film essay questions

profilesharon1997
PatriciaMellencamp-MakingHistoryJulieDash.pdf

Making History: Julie Dash Author(s): Patricia Mellencamp Source: Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 15, No. 1, Women Filmmakers and the Politics of Gender in Third Cinema (1994), pp. 76-101 Published by: University of Nebraska Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3346614 Accessed: 08-01-2020 09:04 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide

range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and

facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at

https://about.jstor.org/terms

University of Nebraska Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies

This content downloaded from 132.174.250.254 on Wed, 08 Jan 2020 09:04:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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

This content downloaded from 132.174.250.254 on Wed, 08 Jan 2020 09:04:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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

This content downloaded from 132.174.250.254 on Wed, 08 Jan 2020 09:04:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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

78

This content downloaded from 132.174.250.254 on Wed, 08 Jan 2020 09:04:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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

79

This content downloaded from 132.174.250.254 on Wed, 08 Jan 2020 09:04:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

FRONTIERS, VOL. XV, NO. 1

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

80

This content downloaded from 132.174.250.254 on Wed, 08 Jan 2020 09:04:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

FRONTIERS, VOL. XV, NO. 1

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

81

This content downloaded from 132.174.250.254 on Wed, 08 Jan 2020 09:04:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

FRONTIERS, VOL. XV, NO. 1

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.

82

This content downloaded from 132.174.250.254 on Wed, 08 Jan 2020 09:04:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

FRONTIERS, VOL. XV, NO. 1

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.

83

This content downloaded from 132.174.250.254 on Wed, 08 Jan 2020 09:04:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

FRONTIERS, VOL. XV, NO. 1

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

84

This content downloaded from 132.174.250.254 on Wed, 08 Jan 2020 09:04:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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.

85

This content downloaded from 132.174.250.254 on Wed, 08 Jan 2020 09:04:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

FRONTIERS, VOL. XV, NO. 1

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

86

This content downloaded from 132.174.250.254 on Wed, 08 Jan 2020 09:04:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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

87

This content downloaded from 132.174.250.254 on Wed, 08 Jan 2020 09:04:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

FRONTIERS, VOL. XV, NO. 1

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

88

This content downloaded from 132.174.250.254 on Wed, 08 Jan 2020 09:04:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

FRONTIERS, VOL. XV, NO. 1

doesn't end "with the dead." Nana responds to her grandson's anger about his wife's rape: "Ya can't get back what you never owned." Nana's attempt to fortify the family for their journey, to give them their heritage, is also the film's gift to the audience and to African American history. "I'm trying to learn ya how to touch your own spirit ... to give you something to take north with ya. .... Call on those old Africans. Let the old souls come into your heart .... let them feed you with wis- dom." Nana calls upon the spirits, carried by the wind. We glimpse the young girl, as yet unborn, running. Then we see this spirit enter her mother's body. The spirits can be felt, experienced.

An aesthetics of history is inscribed on bodies that dance, stroll, gesture, talk, and listen - a choreography of grace-filled movement, poetic voices and words, one group leading to another, then shifting the players. The beauty is a remarkable achievement in twenty-eight days of "principal photography" shot with only "natural light - sunlight" and 170,000 feet of film edited in Dash's living room. The film is lush with group shots and close-ups of beautiful African American women, talking, listening, laughing. "I saw Africa in her face," says Nana. The film caresses these faces of many styles and ages, taking time to let us see them, to cherish their presence and experience what they might be thinking. They are so different yet connected, "unity in diversity." For hooks, the film "breaks new ground in its portrayal of darker-skinned black people."32 Dash: "We used Agfa-Geveart film, instead of Kodak because Black people look better on Agfa."33

The actresses in the film represent another history. "I really tried to use the actresses who had worked ... in Black independent films." Dash mentions Cora Lee Day (Nana Peazant) in Haile Gerima's Bush Mama; Kaycee Moore (Haagar Peazant) in Killer of Sheep; Barbara O (Yellow Mary) in Diary of an African Nun; and Alva Rogers (Eula) in School Daze. "These people worked months on films for little or no pay at all; so, now that I was finally able to pay them ... why look some- where else?"34

Dash understands the affective quality of photography - of com- position and the close-up. She uses still photography as an emblem of turn-of-the-century technology coincident with the historical setting of her film in 1901. A series of photos by James Van Der Zee of "black women at the turn of the century" fascinated her. "The images and ideas combined and grew."35 The young photographer, Mr. Snead, has come to record the auspicious event; this is modem history, abetted by pho- tography, not memory; by images, not spirits or words. For Dash, Mr. Snead had "a secret mission. He has another agenda" in which the peo- ple are "primitive." "For me, he also represents the viewing audience."

