “Indiana Jones” movies as typical of
this formula. Our hero or protagonist, Professor Jones, is a
straight white man of charm, wit, intelligence, and social
standing. He is opposed by evil male super-criminals or
antagonists who are out to destroy or dominate the world.
Frequently the villain is from another country or is
non-white: in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
(1984), Professor Jones must first battle double-crossing
Asian gangsters and then face off against a corrupt cult of
Indians who enslave children and practice human sacrifice.
Good and evil are thus reduced to simplified and racialized
82Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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stereotypes: white male hero versus villains of color. In
this particular film, Professor Jones is accompanied on his
adventures by a small Asian boy who idolizes him, and a
dizzy blonde heroine whose screaming distress is meant to
be a running gag throughout the film. The film proceeds in
a linear manner through a series of exciting twists and
turns (actionfilled set pieces) until the climax, when Jones
saves the woman and the child, destroys the Indian temple,
and restores harmony to the land. The closure of the film
sets up a symbolic nuclear family, with white man as
heroic patriarch, woman as helpmate and romantic/sexual
object, and the Third World quite literally represented as a
child under their protection. Among the film’s basic
ideological messages are that straight white men can do
anything, that women are hysterical nuisances, and that
non-white people are either evil or childlike.
But haven’t Hollywood representations of women and
minorities changed over the years? Haven’t the formulas
been adapted to be less sexist and racist? Yes and no.
There are now Hollywood films made in which the hero is
not white, not male, or (more recently) not heterosexual.
And Hollywood has always made a type of film that
features female protagonists, the so-called woman’s film
(discussed more fully in later chapters), but these stories
usually emphasize the female character’s desire for a man,
and thus reinforce patriarchy in their own way. It is true
that black and Hispanic actors in Hollywood have made
gains in the last few decades and now regularly play the
hero part in many movies every year. Occasionally there
will even be a female action hero as well. But even then,
these are hegemonic negotiations within the dominant
white patriarchal ideology and not inversions of it: most
83Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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African American protagonists are still male, and most
female protagonists are still white. The very few
homosexual protagonists in recent Hollywood film are
usually male and white. On the rare occasions when a
Hollywood film centers on a deaf, blind, or otherwise
differently abled protagonist, he or she is usually white
(and invariably played by an actor without said disability).
While the real world is comprised of people of all different
races, genders, classes, sexualities, and physical abilities,
the world depicted in Hollywood film usually posits
straight white men as central and heroic, and everyone else
as peripheral (or even non-existent).
The drive for simplicity and obviousness in the classical
Hollywood style has other implications for Hollywood
narrative form. Not only are Hollywood storylines
excessively linear, using simplified stock characters
engaged in clear-cut struggles ending in closure, but
Hollywood often consciously reuses popular (that is,
already understood) storylines and characters. The
proliferation of remakes and sequels guarantees that most
audiences are already familiar with many main characters
and basic narrative situations. The Nightmare on Elm
Street films, for example, rely on audience knowledge not
only of the previous films in the series, but also of the
specific formal elements that go into making a scary
movie. Many Hollywood films are thus identifiable by
their genre, a term that this book uses to refer to a specific
type of fictional Hollywood film such as the horror film,
the Western, the war movie, the musical, or the gangster
film. As will be explored in future chapters, racial and
ethnic markers are activated within genres in unique and
interesting ways. For example, Italian Americans (and
84Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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more recently African Americans) have been closely tied
to the gangster film, while the representation of Native
Americans in Hollywood film is almost exclusively tied to
the Western.
In Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), the
white male hero protects both his white love interest and
Third World children from the villainy of an evil Asian
cult. In this still, he is figured as a symbolic father of all
the other characters. Indiana Jones and the Temple of
Doom, copyright © 1984, Paramount
85Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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A genre can be identified by its surface structure or
iconography – what the genre looks and sounds like. (The
iconography of the horror film might include monsters
and mad scientists, blood and gore, dark woods at night,
screams, and so forth.) Genres can also be defined by their
deeper ideological concerns, sometimes referred to as their
thematic myth. Genres are popular with audiences when
these thematic myths in some way relate to current social
concerns, and as such, genres function as a sort of
feedback loop between filmgoers and filmmakers. Certain
genres make money and flourish when their specific
86Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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thematic myth correlates to something the public is
interested in or wants (or needs) to see dramatized. Other
genres “die” when their thematic myths are no longer
thought valid within the ever-changing spheres of history
and culture. For example, the musical was once a staple of
Hollywood filmmaking, but it grew generally unpopular
after the 1960s. Today, the public rarely accepts the
genre’s convention of characters spontaneously breaking
into song and dance, and our cynical age sees their usual,
simple thematic messages of love and harmony as
outmoded.
Thus, the popularity (or unpopularity) of certain genres can
tell the film historian interesting things about the culture
that produced them. Genre films reflect social concerns,
but only rarely do they challenge the underlying
ideological biases of Hollywood narrative form itself.
(Most genre films, being Hollywood films, still feature
straight white male protagonists, while women and people
of color are relegated to peripheral roles.) Rather, popular
Hollywood genres often attempt to shore up the dominant
ideology by repeating over and over again certain types of
stories that seem to resolve social tensions. For example,
the horror film’s emphasis on the threat posed to
“normality” by the monstrous reinforces social ideas about
what is considered normal. Not surprisingly, in classical
Hollywood horror films, “normality” is conventionally
represented by middle-to-upper-class, white, heterosexual
couples and patriarchal institutions. Monsters and villains,
on the other hand, are often coded as non-white,
non-patriarchal, and/or non-capitalist. In many cases, they
even have physical “abnormalities” that are meant to
symbolize or enhance their deviance.
87Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
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The Business of Hollywood
By examining the structure of Hollywood filmmaking, and
exploring when and why certain films were popular with
American audiences, one can gain insight into the
changing ideological currents of twentieth- and early
twenty-first-century America. Yet one must also take into
consideration the specific economic and industrial
conditions that determine how Hollywood produces its
films. Indeed, Hollywood must be understood not just as a
set of formal and stylistic structures, but also as an industry
that produces certain types of fictional films for profit. As
such, Hollywood is an excellent example of capitalism at
work. Hollywood companies make and sell films that they
think people want to see (that is, films that in some way
reflect the dominant ideology), and Hollywood’s business
practices use every tool at their disposal to lessen
competition, increase buyer demand, and reduce the cost
of production. Though Hollywood films are sometimes
discussed as “art” by critics and some filmmakers, a
Hollywood film’s merit is chiefly judged by its box office
revenues. Even when awards are given for artistic
achievement, these too are drawn into a film’s economic
evaluation – winning a Best Picture Oscar will boost a
film’s profits.
Since the earliest days of cinema, film as an industry has
been divided into three main components: production,
distribution, and exhibition. Production involves the
actual making of a film: the financing, writing, shooting,
editing, etc. Distribution refers to the shipping of copies
(or prints) of the finished film to various theaters. The
theaters where the film is actually projected to audiences
88Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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make up the third arm, or exhibition. More recently, cable
television sales, video-cassette and DVD rentals, etc. also
comprise film exhibition. Hollywood producers have
always been highly dependent upon the distribution and
exhibition arms of the business: no matter how many films
you make, or how high-quality they are, if no one ships
them or shows them, then they cannot make any money.
Hollywood companies have thus consistently worked to
maintain close ties with distribution networks and theaters.
One method of doing this is called vertical integration, in
which one parent company oversees the business of all
three branches. This was the strategy adopted by the major
studios in the first half of the twentieth century, and it
helped to ensure that American theaters were almost
exclusively dominated by Hollywood film during that
period.
Another strategy that helped Hollywood come to dominate
the US film industry was the creation of an oligopoly, a
state of business affairs in which a few companies control
an entire industry. (An oligopoly is thus very similar to a
monopoly, wherein one company controls an entire
industry.) In an oligopoly, several large companies agree
to work together, keeping potential competitors weak or
driving them out of business altogether. In the case of film
in America, the Hollywood oligopolies worked throughout
the twentieth century, and continue to work, to keep
foreign and independent American films marginalized.
This has had a specific effect on minority filmmakers.
Excluded from the Hollywood studios, independent films
made by non-white, non-patriarchal, and/or non-capitalist
people often had trouble being distributed and exhibited.
Furthermore, Hollywood’s control of production,
89Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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distribution, and exhibition has not been limited to the
United States alone. Motion pictures have been one of
America’s leading exports for almost a century, and
Hollywood maximizes its profits by distributing its films
globally. Since Hollywood films usually make back their
cost during domestic release, most of the money earned
from foreign exhibition is pure profit. Consequently,
Hollywood films can offer foreign theater owners their
films at a discount – a price calculatedly lower than the
cost of films made locally in their native country. This
makes it very difficult for other countries to support their
own film industries.
