film essay questions

Four long film essay questions.

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)

FTV Examining the Auteur: Contemporary Directors

Midterm

While you may respond to these questions using paragraphs, there is no need to have thesis

statements. （ex. Truffaut said bulabulabula in page 40）Make sure you answer all of the prompts within the question.

Try to answer it more like your own thought, your understanding and your ideas, how your thought connected with these authors, not just quotes and don’t write like a research paper.

1. Auteur theory is initially attributed to François Truffaut. Explain the cinematic traditions that Truffaut found problematic in “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema.” In your response, clarify how the terms “Tradition of Quality,” and “psychological realism” play a role in Truffaut’s essay. Mention where he stands on auteur cinema and the “Tradition of Quality” cinema and his description of auteurs.

2. Andrew Sarris brought auteur theory to the United States. List his three premises of auteur theory and then mention how his explanations are lacking. In your critique of Sarris, use at least two authors – Pauline Kael, Graham Petrie, and Angela Martin.

3. S. V. Hartman and Farah Jasmine Griffin analyze Julie Dash’s Illusions (1982) and they consider the projection scene a significant part of the film. Describe why the authors feel that Esther Getter’s voice was violently appropriated and the reason they feel that Esther’s

relationship with Mignon Dupree is a farce.

4. Patricia Mellencamp argues that Illusions shows how Hollywood erased Black women

historically and in representation. Discuss how Mellencamp views on Illusions are different than

Hartman and Griffin. Also note the ways Mellencamp exposes how whiteness in film was not

neutral and used as a type of continuity of style along with the Production Code.

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).

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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
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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
10

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.”
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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.

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

The 4 Unsung Pioneers of 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.

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.

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.

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)

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)

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)

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.

709

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Four Women by Julie Dash. Courtesy of Black Filmmaker

Foundation.

710

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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-

711

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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-

712

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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.

713

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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.

718

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A Minor Altercation by Jacqueline Shearer. Courtesy of Black Filmmaker

Foundation.

719

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• Contents

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• Issue Table of Contents

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]

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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• Contents

[361]
362
363
364
365
366
367
368
369
370
371
372
373

• Issue Table of Contents

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

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
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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

77

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FRONTIERS, VOL. XV, NO. 1

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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FRONTIERS, VOL. XV, NO. 1

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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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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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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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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… 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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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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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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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

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• Issue Table of Contents

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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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