89

This content downloaded from 132.174.250.254 on Wed, 08 Jan 2020 09:04:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

FRONTIERS, VOL. XV, NO. 1

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

90

This content downloaded from 132.174.250.254 on Wed, 08 Jan 2020 09:04:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

FRONTIERS, VOL. XV, NO. 1

Embodying the mutuality of art and life, the empirical avant-garde con- nects fiction and history in a manner comparable to Walter Benjamin's distinction between the story and the novel. For Benjamin, the story comes from "oral tradition" and shared experience. Storytellers speak of the "circumstances" they have directly learned or they "simply pass it off as their own experience." Thus, the listener has a stake in hearing and in remembering the story that exists in "the realm of living speech," of shared "companionship."40 This living speech, forged in mutual experi- ence and placed within history, is intriguing for feminism - a hearing as much as a seeing, a fiction as much as a fact, a life as much as a history.

These films exist in the intersections between sound and image, history and experience, Art and Life. Affect and intellect emerge from the relations between women. Rather than ontology or duality, the logic is what Deleuze calls the "Anomalous,"41 and Laleen Jayamanne calls hybrid, a tactic of assimilation, not, however, from the point of view of the colonizer.42 As bell hooks reminds us, "White cultural ... appropriation of black culture maintains white supremacy," which occurs with the "commodification of blackness."43 Which, of course, relates to politics - these are films by women of color.

The past, a question of memory and history (which is intimate and emotive), haunts the present like a primal scene. I am not thinking of Freud but of something he could never understand - the mutual struggle of women for independence, of mothers and daughters to love and to let go, to be together and separate, to be alike and different. This lifelong journey, away from and with the mother, is taken into history.

The film asks that we listen, carefully - there is much to hear on the sound track. The screenplay, written by Dash, is brilliant, poetic, instructive. Listening to these words, spoken from the heart, is inspir- ing. The music is haunting, rich, composed by Butch Morris to "incor- porate South Carolina field cries and calls."44 The film respects its oral traditions, it talks poetically, it speaks historically. hooks writes that "talking back" meant "speaking as an equal." In "the home ... it was black women who preached. There, black women spoke in a language so rich, so poetic, that it felt to me like being shut off from life ... if one was not allowed to participate. It was in that world of woman talk ... that was born in me the craving to speak, to have a voice ... belonging to me. ... It was in this world of woman speech ... that I made speech my birthright ... a privilege I would not be denied. It was in that world and because of it that I came to dream of writing, to write. Writ- ing was a way to capture speech."45

History is carried in the conversations that tell the story of our lives. Mary talks about the rape of "colored women," there as common

91

This content downloaded from 132.174.250.254 on Wed, 08 Jan 2020 09:04:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

FRONTIERS, VOL. XV, NO. 1

as fish in the sea. The voice-over spirit says she needed to convince her father "I was his child." The men recall the slave ships. Mary tells the story about her baby, born dead, so she nursed another baby. Nana - shown in close detail, often apart from the group, old, wiry, tough, a survivor - cannot understand how the family can leave.

The family is divided, momentarily, historically, over spirituality versus Christianity. Nana's daughter-in-law says, "I am educated. I'm tired of those old stories.... they pray to the sun, the moon, they ain't got no religion. I don't want my daughter to hear about that stuff." The voice of the spirit girl: "We were the children of those who chose to survive." Shots of clothes drying are intercut. "I was traveling on a spiritual mission, but sometimes I would be distracted. ... I remember the call from my great-, great-grandmother. I remember and I recall. I remember my journey home."

For many viewers, the film feels like "a journey home." The film comes to understand that "we are part of each other..., we are all good women. We are the Daughters of the Dust." Although the family separates, four generations of women remain together. Yellow Mary became active in anti-lynching. The spirit's voice-over concludes this extraordinary film: "My mommy and daddy stayed behind, with Yel- low Mary. We remain behind, growing older, wiser, stronger."