As such, the Hollywood system is an example not just of
industrial capitalism but also of cultural imperialism, the
promotion and imposition of ideals and ideologies
throughout the world via cultural means. Imperialism
means one country dominating another through force and
economic control, but in cultural imperialism, one nation
doesn’t conquer another with force, but rather overwhelms
it with cultural products and the ideologies contained
within them. People around the world are inundated with
American ways of viewing life when they go to the
movies, and often they have little or no access to films
made by people of their own nationality. Furthermore,
since Hollywood films dominate the world, Hollywood
style tends to define film practice for all filmmakers
around the world, since Hollywood style is what most
people are accustomed to seeing and understanding. Many
filmmakers in other countries, having grown up
themselves watching Hollywood films, make pictures that
duplicate the Hollywood style, again reinforcing its
dominance.
90Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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As the following history hopes to show, various
restructurings of Hollywood’s business practices have
affected the ability of other types of films (and their
different representations of race, class, gender, sexuality,
and ability) to get made and to find audiences. Yet,
although new technologies and legal decisions have
occasionally challenged and disrupted the business
strategies of the Hollywood oligopoly, its dominance has
not changed very much in 80 years or so. Most of the
major companies that founded the Hollywood industry are
still around: Paramount, Warner Brothers, 20th
Century-Fox, Universal, Columbia. If anything, these
companies have grown stronger and more diversified. The
main purpose of Hollywood’s business practices – to keep
profits high and inhibit competition by maintaining
centralized control over the industry – has been upheld.
Hollywood film, with its formulas and genres that uphold
white patriarchal capitalism, affects not just people in
America, but people around the globe.
The History of Hollywood: The Movies Begin
The United States did not always dominate the
international film industry, and a number of people around
the globe could arguably take credit for inventing motion
pictures at the end of the nineteenth century. In America,
Thomas Edison ’s company first demonstrated moving
images in 1894 through a mechanical peep-hole device, the
kinetoscope. In France, the Lumière Brothers first
projected their moving pictures upon a screen in 1895,
giving birth to cinema as a shared social phenomenon for
paying audiences. The Lumières’ method of exhibition
soon became the standard worldwide, and French
91Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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filmmakers often led the way in cinema’s early years.
French film companies such as Pathé became the first to
accomplish vertical integration, long before the Hollywood
studios even existed.
The first movies were short travelogs, documentaries, and
“trick” films shown at traveling tent shows and vaudeville
theaters. As the novelty of seeing photographs brought to
life faded, filmmakers moved to telling fictional stories,
first in one-reel shorts (which lasted about 5–10 minutes)
and then in two-reel and four-reel short features. Films
grew so popular that a wave of nickelodeons, small
store-front theaters devoted solely to showing films,
opened their doors across the United States. During this
period, American filmmakers began refining the methods
of storytelling, methods that eventually became
Hollywood’s invisible style. Since films were silent during
this period, filmmakers had to learn how to emphasize key
narrative points without the use of sound. Often this
involved exaggerated gestures by the actors, but
filmmakers also learned how to communicate through the
choice of camera placement, lighting, focus, and editing.
Simultaneously, audiences learned and accepted what
these choices meant. By the 1910s, fictional films that told
melodramatic or sensationalistic stories over the course of
one of more hours were becoming the norm.
Arcades filled with Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscopes, such
as this one in New York City, were a popular early space
for exhibiting motion pictures.
Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York, The
Byron Collection
92Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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In the United States, Hollywood was incorporated as a
town in 1911 and, for a number of reasons, quickly
became the center for the nation’s film production.
Southern California provided almost year-round sunny
weather (needed to illuminate early cinematography). The
diversity of terrain in and around Los Angeles (beaches,
mountains, forests, and deserts) allowed many different
locations for filming. In the 1910s, Los Angeles was still a
relatively small town and film companies could buy land
cheaply to build their mammoth studios. Growing
unionization in all US industries had not made a significant
impact in Los Angeles yet, and the availability of cheap
labor also drew filmmakers to Hollywood. These
pioneering filmmakers were also seeking an escape from
Thomas Edison’s east-coast patent lawyers, who wanted
them to pay royalties.
93Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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When American film was still a small cottage industry,
individuals from various minority groups had more
opportunity to move into the business. While a consortium
of WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) males and their
lawyers were trying to control the American film industry,
women and some racial/ethnic minorities were able to
carve out a niche. Many pioneering Hollywood film
businesses were started by recent European Jewish
immigrants such as Samuel Goldwyn, Adolph Zukor, and
Carl Laemmle. However, as film in America became a
bigger and bigger business, more controlled by companies
rather than individuals, the opportunities for minorities
behind the camera dwindled. Laemmle, Zukor, and others
of Jewish descent were able to maintain their power, but
people of color were rarely permitted any creative control
behind the scenes in Hollywood. Increasingly, the
producing and directing of motion pictures was regarded
as man’s work, and women were pushed aside. American
women did not even have the right to vote prior to 1920,
and non-white people were rarely permitted into white
social spheres or business concerns during these decades.
The Comet Theatre in New York City was a typical
nickelodeon; note the price of admission and the various
short films advertised.
Courtesy of the Quigley Photographic Archive,
Georgetown University Library
94Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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During the 1910s, cinema was commonly regarded in the
United States as enter tainment for immigrants and the
working class. Some middle-to-upper-class white
Americans felt that cinema was potentially a disturbing
social institution that promoted “dangerous” ideas to the
lower classes, and thus many local and state censorship
boards began to monitor the content of films. (In 1915, the
Supreme Court ruled that cinema was not an art form
protected as free speech, but simply a business and
therefore open to regulation.) The film industry thus felt
pressure to become more “respectable,” a euphemism for
affirming the social ideals of the era’s white patriarchy.
The industry also wanted to capture the more lucrative
middle-class audience. One of the ways it did this was by
replacing nickelodeons with opulent theaters known as
movie palaces. It was not unusual for movie palaces to
have marble foyers, crystal chandeliers, and curtained
95Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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boxes. Able to seat thousands of patrons at once, the
palaces helped elevate the cultural status of film to
something closer to that of live theater.
This interior shot of the Majestic Theatre shows the size
and opulence of a typical movie palace.
Courtesy of the Quigley Photographic Archive,
Georgetown University Library
During the 1910s and 1920s, studios also developed the
concept of the movie star (an actor or actress the public
recognizes and likes), realizing that a star’s fans would pay
to see any of the star’s films. Stars are thus used to sell
films, giving them a kind of brand-name appeal. Often
stars were (and still are) associated with a specific type of
role or a stereotypical persona. Charlie Chaplin ’s
96Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
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beloved “Little Tramp” character was a poor but optimistic
everyman figure, while Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford
usually played helpless ingénues, dependent upon
swashbuckling heroes like Douglas Fairbanks to save
them. In this way, the Hollywood star system (in
conjunction with the form of Hollywood narrative itself)
endorsed middle-class American values of strong active
men and passive women, heterosexual romance, and the
centrality of whiteness. At its most basic level, the star
system is a caste system, creating a class of individuals
who supposedly shine brighter than the rest of us, and, as
the word “star” suggests, glitter in the night sky above us.
Indeed, the terms “movie god,” “movie goddess,” and
“Hollywood royalty” have been part of the Hollywood
publicity machine for many years. The star system thus
elevates some human beings above others, and constructs
specific ideals of beauty, appropriate gender behavior, skin
color, class, sexuality, and so forth.
The Classical Hollywood Cinema
By the 1920s (sometimes known as the Golden Age of
Silent Cinema), Hollywood had streamlined its production,
distribution, and exhibition practices, and was regularly
exhibiting its opulent entertainments in lush movie palaces
attended by middle- and upper-class patrons. In 1927,
sound was added to the silent movie, and by the 1930s,
Hollywood had entered what many historians now call its
classical phase. During this period of classical Hollywood
cinema (roughly the 1930s to the 1950s), Hollywood
developed a standardized product that employed classical
Hollywood narrative form and the invisible style. Film
production occurred mostly under the oligopolistic control
97Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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of eight Hollywood companies. The so-called Big 5 or the
major studios (Warner Brothers, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
[MGM], 20th Century-Fox, RKO, and Paramount) were
each vertically integrated, while the Little 3 or minor
studios (Columbia, Universal, and United Artists) did not
own their own theaters and had fewer assets with which to
produce the lush expensive movies for which the Big 5
were famous. At the bottom of the economic ladder in
Hollywood were the Poverty Row studios (such as
Monogram, Mascot, and Producers Releasing
Corporation), studios that made cheap genre films and
serials that were often used by exhibitors to fill out the
second half of a double feature.
Most of these Hollywood companies were centralized
around their own production facilities, referred to as movie
studios. A Hollywood movie studio housed any number of
large sound stages, on which sets could be built and torn
down as needed, so that multiple films could be shot
simultaneously. Most studios included a number of
permanent (or standing) sets, such as a Western town, an
urban street, a European village, a jungle, etc., that could
be used repeatedly in different films. The studios also had
large lists of actors, directors, camera operators, editors,
screenwriters, musicians, costumers, set designers, and
makeup artists under contract. Studios also employed
janitors, bookkeepers, electricians, carpenters, and security
guards. The major Hollywood studios even had
commissaries, hospitals, and their own fire departments.