Bambara calls the film "oppositional cinema" - due to "dual nar- ration" and "multiple point of view camerawork." The style is a "non- linear, multilayered unfolding" comparable to the "storytelling traditions" of "African cinema." Dash compares the film's structure to an African griot: "The story would just unravel ... through a series of vignettes.... the story would come out and come in and go out and come in ... go off on a tangent ... and back again. Like a rhizome."46 For Bambara, Daughters is "Africentric." She says the "storytelling mode is African-derived, in a call-and-response circle." "The spacious- ness in DD is closer to African cinema than to European and Euro- American cinema. People's circumstances are the focus in African cin- ema, rather than individual psychology."47

"I wanted the look of the film to come from a rich African base."

The production design and set "were done by artists [e.g., Kerry Mar- shall, Michael Kelly Williams, Martha Jackson Jarvis, and David Hammond].... All ... are nationally known African American art- ists." The costumes (the way the scarves are tied meaning different things) and gestures (turning the head "slightly to the left when listen- ing to an elder") all derive from West African culture. "The men have these hand signals [that] were derived from secret societies in West Africa." "I wanted to have a connection to the past.... Afrocentrism

92

This content downloaded from 132.174.250.254 on Wed, 08 Jan 2020 09:04:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

FRONTIERS, VOL. XV, NO. 1

... is that your actions are derived from West African culture rather than from ... Europe."48 For hooks, the film is an interrogation of "Eurocentric biases that have informed our understanding of the Afri- can American experience."

Bambara's analysis of the use of space is akin to that of Bazin on Orson Welles - reaching very different conclusions. This is "shared space (wide-angled, deep focus)" rather than "dominated space," space which portrays conflicts that are "systemic," not merely "psycho- logical." Bazin contrasted what can be called "spatial realism" with "psychological realism," the conventions of Hollywood continuity style. "Spatial realism" consists of shots in depth, of long duration, and the use of the moving camera. Thus, the spectator has the freedom to look around. In addition, cuts are not motivated according to the same cause-effect logic of continuity style. Psychological character motiva- tion is not the main logic of cutting; neither is point of view from, usu- ally, a male perspective. Often, as with the films of Jean Renoir, this is called the cinema of mise-en-schne, which resembles what Bambara calls "shared space," without, however, her political connotations. What is significant, however, is the way this "technique" shifts when women tell the story and are the protagonists. Dash's shared space and Bazin's "spatial realism" are, paradoxically, worlds apart. What women and men are doing in that space is one measure of aesthetic difference. This debate over the politics of aesthetics is productive and important.

Daughters revises the history of photography and film, creating a moving picture that shows what could have been, what might have been, and now, what is on record. But this is not the same old story. This story focuses on mothers and daughters. Their centrality remem- bers the past and changes history. hooks writes, "To bear the burden of memory one must willingly journey to places long uninhabited, searching for traces of the unforgettable, all knowledge of which has been suppressed." "Reconstructing an archaeology of memory makes return possible." This is "history written in the hearts of our people, who then feel for history."49

Dash was addressing "black women first, the black community second, white women third," a hierarchy that is reflected in her empa- thetic portrayal of Black men in the film. As hooks argues, "To de-cen- ter the white patriarchal gaze, we have to focus on someone else for a change.... the film takes up that group that is truly on the bottom of this society's race-sex hierarchy. Black women tend not to be seen.... Daughters de-centers the usual subject - and that includes white women." hooks also suggests that "people will place Daughters in a world not only of black independent filmmakers, but also in the larger

93

This content downloaded from 132.174.250.254 on Wed, 08 Jan 2020 09:04:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

FRONTIERS, VOL. XV, NO. 1

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."

94

This content downloaded from 132.174.250.254 on Wed, 08 Jan 2020 09:04:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

FRONTIERS, VOL. XV, NO. 1

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

95

This content downloaded from 132.174.250.254 on Wed, 08 Jan 2020 09:04:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

FRONTIERS, VOL. XV, NO. 1

appeared. Although my interpretation has changed little since my first wondrous encounter with the film, an experience that included the audience's love, respect, and gratitude for the film, these important critics deserve mention.

In the introduction to his superb anthology, Black American Cinema, Diawara posits two types of Black American cinema, one based on a model of time (linear, not simultaneous), the other on space. "Spatial narration" reveals and links "black spaces that have been ... sup- pressed by White times," and validates "black culture." "Spatial narra- tion" is "cultural restoration, a way for Black filmmakers to reconstruct Black history." In contrast, the "time-based narratives" are "perfor- mances of Black people against racism, and genocide," linking the "progress of time to Black characters." This structure is linear, the other is circular; Boyz N the Hood compared to Daughters in the Dust.55

This distinction resembles that advocated (for different political reasons and predicated on different philosophical and aesthetic princi- ples) by Andre Bazin between the continuity style and spatial realism. It also shares an attitude with Deleuze's distinction between time/ movement and space/movement. However, Diawara disputes my ten- dency to interrelate disparate thinkers: "Is this not a way of effacing? The universal, being like Deleuze/Bazin, obliterates the local, the orig- inality of Dash's films?" and, one could add, hooks's or Diawara's writing. I hear what he means. For me, however, it's not a question of either/or, with women granted the local and male theorists the global. The global also belongs to women. For me, hooks is of the same magni- tude as Deleuze. This is what comparing them means for me.

Diawara emphasizes what he calls the film's "religious system," which he states is African, leading to "a Black structure of feeling." He links what I call the film's spirituality (which is African and resembles Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, and what I practice, Kasmir Shaivism), a mode of self- and historical empowerment, to Cornel West's recent call for a politics of conversion, of feeling, which Dash's system of "ances- tor worship" resembles.56 For me the spiritual basis of the film is unify- ing - providing another way to think and feel and change history. Spirituality, the character of the unborn child, the wind, the sound track of noises, music, voice-overs, enables an identification with forces within each individual that are greater than the material world, powers that are indestructible and eternal. The spirit within each human being outruns the limits and prejudices of Western rationality and history.

In "Reading the Signs, Empowering the Eye: Daughters of the Dust and the Black Independent Cinema Movement," Toni Cade

96

This content downloaded from 132.174.250.254 on Wed, 08 Jan 2020 09:04:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

FRONTIERS, VOL. XV, NO. 1

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,

97

This content downloaded from 132.174.250.254 on Wed, 08 Jan 2020 09:04:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

FRONTIERS, VOL. XV, NO. 1

unlike in the United States, where many scholars are just beginning to take note. For my analysis of Jayamanne's film theory, see The Fugitive Image, ed. Patrice Petro (forthcoming from Indiana University Press).

5. hooks, 122.

6. Freud posits three modes of identification - having, being, and group. It is the third instance so applicable to the public exhibition of film that is paradoxically ignored in film theory.

7. S. V. Hartman and Farah Jasmine Griffin, "Are You As Colored As That Negro? The Politics of Being Seen in Julie Dash's Illusions," Black American Literature Forum 25:2 (Summer 1991); 361-375. Here is their description of the story:

The film's narrative, set in the 1940s, focuses on Mignon [Dupree], a beautiful, fair-skinned movie executive who is passing for white. Mignon has come to Hollywood to "make the world of moving shadows work for" her. However, she winds up developing escapist entertainment fare. In the course of her duties at National Studio, she befriends a dark-skinned singer, Ester Geeter [the name is spelled Jeeter by others, including me], who has been hired to dub the voice of white film star Leila Grant and thereby save the studio's Christmas blockbuster. Ester's presence makes Mignon realize that she has become "an illusion just like the stories here." ... After [her race is discovered by the boss's son, home on leave], Mignon confirms her desire ... to tell real stories about real Negroes, and use the power of the film industry to present honest represen- tations. (363-364)

8. I am referring to the influential essays by Jean-Louis Baudry and Jean-Louis Comolli on the apparatus - theoretical models that came to the United States in the late 1970s.

9. I am referring to Michel de Certeau's distinction between strategies and tactics, with strategies being institutional, dominant practices.

10. Disavowal, the maintenance of contradictory beliefs, is usually the only mechanism in film theory. However, in Queer Theory, Liz Grosz has complicated this to include denial and repudiation. For more on this, see my book High Anxiety. Repudiation explains how Black voice/white face would work. We know something to be true, in reality, but block it out.

11. Homi Bhabha applied the theory of fetishistic disavowal to colonial subjectivity, without, however, noting women. For another critique of Bhabha, see Manthia Diawara, "The Nature of Mother in Dreaming Rivers," Black American Literature Forum 25:2 (Summer 1991): 283-298.

12. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, "Year Zero: Faciality," A Thousand Plateaus: Capi- talism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 167-191.