Without exception, white men held most of the creative
and executive positions at the studios, while people of
color and women – if they were hired at all – were usually
relegated to manual labor or assistant-type jobs.
98Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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During Hollywood’s classical era, the studios (such as
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) were huge industrial complexes
that filled several city blocks.
Unidentified publicity photo, authors’ personal collection
The studio system of motion picture production
increasingly forced workers to specialize in certain areas.
While early filmmakers did multiple tasks (wrote the
scripts, directed the actors, worked the camera, and edited
the film), classical Hollywood movie studios divided these
jobs into various departments. This kept any individual,
other than the (straight, white, male) heads of the studios
themselves, from having too much control over the films
being made, and it streamlined the filmmaking process.
Much like Henry Ford’s assembly-line production of
automobiles, studio employees figuratively stood at certain
places on a filmmaking conveyor belt, contributing their
own small area of expertise to the product as it rolled
99Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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smoothly down the line toward completion. During its
classical period, the Hollywood industry produced about
500 films a year, or about a film per week per studio.
(Today’s Hollywood output is considerably less, usually
under 200 films per year.)
Some American movies were made independently of these
companies during the classical period, but it was difficult
to get these films distributed or exhibited without making a
deal with one of the major Hollywood studios. Smaller
independent filmmaking companies that produced
Hollywood-type films (examples of which would include
the Walt Disney Company and the Samuel Goldwyn
Company) often distributed their work through one of the
Big 5 or Little 3. Other independent filmmakers produced
work that the Hollywood majors had little interest in
distributing. For example, independently produced films
starring African Americans or all-Yiddish casts were
produced during Hollywood’s classical period, but these
films never reached wide audiences outside of specific
ethnic movie houses. For many years these films were
ignored or dismissed by film historians, but in the last 30
years or so, film scholars have begun to study them in
more detail. One thing that is immediately apparent about
many of these independent films is that they allowed
people of color to be in control behind the camera,
representing issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and
ability in different ways than did Hollywood.
The studio system was established to minimize costs and
reduce possible financial liabilities – and the risk of
financial ruin ran high during the Great Depression (1929
until the start of World War II). Hollywood maintained
100Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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profitability in the first few years after the stock market
collapsed through audience interest in the new sound
technology. But by 1932, all of the major studios had
begun to feel the effects of the country’s economic despair.
Ticket sales began to dwindle, and by 1933 every studio
(except powerhouse MGM) had run into debt. Some
studios even went into receivership or declared
bankruptcy. Employee rosters were reduced, and those that
remained faced slashed salaries. Most of those let go
occupied the lowest rungs on the studio ladder – positions
largely held by women and people of color – and most of
these studio employees had no unions to bargain for them.
One of the methods Hollywood used to woo potential
customers back into the theaters was to emphasize lurid
stories that promised increased violence and sexual
titillation, even in the face of local and state censorship
campaigns. The studios worked to forestall any federal
censorship by asserting that the industry could police itself.
In the 1920s, Hollywood moguls appointed former
postmaster general Will Hays to head an in-house
association to oversee the content of Hollywood films. In
1930, the studios officially adopted the Hollywood
Production Code, written by a Jesuit priest and a Catholic
layman, as a list of what could and could not be depicted in
Hollywood movies. Not only were overtly political themes
and acts of graphic violence to be censored, but issues of
sex and sexuality in the movies were strictly monitored.
For example, the Code outlawed the depiction or
discussion of homosexuality and forbade miscegenation –
the romantic or sexual coupling of people from different
races. (The Production Code is a good example of how
discrimination can become institutionalized, embedded
101Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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within a corporate or bureaucratic structure.) Yet, as it
existed in the first years of the Depression, the Production
Code had no way to enforce its rules, and studios willfully
disregarded its pronouncements when box office returns
slid. Gangster films, horror films, and stories of “fallen
women” proliferated, providing not only large doses of sex
and violence, but also a cynical, pessimistic view of
America and, to some degree, a critique of capitalist
ideology.
In 1933, coinciding with Roosevelt’s inauguration and a
general turn toward optimism in US society, the Catholic
Church and other groups renewed their protests against
Hollywood films. Facing boycotts and more urgent calls
for federal censorship, the Production Code was revised in
1934 to include a Seal of Approval that would be given
only to those films deemed acceptable. Hollywood
companies agreed only to show films in their theaters that
had the Seal of Approval attached (or face a large fine),
and thus the industry became self-censoring. This was also
a new way of denying exhibition to other types of films,
further consolidating Hollywood’s oligopoly. As a result,
Hollywood films became a dependable source of escapist
fantasy through the rest of the Depression and into World
War II. While some films of the 1930s did acknowledge
contemporary issues of poverty and unemployment, more
regularly Depression-era Hollywood films showcased the
lifestyles of the rich and beautiful (as in the Fred Astaire
and Ginger Rogers musicals). Anything too political (such
as race relations, class division, or women’s rights) was
not allowed to be discussed in a Hollywood film. Most
women were depicted as asexual wives and mothers,
people of color were consistently marginalized as
102Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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stereotypical servants, and homosexuals officially
disappeared from the movies altogether.
World War II and Postwar Film
World War II substantially upended the day-to-day life of
almost every American citizen. Many men entered military
service, while women contributed to the war effort by
entering the home front workforce. Although
unemployment was practically non-existent, Americans
could spend their paychecks on very little due to war
rationing. The movies benefited as a result, and Hollywood
studios made considerable sums during the war years.
Hollywood continued to provide escapism, but also made
films supporting the war effort (despite the Production
Code’s prohibitions on political themes). The war movie
as a genre reached its classical apex during these years,
thematically promoting American unity in the face of our
enemies’ aggressions. Often these films showed members
of different ethnic groups or racial backgrounds
overcoming their differences and learning to work together
as a unit. On the other hand, Hollywood war films often
featured grotesque stereotypes of Japanese enemies.
When World War II ended, many American citizens
continued to fight for social causes. Groups began
campaigning more vocally for African American civil
rights, and some homosexuals began to organize as well.
Hollywood made a number of films in the late 1940s that
addressed various social issues. These social problem
films explored topics previously considered taboo or
financially risky, and a few of them even dared to examine
racism, anti-Semitism, and the plight of disabled war
103Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
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veterans. In addition to the social problem films, audiences
watched stories of frustration and corruption told in a
number of dark mysteries and thrillers.
Termed film noir by French film critics, these films
questioned the ideals of American capitalism that citizens
had just been fighting to preserve. Film noir also expressed
the social and personal tensions between men and women
in the postwar period, tensions that had been created by
women’s wartime independence versus the postwar
patriarchy’s need to make them once again subservient to
men.
John Garfield was a popular Hollywood actor whose
career was destroyed by the Red Scare; he suffered a heart
attack and died in 1952.
Unidentified publicity photo, authors’ personal collection
104Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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Turning back the calendar on women’s roles after the war
exemplified a general reactionary trend in American
society as the 1940s ended. Following World War II,
America found itself in a Cold War of espionage with the
Soviet Union, and began to fight communism abroad in
actions both open and covert. The resultant Red Scare, a
term that refers to the hysteria about possible communist
infiltration that swept America at this time, caused
immense changes to American film practice in the postwar
years. The congressional committee known as HUAC (the
House Un-American Activities Committee ) investigated
allegations of communist infiltration in various American
industries and institutions. In 1947, HUAC came to ers
were instilling anti-American messages into their films.
The Unidentified publicity photo, authors’ personal owners
of the Hollywood companies quickly closed ranks and
collection offered up sacrificial victims to the committee.
The Hollywood Ten, as these people became known,
refused to answer the committee’s questions, and most of
them served time in prison. Soon, studios were making
employees sign loyalty oaths, and blacklists (rosters of
people who were to be considered unemployable because
of their political beliefs) were circulated throughout the
industry. Careers were ruined and in many cases lives were
destroyed. Other people under investigation recanted their
former political beliefs and were readmitted to the
industry.
In retrospect, the people targeted by HUAC during these
years were disproportionately Jewish, homosexual,
non-white, or people struggling to organize the working
classes – in other words, people who were legitimately
critiquing the elitism of the white patriarchal capitalist
105Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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ruling class. The heads of the studios used the Red Scare to
weaken the power of labor unions in Hollywood, since
unionizing seemed dangerously close to communism in
those trying times. (A number of other industries also used
this gambit against unions.) This type of communist “red
baiting” came to an unofficial end around 1954 when
Senator Joseph McCarthy (one of the leading alarmists
who had used the Red Scare for his own political gain) was
discredited and censured by Congress, after he alleged that
the US Army itself was infiltrated by communists. Yet the
blacklists that had been created in Hollywood and many
other industries lingered well into the 1960s.
Partly in response to the Red Scare, mainstream American
culture throughout the 1950s stressed conformity to white
patriarchal capitalist ideals, under the assumption that even
discussing cultural difference or social inequity would be
misconstrued as un-American. Hollywood filmmakers
deliberately avoided making films that might be
understood as in any way critical of American foreign or
domestic policy. Social problem films and film noir dried
up as filmmakers became afraid that such movies could get
them fired and/or blacklisted. Musicals, melodramas, lush
historical romances, and Biblical epics became the
mainstay of 1950s Hollywood film production, as these
genres were felt to be safe and apolitical. The 1950s is
often spoken about nostalgically as a time when people
migrated to crime-free suburbs to raise perfect nuclear
families. Yet underneath that facade lay ugly reminders of
social inequity that many people choose to forget. Many of
those perfect neighborhoods were zoned to keep out blacks
and/or Jews, women often chafed under the restrictions
placed on them, and gay and lesbian people could be
106Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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arrested and fired from their jobs for merely meeting in a
bar.
The Red Scare was not the only problem facing the
Hollywood studios after the war. Postwar migration to the
suburbs took customers away from urban areas where film
theaters were located, and many preferred to stay home
with their new television sets rather than drive to the
movies. By 1960, about 90 percent of all American homes
had TV. In an attempt to hold onto its audience,
Hollywood responded with expansive technologies that
TV did not have – widescreen formats, stereo sound, and
color, as well as novelty techniques such as 3-D. Even
more dire, the Supreme Court declared in 1948 that the
Hollywood industry had formed an illegal and
oligopolistic business trust. The Paramount Consent
Decrees (as the rulings became known) forced the
Hollywood studios to dismantle their vertical integration
throughout the 1950s. Hollywood companies chose to sell
off their exhibition outlets as a way of complying with this
decision. However, without guaranteed theaters to show
their films, and with the loss of filmgoers to TV, the
Hollywood studios were again forced to cut back
production and whittle down their employee rosters. Many
stars, directors, and writers became independent agents, no
longer tied to one particular studio. This development,
along with theaters that were now free to book
non-studio-produced films, encouraged more independent
filmmaking, even as the political climate of the 1950s did
not exactly encourage independent thinking.
While Hollywood filmmakers aimed for a broad appeal
that would offend no one, some independent filmmakers
107Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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slowly ventured into less-traveled territories. Rather than
trying to sell films to everyone, many independent
filmmakers aimed at smaller, specialized sections of the
audience – teenagers, intellectuals, the socially concerned.
Independent filmmakers learned that their films might
alienate some customers, but would draw in others eager to
see something more complex than the usual Hollywood
fare. The Supreme Court had reversed itself in 1952 and
declared that film was indeed an art form guaranteed
protection under the First Amendment, and thus
independent filmmakers began to deal with topics
considered taboo by the Production Code, such as
miscegenation or homosexuality. Yet most independent
films during this period (and the Hollywood studio films
that sought to imitate them) raised these topics only to
uphold traditional beliefs.
More forthright explorations of mid-century social issues
were to be found in other art forms and movements. Poets
and artists who comprised the Beat movement criticized
American class consciousness and sexual hypocrisy. The
civil rights movement, fighting for equal rights for
African Americans, burgeoned throughout the 1950s and
eventually became more vocal, militant, and successful.
By the 1960s, Native Americans, Hispanics, women, and
homosexuals were also protesting for their civil rights.
Many of these movements were closely linked to protests
against American military involvement in Vietnam, and all
of these movements were connected by a larger youth
movement that openly challenged the conformity of the
1950s. The term counterculture is often used to describe
this broad patchwork coalition of leftists, liberals, and
libertarians who wanted to increase freedom for all
108Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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members of society and bring an end to what they felt was
an unjust war. “Sex, drugs, and rock and roll” became a
mantra of this new social force. Since the personal was
equated with the more broadly political, it was felt that
social freedoms could be increased by expanding personal
freedoms and vice versa.
Hollywood had a difficult time dealing with the social
changes of the 1960s. Many younger Americans, people of
color, and women began to reject the stereotypes and
simplistic formulas of Hollywood films, and turned instead
to independent, foreign, and avant-garde films (both as
audiences and as filmmakers). As a result, by the end of
the decade, several of the Hollywood majors were again on
the verge of bankruptcy. As part of these financial
shake-ups, most of the major studios were being bought
out by larger non-filmic corporations such as Gulf and
Western (absorbing Paramount) and Kinney (absorbing
Warner Brothers). These new corporate managers were
desperate to make Hollywood profitable once again, and
they began to experiment with different sorts of movies
and film styles in an attempt to address the
counterculture’s concerns. Slowly, a few women and
African American men began gaining a small degree of
power in Hollywood. The studios began targeting specific
sections of the population, most notably in what came to
be known as blaxploitation films – cheaply made genre
pictures that featured African American protagonists.
However, still being Hollywood films, most of them failed
to address in any significant way the deeper political issues
of 1960s America.
“New” Hollywood and the Blockbuster Mentality
109Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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During this same period (the late 1960s and early 1970s),
in yet another effort to tap into the interests of younger
audiences, studios began to hire a new generation of
filmmakers who had learned their craft in the growing
number of film departments in American universities.
Mostly white, male, and heterosexual, these so-called Film
School Brats (including George Lucas, Steven Spielberg,
Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola) reinvigorated
the Hollywood industry throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
Having studied film as an art, this new generation made
films that reflected their knowledge of Hollywood (and
global) film history. The Film School Brats revamped
traditional genre formulas that had worked during
Hollywood’s classical period, spicing them up with liberal
doses of sex and violence, now that the Production Code
had been replaced by the Ratings System in the late
1960s. (The ratings system restricted audiences rather than
filmmakers.) Genre films that criticized or deconstructed
American myths, which had been briefly popular with the
counterculture, were now supplanted by genre films that
reinscribed traditional form and ideology in a nostalgic
fashion. In most of these films, women were once again
cast as princesses, people of color appeared as villains or
helpers, and conventionally strong white men remained the
central heroes. This type of film, sometimes called the
nostalgic Hollywood blockbuster, still drives the
Hollywood industry today. Indiana Jones and the Temple
of Doom, discussed earlier in this chapter, is an excellent
example of a nostalgic Hollywood blockbuster, and that
particular franchise (with all of its outdated ideologies
about race and gender) continues to thrive: Indiana Jones
and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) is its most
recent incarnation.
110Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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Rocky (1976) is a good example of the nostalgic
Hollywood blockbuster, a type of film that uses classical
Hollywood formulas to reinscribe traditional concepts of
race, class, gender, and sexuality.
Rocky, copyright © 1976, United Artists
Today, most of these Hollywood blockbusters are
shrewdly calculated remakes and recyclings of what has
worked (that is, made money) in the past. They are
designed according to marketplace research, and work not
to raise questions or explore social issues but to maintain
the ideological status quo. They are usually pre-sold (they
111Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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have name recognition from a previous incarnation as TV
show, novel, comic book, etc.), and are considered high
concept (they have a story that can be reduced to simple
phrases and tag-lines). Today’s blockbusters are sold via
saturation advertising and saturation booking, which
means that the country is blanketed with ads for a film for
weeks before it opens in thousands of theaters at once. The
concept of synergy also drives current Hollywood
production, wherein the film acts as an advertisement for
other related products (and vice versa) – CDs of music,
movie novelizations, behind-thescenes mini-features,
magazine specials, comic books, websites, fast food
franchises, posters, toys, games, action figures, theme park
rides, clothes, and other assorted collectibles. All of this
media saturation convinces filmgoers of these films’
alleged importance. Independent films, which tend to offer
the viewpoints of various marginalized groups, are
frequently lost in the media flurry surrounding the more
formulaic Hollywood output, films that still tend to center
on white patriarchal capitalist ideals.
This situation is the result of the increasingly occurring
merger of media companies into corporate
conglomerates, large multinational businesses that control
multiple aspects of the entertainment industry. Today, the
same seven or eight giant media corporations that make
Hollywood movies (including Disney, TimeWarner-AOL,
News Corp.-20th Century-Fox, Viacom-Paramount,
Sony-Tristar-Columbia, NBC-Universal) also make and
distribute the world’s books, CDs, newspapers, magazines,
and TV shows. They are the same global corporations that
own theme parks, sports teams, TV channels, cable TV
distributors, video and DVD rental companies, and many
112Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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of the chains of movie theaters. This is a new type of
corporate oligopoly, since these global conglomerates
control almost all of the world’s mass media. It is thus
increasingly difficult for truly independent filmmakers to
have their work screened within mainstream cinematic
outlets, which are for the most part controlled by these
multimedia corporate conglomerates.
Most contemporary Hollywood films are screened at
multiplex theatres, such as this one, the Cinemark 17 in
Dallas, Texas.