13. In "The Re-Birth of the Aesthetic in Cinema," Clyde Taylor discusses how aesthetics (often argued as "excess") were a cover-up for the film's "evil" racism. "It is this mystifying aura orchestrated by the art-culture system that has deterred the recogni- tion of The Birth of a Nation as one of the most accomplished articulations of fascism, of twentieth century evil" (28). He notes, but doesn't emphasize, the film's linkage between rape and racism, the way the white woman becomes the pawn for lynch- ing. (He even refers to Griffith's obsessiveness for young white girls in jeopardy.) In the film's prologue, Africans are the problem. In the film's epilogue, Africans have

98

This content downloaded from 132.174.250.254 on Wed, 08 Jan 2020 09:04:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

FRONTIERS, VOL. XV, NO. 1

gone, replaced by white Christianity and couples. Wide Angle 13:3/4 (July-Oct. 1991): 12-31.

14. Unlike Jeanne Crane, a white actress and 1950s star impersonating a Black woman in Pinky, a feature film about "passing," Mignon is played by a Black actress.

15. Jacques Lacan, "Seminar on the Purloined Letter," in French Freud, ed. Jeffrey Mehl- man, Yale French Studies 48 (New Haven: Yale University, 1972).

16. Like the film, pronouns are revealing, difficult. I can't fully claim "we" or "us" if I have not had the experience.

17. Hartman and Griffin, 361-374.

18. Diawara recommended Mark Reid, Jacquie Jones, and Jacqueline Bobo. He also rec- ommended that I read essays by Mary Ann Doane and Jane Gaines. Both women have been friends for years.

Mark Reid's book Redefining Black Film has a chapter on "Black Feminism and the Independent Film," previously published as an essay. Reid takes his cue from liter- ary criticism, specifically that of Alice Walker, and distinguishes feminist films from Black womanist films, a concept that "refers to ... reading strategies whose narra- tive and receptive processes permit polyvalent female subjectivity" (110). Reid endorses Alile Sharon Larkin's analysis of triple oppression (economic, racial, sex- ual) for Black women, unlike white feminists. "I cannot pick and choose a single area of struggle..... Feminists ... do not have to deal with the totality of oppression.... Feminism succumbs to racism when it segregates Black women from Black men and dismisses our histories" (118-119). "Black womanist films" include Illusions (with only a paragraph analysis) and Nice Colored Girls by Tracey Moffatt (without mentioning her name). Daughters of the Dust "dramatizes woman- ism in a female-centered narrative with a pan-African sentiment" (129). Troubling, however, is that a Black womanist viewing position "acknowledges that the goal of Black feminist theory is a revision of gender relations and an open-ended sexual- ity." What, exactly, is "open-ended sexuality"? Redefining Black Film (Berkeley: Uni- versity of California Press, 1993), 109-124. This chapter was published as "Dialogic Modes of Representing Africa(s) in Black American Literature Forum, 25:2 (Summer 1991): 375-388. This was a special Black Film Issue, edited by Valerie Smith, Camille Billops, and Ada Griffin.

Jacquie Jones, the editor of Black Film Review, has a short and terrific review of Daughters in African American Review, 27:1 (1993): 19-21. "African American life is freed from the urban, from the cotton picking..... the complexity and shaded histo- ries of Black women's lives take center stage. There are no whores or maids ... no acquiescent slaves. No white people .... The film does have a certain preoccupation with beauty"(19).

19. Hartman and Griffin, 371.

20. Ibid., 368.

21. Ibid., 370-371.

22. Ibid., 371-372.

23. Ultimately, of course, the authors and I are both wrong - essentially speaking. There is no such thing as a unified "Black female subject" or a singular white female subject with built-in responses.

99

This content downloaded from 132.174.250.254 on Wed, 08 Jan 2020 09:04:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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.

100

This content downloaded from 132.174.250.254 on Wed, 08 Jan 2020 09:04:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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.

101

This content downloaded from 132.174.250.254 on Wed, 08 Jan 2020 09:04:13 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

  • Contents
    • 76
    • 77
    • 78
    • 79
    • 80
    • 81
    • 82
    • 83
    • 84
    • 85
    • 86
    • 87
    • 88
    • 89
    • 90
    • 91
    • 92
    • 93
    • 94
    • 95
    • 96
    • 97
    • 98
    • 99
    • 100
    • 101
  • 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]