Authors’ private collection
Independent filmmaking did flourish briefly in the 1980s
and 1990s, because of the developing technologies of
home video and cable TV, which desperately needed
scores of films to fill program schedules and video-store
shelves. A large number of the independent films of this
period dealt with race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability
113Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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in new and important ways. Some of this was a result of
the newest generation of film-school graduates, a group
that now included women and people of color, partly
because of affirmative action legislation. A number of
openly lesbian and gay filmmakers also found
opportunities in independent filmmaking at this time. The
success of some of these filmmakers has led Hollywood
conglomerates to hire and promote more women, people of
color, open homosexuals, and disabled people, and to
make a few films not focused on white heterosexual males
and their adventures. By the mid-1990s, however, many of
the smaller independent film distributors were either
driven out of business or absorbed by the major
Hollywood corporations. For example, in the 1990s,
Miramax was absorbed by Disney, and New Line Cinema
became a part of the Time-Warner corporation, which was
itself acquired by the Internet company America On Line
in 2001. Today it is not unusual for the major Hollywood
corporations to release “independent” films made or
distributed by their own “boutique” subsidiaries, such as
Focus Features (owned by Universal) or Fox Searchlight (a
division of 20th Century-Fox), further blurring the line
between what is considered an independent or a
Hollywood film.
The merger of Time-Warner with AOL highlights the
growth of even newer methods of distributing motion
pictures as downloads to computers, cell phones, and
iPods. Many in the industry are worried about a rise in
media piracy from illegal DVD copies or file sharing –
particularly as their product is handled outside the United
States, where copyright laws (and their enforcement) are
not always the same. In addition to numerous lawsuits and
114Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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raids, public relations campaigns in the early years of the
new millennium have tried to convince consumers that
media piracy takes jobs and money away from the average
film worker (the stunt driver, the carpenter, the
electrician). Yet the money coming from these new modes
of delivery goes almost exclusively to the producers and
company executives. The Writers Guild strike of 2007–8
was largely about trying to get a more equitable share of
this new revenue. (The Directors and Actors Guilds have
also had to bargain hard with the studios over this issue.)
In corporate Hollywood today, billions of dollars are at
stake and, while the industry may be on the cutting edge of
technology, Hollywood films rarely seek to make radical
aesthetic innovations or challenge pre-existing ideas. They
adhere to decades-old formulas and genres that for the
most part uphold the centrality of white patriarchal
capitalism. Hollywood narrative form and the invisible
style remain similar to what they were during the classical
years. Although Hollywood’s distribution and exhibition
venues have changed a great deal, the basic economic
goals of the Hollywood industry are still in place: to
maintain tight control on the market in order to minimize
risk and maximize profit. Hollywood’s corporate
dominance keeps smaller, independent films – those more
regularly made by minority group filmmakers and/or
containing subcultural themes and issues – marginalized.
Questions for Discussion
1 What types of movies do you prefer to watch? Are there
art-house or independent theaters close to you, or many
miles away? What types of films does your local video
115Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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store stock? Are you ever bothered by the lack of diversity
in local video stores or multiplex theaters?
2 Pick a few current Hollywood releases and see if they fit
into the structure of classical Hollywood narrative form.
How are concepts of race, class, gender, sexuality, and
ability positioned by your chosen films?
3 Can you name some examples of synergy
(crossmarketing) associated with recent nostalgic
Hollywood blockbusters?
Further Reading
Balio, Tino, ed. The American Film Industry. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.
Kramer, Peter. The New Hollywood: From Bonnie and
Clyde to Star Wars. London and New York: Wallflower
Press, 2005.
Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson.
The Classical Hollywood Cinema. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1985.
Lewis, Jon, ed. The New American Cinema. Durham:
Duke University Press, 1998.
Grainge, Paul. Brand Hollywood: Selling Entertainment in
a Global Media Age. London and New York: Routledge,
2008.
116Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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Neale, Steve and Murray Smith. Contemporary Hollywood
Cinema. New York: Routledge, 1998.
Ray, Robert. A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood
Cinema, 1930–1980. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1985.
Schatz, Thomas. The Genius of the System. New York:
Henry Holt, 1996.
Sklar, Robert. Movie-Made America. New York: Vintage
Books, 1994.
Wasko, Janet. Hollywood in the Information Age. Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1995.
Wood, Robin. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1986.
Wyatt, Justin. High Concept: Movies and Marketing in
Hollywood. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994.
Further Screening
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
Since You Went Away (1943)
Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
The Ten Commandments (1956)
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)
117Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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Independence Day (1996)
Pleasantville (1998)
Gladiator (2000)
Lord of the Rings (2001–3)
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)
118Benshoff, Harry M., and Sean Griffin. America on Film : Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies,
John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csudh/detail.action?docID=819377.
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Black Lives, Silver Screen
Author(s): Ava DuVernay and Bradford Young
Source: Aperture, No. 223, Vision & Justice (Summer 2016), pp. 34-41
Published by: Aperture Foundation, Inc.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43825320
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David Oyelowo
and Carmen Ejogo
in Selma , 2014
Courtesy Paramount
Pictures/Jima
Black Lives, Silver
Screen
Ava DuVernayand Bradford Young in Conversation
Director Ava DuVernay is on a mission. With her films I Will Follow (2010),
Middle of Nowhere (2012), and the critically acclaimed Selma (2014), about
Martin Luther King, Jr., she has created cinematic worlds distinguished by
deft character studies and nuanced subtexts. One of the only African American
female directors to helm a major Hollywood picture, DuVernay realized early in
her career the importance of telling stories as yet untold. In Selma , she portrayed
a King of stirring complexity. “We unencased him from marble,” she remarked
when the film was released. “We really made him breathe and live as any man
would, in his kitchen, telling his wife he’s about to go on a long trip.” In this
conversation with her frequent collaborator Bradford Young, two enterprising
filmmakers discuss the significance of the black cinematic image. Young,
the groundbreaking cinematographer and director of photography, has a
distinguished profile in contemporary cinema, enriching the inner lives of
on-screen characters with an uncommon range of visual emotions in films like
Pariah (2011), Dee Rees’s striking, coming-of-age portrait of a young New York
lesbian, and Mother of George (2013), Andrew Dosunmu’s sumptuously colorful
drama about Nigerians living in Brooklyn.
For the Vision & Justice issue of Aperture , DuVernay and Young speak at
length about their collaborations and inspirations. They describe their love of
Haile Gerima’s films, the state of diversity and inclusion in Hollywood – now a
national conversation – and why black lives must be visible on the silver screen.
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Ava DuVernay: I don’t really know what we’re talking about·
I just came out of casting and writers9 room and my head is
swimming with other things, so literally, I’m super taking
your lead.
Bradford Young: I was going to take your lead! Oh, we’re in
trouble.
AD: Let’s get it on track. I think we’re supposed to talk about
black imagery, black images · · · Don’t laugh! Let’s start with
Haile Gerima. Shall we?
BY: And the importance of image making and our collaboration
specifically. And why should we even care about the possibility
of what an image can look like within the context of a black film.
AD: I think my mind can’t help but go to Haile, because today
our distribution collective ARRAY announced the acquisition
of his film Ashes and Embers (1982) and I’m so proud of
that. And he is your teacher, all of our teacher· He’s such
a foundation in your work, and an inspiration for our work
together· Now, I feel some kind of way about trying to release
Ashes and Embers in theaters and other platforms for the first
time since its making in the early ’80s· Truly too many have
forgotten about that particular work, and the film community
at large is not acknowledging him as it should· Because there
is no true value placed, outside of the value that we place on
our own· No true value placed on the black image as it relates
to cinema at large·
BY: I think Haile Gerima is the catalyst and the counterpoint
really for our whole conversation. Haile has taught us so much
in direct and indirect ways. I discovered knowledge of myself,
who I am, what my purpose is on the earth – it comes from me
being with Haile for the past twenty years of my life. In particular,
Ashes and Embers was the one film that changed not only what I
think film can stand for but also what the film experience can be.
Ashes and Embers set the bar for me. It was that fine line between
realism as it relates to black life and realism as it relates to black
life in film, but it was also willing to be experimental and imagina-
tive at the same time. The imagination part of his films isn’t just
magical realism. It’s not just imagination or experimentation
just for imagination’s or experimentation’s sake. When he wants
to convey the psychological decay of the main character, he hangs
the camera from a tree and spins it. There’s so much loaded in
that. That’s about black men being lynched. It’s about black men
ultimately lynching themselves, the black body sort of being
lynched in real time by the forces that be. But it’s also in order
to put us in the shoes of the person who’s hanging from the tree;
he actually hangs the camera from the tree. That way of making
films is the beginning of why I even care about the way a film
looks, or the potential of what a film can look like.
AD: Yes, yes!
BY: But on many levels, I’m so curious to hear from you, Miss Ava
DuVernay, a growing artist in the film context. Your life’s calling
is about the transformative, revolutionary power of cinema.
You’ve taken on a mandate to make film that truly communicates
the revolutionary potential of human beings. I’d be curious to
hear why you think the image is important in our evolutionary
and revolutionary process as black people in the world and within
the American context. What makes you feel like the image is such
a significant element in our development?
APERTURE 36
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This page, top and
bottom: Ava DuVernay
and Bradford Young on
the set of Selma , 2014
Courtesy Paramount
Pictures/ Jima
Opposite:
Still from Selma , 2014
Courtesy Paramount
Pictures/Jima
AD: Goodness gracious, Bradford· That’s an easy question·
Let me just rattle off a quick answer· Ha! The image
is intimate to me· We use the term our mind’s eye for a
reason· The images that we consume, and that we take in,
can nourish us, and they can malnourish us· They become
a part of our DNA in some way· They become a part of
our mind, our memory·
BY: Right.
AD: It’s in our internal camera· The image· This idea of the
image is so much more dense than even using it in a film
context· It’s an intimacy inside your own memory, inside
your own mind·
We see the world and each other in pictures· That’s why
I think film is so emotional· It’s re-creating what’s already
embedded in our internal process. It’s an artificial rendering
of what’s already going on inside· I think that, for whatever
reason, that is why I’ve always been drawn to it, and as you
start to apply theories of progression and liberation and all
of those things around very intimate ideas, it becomes even
more powerfiil·
But that’s why I’m so excited when I see your images as
a cinematographer· Because I know inherent in that image,
there is an idea becoming a part of someone’s mental canvas·
You drink it in, and that’s now part of you· That’s why what
you do is so important, I think, divorced of story· You’re
telling your own story within the image that’s sometimes not
even attached to the narrative that it’s inside of· Does that
make sense?
BY: Yes. As you’re saying that, I’m tapping my foot on the
ground. I might actually want to scream and run around the
room. As your director of photography, I’m supposed to manage
expectations. You say to me, “I want the film to feel this way
visually,” and then I have to go pull all these people together
to determine how we’re going to make your wishes come true.
How we’re going to manifest what you said, this sort of internal
image-making capacity that’s innate to all of us. For the last two
years I’ve been thinking about images, but as an image maker
I’ve actually never heard anybody describe it like that. Now
you’ve got me thinking, Wow, I’ve got to really be careful
with whom I collaborate, because the director is essentially
the person in this context who is going to help me unlock
the box.
AD : That’s not easy· We work in a place that is set up to, that
is crafted to do exactly the opposite of that· Our objectives,
our intentions as black movie makers, as a black woman
movie director -there’s nothing in this industry, when we
work inside of the industry, that fosters that· I think that’s
why I hold on for dear life for the collaborations, the moments
that exist outside of this industry, because that’s where we
both started- outside of the industry·
BY: Right.
AD: You represent a weird conundrum for me in that regard
because you represent the moments where I’ve felt the most
free, independently making films outside of the industry like
Middle of Nowhere (2012)· And also the moments when I first
took a step inside of that industry with Selma (2014) and tried
to create something intentional in an environment that was
a lot less free· That’s what I’m wrestling with· The films are
not going to reach who you want the way you want if you
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don’t participate in this industry somehow. I know that to be
true· I grew up in Compton, and you can’t see Straight Outta
Compton (2015) in Compton because there ain’t no movie
theater there· You can’t see Selma in Selma because there
ain’t no movie theater there for that black community·
You know what I mean? There’s this cinema segregation
that happens that ain’t nobody seen Ashes and Embers ,
the film that they should see! Why?! Because it ain’t coming
to a theater near you, because it wasn’t made inside this
paradigm· I struggle with that· How have you navigated it?
Because you’re doing it quite well·
BY: Sometimes it’s hard for me to see if I’m navigating it well.
The installation work and things I’ve done specifically, let’s say,
with Leslie Hewitt, have become really important in my process.
At the same time, I do think there is a disharmony between what
I expect from the filmmaking experience and what it is I am
actually getting out of all the experience that I’m having outside
of the community that actually raised me. You know what
I’m saying?
AD: Mmm hmm. Yeah·
BY: It’s not like jazz or hip-hop – art forms that started as
expressions of dissonance and resistance. Filmmaking isn’t part
of our organic narrative as black people in America. We’re asking
people who were very much interested in making sure film
communicated white supremacist values, like the founding
fathers of the film experience – D. W. Griffith, Thomas Edison,
these people who were very interested in white supremacy –
we’re asking the sort of grandchildren of those people to allow
us into the filmmaking experience with a whole counterpoint
to why they started it. You know what I mean? It didn’t start
off as an art form of resistance. Actually what you said earlier is
the real purpose of why we do this. It’s like trying to etch in real
time our mind’s camera, our mind’s image-making capacity.
It generates images so that we can deal with life. So the way
I navigate it, I think, is that I’ve just got to stay focused on the
possibility that one day it could be completely turned over on
its head and transformed.
AD: Those words are moving· As you were talking, a conversa-
tion that I had with Ryan Coogler came to mind· We were
looking at the statistics that just came out from the Directors
Guild of America about super-disturbing numbers that
really starkly lay out the omission and the absence and the
disappearing of voices other than white men in the guild,
or the industry or whatever· It went by year and by studio,
by gender and by race· It was like, one woman director at
Paramount in 2015, two people of color directors at Warner
Bros· in 2013-14, etcetera· We were trippin’ out, because he
rightly remarked, “That one at that studio in that year is you,
and I’m one of the two in this year·” So we were talking about
those numbers; they might as well have had our names on
it· We are the numbers on the chart at this moment· Ain’t
nobody else around· Like, who are we looking for? Ain’t
nobody coming to help us· Know what I mean? There’s one
person in that column and it’s you and you’re standing there
next to one other person at another studio in the other year
and that’s your homie· So how do you reconcile being part
of a larger industry, a larger energy that’s making a certain
thing, when you lay the numbers out and we literally are
standing alone amongst a lot of opposition, misunderstanding,
purposeful omission, all of that·
APERTURE 38
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This page:
Gabrielle Union
in The Door, 2013
Courtesy Brigitte Lacombe
Even more so, I thought, Oh, well, Ryan, at least he’s
got five other black men with him as small as that is· There’s
two of us· Women. Two black American women who’ve
made studio movies in 2014· There’s me and Gina Prince-
Bythewood. I thought, Well, we’ve got it really bad! And then,
do you know who I started to think of?
BY: Who?
AD: You! Because you ain’t got none. The past five years,
it would be one. It would be Brad. Not even one other black
cinematographer who’s getting air and room to breathe in
the studio framework. Just one. You. What is that like? When
you can say, you are a creative entity that has it worse than
the black woman filmmaker! That’s rough, cause we got it
bad! Ha! It’s the black cinematographer. That’s so sparse
that there’s only one guy doing it on a certain level. You truly
stand alone in this moment. I know it’s not a badge of honor.
That’s a badge of disappointment for all of us that there’s
not more. But surely, that’s where you are. And what’s going
on with that?
BY: You know what’s bittersweet about it? The sweet part
of it is all of the elders around me, Ernest Dickerson, Malik
Sayeed, Arthur Jafa, and Johnny Simmons. It’s not like I’m
really alone. But things do happen when you’re alone. There’s
a certain dissonance that comes from being alone. Know what
I mean?
AD: Yes.
BY: I’m just one cell in a mass of what we need to do to feel
human in our experience of being black in the world. Obviously,
there’s Shawn Peters. There’s Chayse Irvin. There are cats that
are coming up. But at the same time, I do feel lonely, because
I still want to be able to pick up the phone and call the other
cinematographer who’s working consistently within projects,
the same kind of level of projects I’m working on, and say,
“Hey, what was it like for you?” I still have to go back to Haile.
Listen, I’m like the seventh black person to ever be let into
the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC). The seventh.
Out of a body of more than three hundred people. According
to the history of the organization, they don’t let us in all the
time, and when they let us in, we’ve got to really check how
we celebrate that.
These images, these things I’m helping to provide, come
from a very complicated, joyful, but very painful experience
of often being the only person in the conversation.
AD: You were talking about ASC. Same situation with the
Academy. Having a moment that you look around and it’s
not even a deep dive to understand the context. It’s so stark,
it’s laid so bare right there. How much can you celebrate?
It’s a residue of all that is not. All that is not. All that never
was. All that is absent. It sits right on top of whatever little
moment that is. But that’s such an interesting way to think
about your place in all of this, and it’s really fascinating
to hear how you’re reconciling it, both in your work and
just personally.
BY: Everything we just talked about is why you and I are together.
It is why we’re doing what we’re doing together. We’re aware
of what’s happening around us.
AD: Yeah, for sure. Yes, indeed. Okay, they want us to talk
about that work. Our work together. I’ll throw out the
name. You can tell them what we did. The first was My Mie
Sounds Nice (2010)· It was a documentary that was the first
documentary that BET ever commissioned as an original
doc. It was about women in hip-hop and the art form
of emceeing. I’d reached out to you because I had seen
Mississippi Damned (2009)· Tina Mabry, great filmmaker,
who is now working with me, blessedly, on my new TV show
project – writing and directing with me. I’d seen her film
Opposite:
David Oyelowo
in Selma , 2014
Courtesy Paramount
Pictures/Jima
WORDS 39
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This page, top and
bottom: Danai Gurira in
Mother of George, 2013
Courtesy Oscilloscope
Laboratories
Opposite:
Emayatzy Corinealdi
in Middle of Nowhere,
2012
Courtesy ARRAY
We use the term our mind’s eye
for a reason. The images that
we consume, they become a
part of our DNA. They become
a part of our mind9 our memory·
and loved it, which you shot· I reached out to you about
I Will Follow (2010) and you couldn’t do it because you
were shooting the great filmmaker Dee Rees’s project
Pariah (2011)· I didn’t know you from Adam· It was just
a cold call·
BY: That’s right. First of all, everybody had been talking about
you. So when you asked me and I said I couldn’t, I was hoping
and anticipating at some point that you would call again and we
would do something together. When it finally came that time
when we were actually going to do My Mie Sounds Nice , it was
abundantly clear from the beginning that whatever we were going
to do, we were going to try to push it. We were going to try to
make it not just seeing these beautiful sisters on a screen talking
about their experience. It was also going to be about how people
were going to experience it visually.
So we met in Atlanta. Before we even went to shoot, we
sat on these couches in the hotel where we were staying, and
we had a more than an hour long conversation about what
our expectations were and are about cinema. I hadn’t had that
experience before. We talked about Haile. You were bringing
up films that I had never seen. I just realized, like, Oh, this is
my sister. This is my friend. This is a person I haven’t met, but
we’ve been on the same path, the same journey. The only thing
that was separating us was land, was space.
AD: Middle of Nowhere was our next collaboration· You were
already a star· You’d already won Best Cinematography at
Sundance for Pariah9 or it was coming up· These things
that the industry marks as worthy· But we already knew·
I remember being glad that you were doing it, because I
think at that point you had different choices about what
you could do· Different possible trajectories and different
people pulling on you different ways· The talent was apparent
at that point· Enough of us had seen the work, and were
valuing it· So anyway, it was no money· It was fourteen days
in LA, in South Central and all around LA· Yeah, what did
we do then?
BY: We were at a place to exercise some of the ideas that we think
about. Like, how do you capture black life in real time? We’d
already talked Ashes and Embers . We already had those references.
Now it was time to show up and be part of that conversation.
AD: After, we did a branded piece, The Door (2013),
commissioned by Prada· They basically just gave a chunk
of change to tell a story, as long as the characters were
wearing their clothes· I love that piece· I think we said
something with it·
Told a story that I thought was important· Everyone
looks like you just want to sop them up on a biscuit· We walked
into that with very little prep· By that point, we’d already
done Middle and Mie and we had a shorthand· I just remember
feeling super free· Even though the client was on the set
looking at it, it felt super free and very connected· What did
you think?
BY: Yes. It was basically an experiment to see if we could do
something more free and do something commercial, sell a
product. I hadn’t shot many commercials and you hadn’t
shot many either. It was beautiful to improv with you. I’m so
proud of that piece. I think this is what we do when we come
together. We try to bring all the conversations we have when
we’re not shooting movies together or shooting commercials
together.
APERTURE 40
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AD: There’s no one who can reach into my brain and make
the image a reality, that mind’s eye into a real thing, better
than you. You make it even better than I even thought of it.
Then Selma was next· Truly, on Selma was the first
time I felt like I knew what I was doing at all. I had made
five documentaries, two narrative films, shot an episode of
Scandal , done the Prada thing, done a couple of other branded
pieces- and with all those I felt not entirely comfortable
within myself, if I’m honest·
So it was on Selma that I was super clear· From my work
with the actors, to my work on the script, to my work with
you on camera, to work with the set design, the locations,
production design·
Whatever my strengths were, and weaknesses, I feel
like they all evened out and I had accepted my limits and
my strengths and wasn’t beating myself up over either·
It’s certainly not done, but I felt like I was at least stepping
into a sphere where I could say, Oh, I understand· I haven’t
mastered any of it but I understand what I want my place to be·
BY: You had so much swagger on Selma . It was unbelievable.
Working with you on that film has changed not just the way
I look at you as a director, but the way I look at you as a woman,
as a person, as a human being. It was evident and clear from the
time that you showed me those Paul Fusco photographs to the
point we went into the battle. You were like, “This is what I want,
and it’s got to happen.” I was just watching everybody, including
myself, line up and meet the challenge.
AD: We couldn’t have done it without each other· Nor would
I have wanted to·
BY: I feel the same.
AD: So as we wrap up this almost conversation for some
people who are listening, and they’re like, What the hell
are they talking about?
BY: Ha!
AD : I just have to thank you for being my partner· I just want to
thank you· Because before the image itself, it’s the experience
of making the image· The audience gets the image· We get the
experience of making the image, too· And those experiences
when I’ve worked with you have been real gifts· So thank you,
my brother· I love you.
BY: I love you, A. I always say, I’ve been standing with Haile for
twenty years, and I’ve watched a lot of cats, brothers, and sisters
come in and out of his space. But you are the first person that
I brought to meet the brother. We all love you. We adore you.
We look up to you right now. You’re so real. And people got
to know that. I hope people who read this know that. Man, the
way you’re navigating this space – we’re watching you. We’re
learning. Because you bring a lot of dignity – forgive me, I’m
getting emotional – you bring a lot of dignity to a space where
I don’t see dignity. I know we all have our capacity to go down
that road. But you? You are relentless. And you make us so proud.
That’s why I don’t want to waste your time. Even my wife is
like, “Do not waste Ava’s time. She’s on a mission.”
AD: I’m happy to be on it with you, Brad·
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- Contents
- Issue Table of Contents
p. [34]
p. 35
p. 36
p. 37
p. 38
p. 39
p. 40
p. 41
Aperture, No. 223 (Summer 2016) pp. 1-152
Front Matter
[Guest Editor’s Note] [pp. 10-14]
Collectors: The Jazz Musicians On Recent Acquisitions [pp. 17-18]
Curriculum: A List of Favorite Anythings [pp. 20-21]
Redux: Rediscovered Books and Writings: Harlem on My Mind [pp. 23-24]
Words
Frederick Douglass’s Camera Obscura [pp. 25-29]
The Black Photographers Annual [pp. 30-33]
Black Lives, Silver Screen [pp. 34-41]
Love Visual: A Conversation with Haile Gerima [pp. 42-45]
Picturing Obama: How have photographs defined a transformative presidency? [pp. 46-51]
Around the Kitchen Table [pp. 52-56]
Pictures
Awol Erizku [pp. 57-65]
Toyin Ojih Odutola [pp. 66-69]
Lorna Simpson [pp. 70-75]
Annie Leibovitz [pp. 76-81]
Deborah Willis [pp. 82-87]
Sally Mann [pp. 88-95]
Jamel Shabazz [pp. 96-105]
Devin Allen [pp. 106-109]
Leslie Hewitt [pp. 110-115]
Lyle Ashton Harris [pp. 116-121]
Radcliffe Roye [pp. 122-125]
LaToya Ruby Frazier [pp. 126-135]
Dawoud Bey [pp. 136-143]
Deana Lawson [pp. 144-149]
Object Lessons: James VanDerZee’s “Christmas Morning”, 1933 [pp. 152-152]
Back Matter
1
A Certain Tendency of
the French Cinema
Francois Truffaut
,
Francois Truffaut began his career as a film critic writing for Cahiers du Cinema beginning in
1953. He went on to become one of the most celebrated and popular directors of the French
New Wave, beginning with his first feature film, Les Quatre cents coup (The Four Hundred
Blows, 1959). Other notable films written and directed by Truffaut include Jules et Jim (1962),
The Story of Adele H. (1975), and L’Argent de Poche (Small Change; 1976). He also acted
in some of his own films, including L’Enfant Sauvage (The Wild Child, 1970) and La Nuit
Americain (Day for Night, 1973). He appeared as the scientist Lacombe in Steven Spielberg’s
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Truffaut’s controversial essay, originally published
in Cahiers du Cinema in January 1954, helped launch the development of the magazine’s
auteurist practice by rejecting the literary films of the “Tradition of Quality” in favor of a cinema
des auteurs in which filmmakers like Jean Renoir and Jean Cocteau express a more personal
vision. Truffaut claims to see no “peaceful co-existence between this ‘Tradition of Quality’ and
an ‘auteur’s cinema.”‘ Although its tone is provocative, perhaps even sarcastic, the article
served as a touchstone for Cahiers, giving the magazine’s various writers a collective identity
as championing certain filmmakers and dismissing others.
These notes have no other object than to attempt to
define a certain tendency of the French cinema – a
tendency called “psychological realism” – and to
sketch its limits.
Ten or Twelve Films
If the French cinema exists by means of about a
hundred films a year, it is well understood that only
ten or twelve merit the attention of critics and cine
philes, the attention, therefore of Cahiers.
These ten or twelve films constitute what has been
prettily named the “Tradition of Quality”; they force, by
their ambitiousness, the admiration of the foreign press,
defend the French flag twice a year at Cannes and at
Venice where, since 1946, they regularly carry off
medals, golden lions and grands prix.
With the advent of”talkies,” the French cinema was
a frank plagiarism of the American cinema. Under the
influence of Sca,face, we ni.ade the amusing Pepe Le
Mako. Then the French scenario is most clearly obliged
to Prevert for its evolution: Quai Des Brumes (Port Of
Shadows) remains the masterpiece of poetic realism.
Frarn;ois Truffaut, “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” from Cahiers d11 Ci11C111a in English l. Originally published in French in Ca/tiers d11 Ci11C111a 31
195-1). © 1954. Reprinted by penn.ission of Cahiers d11 Ci11e111a.
40 Andrew Sarris
have been any more inspired than Voltaire’s. Presum
ably, the Age of Reason would have stifled Racine’s
neoclassical impulses. Perhaps. Perhaps not. Bazin’s
hypothesis can hardly be argued to a verifiable conclu
sion, but I suspect somewhat greater reciprocity
between an artist and his zeitgeist than Bazin would
allow. He mentions, more than once and in other
contexts, capitalisn1’s influence on the cinema. Without
denying this influence, I still find it impossible to
attribute X directors and Y films to any particular
system or culture. Why should the Italian cinema be
superior to the German cinema after one war, when
the reverse was true after the previous one? As for
artists conforn1ing to the spirit of their age, that spirit
is often expressed in contradictions, whether between
Stravinsky and Sibelius, Fielding and Richardson,
Picasso and Matisse, Chateaubriand and Stendhal.
Even if the artist does not spring from the idealized
head of Zeus, free of the embryonic stains of history,
history itself is profoundly affected by his arrival. If
we cannot imagine Griffith’s October or Eisenstein’s
Birth of a Nation because we find it difficult to trans
pose one artist’s unifying conceptions of Lee and
Lincoln to the other’s dialectical conceptions of Lenin
and Kerensky, we are, nevertheless, compelled to rec
ognize other differences in the perso11alities of these
two pioneers beyond their respective cultural com
plexes. It is with these latter differences tF1at the auteur
theory is most deeply concerned. If directors and
other artists cannot be wrenched from their historical
environments, aesthetics is reduced to a subordinate
branch of ethnography.
I have not done full justice to the subtlety of
Bazin’s reasoning and to the civilized skepticisn1 with
which he propounds his own argun1ents as slight
probabilities rather than absolute certainties. Conten1-
porary opponents of the auteur theory n1.ay feel that
Bazin himself is suspect as a member of the Cahiers
family. After all, Bazin does express qualified approval
of the auteur theory as a relatively objective method
of evaluating films apart from the subjective perils of
impressionistic and ideological criticism. Better to
analyze the director’s personality than the critic’s nerve
centers or politics. Nevertheless, Bazin makes his stand
clear by concluding: “This is not to deny the role of
the author, but to restore to him the preposition
without which the noun is only a limp concept.
‘Author,’ undoubtedly, but of what?”
Bazin’s syntactical flourish raises an interesting
problem in English usage. The French preposition “de”
serves many functions, but among others, those of
possession and authorship. In English, the preposition
“by” once created a scandal in the American film
industry when Otto Preminger had the temerity to
advertise The Man With the Golden Arm as a film “by
Otto Preminger.” Novelist Nelson Algren and The
Screenwriters’ Guild raised such an outcry that
the offending preposition was deleted. Even the noun
“author” (which I cunningly mask as “auteur”) has a
literary connotation in English. In general conversa
tion, an “author” is invariably taken to be a writer.
Since “by” is a preposition of authorship and not of
ownership like the ambiguous “de,” the fact that
Preminger both produced and directed The Man with
the Golden Arm did not entitle him in America to
the preposition “by.” No one would have objected
to the possessive form: “Otto Preminger’s The Man
with the Golden Arm.” But, even in this case, a novelist
of sufficient reputation is usually honored with the
possessive designation. Now, this is hardly the case in
France, where The Red and the Black is advertised as
“un film de Claude Au tant-Lara.” In America, “directed
by” is all the director can claim, when he is not also
a well-known producer like Alfred Hitchcock or Cecil
B. de Mille.
Since most American film critics are oriented
toward literature or journalism, rather than toward
future film-making, most American film criticism is
directed toward the script instead of toward the screen.
The writer-hero in Sunset Boulevard complains that
people don’t realize that someone “writes a picture;
they think the actors make it up as they go along.” It
would never occur to this writer or most of his col
leagues that people are even less aware of the director’s
function.
Of course, the much-abused man in the street has
a good excuse not to be aware of the auteur theory
even as a figure of speech. Even on the so-called
classic level, he is not encouraged to ask “Aimez-vous
Griffith?” or “Aimez-vous Eisenstein?” Instead, it is
which Griffith or which Eisenstein? As for less
acclaimed directors, he is lucky to find their names in
the fourth paragraph of the typical review. I doubt
that most American film critics really believe that an
indifferently directed film is comparable to an indif
ferently written book. However, there is little point in
TIPS ON THE FTV 113 FINAL EXAM
TA Dan Zweifach (
dzweifach@ucla.edu
)
Updates:
March 16, 3PM– added additional advice on
#5
March 14– added advice on
#3
Exam is due Thursday, March 19 by 11:59PM via Turnitin (Follow Turnitin link from course website under “Week 4.” Prompts also available on website.) Good luck!
CONTENTS:
Format Reminders
Overall Tips
Advice on Specific Questions
Film Availability
Format Reminders
· Answer all seven questions, numbering them.
· No word count minimum or maximum. Answer the question as completely as possible based upon course material.
· Use double-spaced, 12 point font, paragraphs, and complete sentences.
· For course material, include parenthetical citation and page number when paraphrasing or quoting, e.g. “(A. Martin 129).”
· No need for fuller citations of course material
· No outside research is expected. However, as always, any sources you draw upon (including websites) MUST be fully cited.
· Citation formats:
Purdue OWL
· This is an individual assignment; Turnitin will flag overly similar responses between students
Overall Tips
· Note the point totals- questions 1-4 are 10 points each and questions 5-7 are 20 points each. Questions 1-4 require direct, shorter answers while questions 5-7 are more detailed. Questions 5-7 are more similar to the midterm prompts (which were worth 25 points each). New for the final.
· No formal thesis statement is required. However, note that questions 5 and 7 do require you to state an opinion and advance an argument (discussed further below).
New for the final.
· Questions 5 and 7 ask you to discuss course films. Discuss specific scenes, using the stylistic and narrative terms we’ve discussed in section.
New for the final.
· Unlike for the midterm, film analysis (of Lee/DuVernay films) is required for several of the prompts. If you missed the course screenings, be sure to allow time to access and watch the films.
New for the final.
· Limit the use of quotes. Put the concepts in your own words. If you use quotes or closely paraphrase a reading OR lecture, explain the significance of the quote in your own words.
· Answer each question as fully as possible, drawing upon the reading, lecture, screenings, and discussion section.
· Check that you’ve answered each part of the question and included the requested number of readings and/or media.
· Re-read the relevant articles. Don’t rely on lecture slides/notes alone.
· For questions 5-7, be sure you understand each article’s argument or intervention. Why did the author write it? What are they trying to add to the scholarly conversation?
· An answer like “highlight the importance of female directors” is a good start but not enough because it applies to many articles we’ve read. Each article has a unique perspective.
Advice on Specific Questions
#3
· The question refers to comments Prof. Bowdre made in lecture (not in the slides and not in the reading). If you’re not sure what she said, just pick one of the directors (Lee or Perry) and summarize Prof. Bowdre’s perspective based upon her article. I will still give significant partial credit if you engage with the reading.
#5
· Be sure to discuss specific scenes from AT LEAST two Lee films, including 4 Little Girls and/or When the Levees Broke.
· The prompt asks you if sexism is apparent in Lee’s documentaries. I recommend giving your answer, and briefly explaining why, in your opening paragraph. This will help focus your response.
· The prompt asks you to “consider the sexism in his fiction films such as School Daze (1988) and Malcolm X (1992) and then consider his documentaries,” so part of your answer can certainly be focused on the fictional films.
· Remember it’s fine to disagree with a reading, or say that it applies to the fiction films but not the documentaries.
#6
· Note that the prompt says, “Use Maryann Erigha and other writers in your analysis.” So the response should discuss Erigha, Benshoff/Griffin, and AT LEAST one additional author.
#7:
· Here’s a good chance to use the stylistic/narrative elements I kept bringing up in section and that you used on your papers. You may want to consult my handouts on Film Form/Style and Narrative.
· Though optional, it may be helpful to include a basic thesis statement in your intro. Here, you can summarize the themes/visuals you will discuss and your answer as to whether or not the themes apply across both documentaries and fiction.
Film Availability
As noted earlier in the quarter, all screened films are available for viewing at the
Instructional Media Lab
, 270 Powell Library (310-206-1211) EXCEPT the following:
· Miracle at St. Anna (Lee, 2008)
· Mo’ne Davis: I Throw Like a Girl (Lee, 2014)
· My Mic Sounds Nice: A Truth About Women and Hip Hop (DuVernay, 2010)
· I Will Follow (DuVernay, 2010)
· Venus vs. (DuVernay, 2013)
· August 28th (DuVernay, 2016)
You will still be able to answer the questions successfully even if you cannot find one of the above. At this time, libraries remain open. Many of the films are also available online on various platforms. If you have trouble with IML or media access, let me know. (However, do remember that these are courtesy options; Prof. Bowdre’s expectation is that you watched the material in class unless you notified us of an excused absence.)