Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions

by Toni Cade Bambara

  There’s a particularly breathtaking moment that occurs on the beach shortly after Nana has stressed the necessity of honoring the ancestors. It’s a deep-focus shot. Close in the foreground are the grown-ups. They are facing our way. The men are in swallowtail coats. Some have on homburgs as well. Some are sitting, others standing. Two or three move across the picture plane, coattails buffeted by the breeze. They are talking about the importance of making right choices. Someone says that for the sake of the children they must. We see, across a stretch of sand glinting in the sun in mid-ground, the children playing along the shore. Several of the grown-ups turn to look over their shoulders and in turning, form an open “door.” The camera moves through, maintaining crisp focus, and approaches the children, except that the frame rate has slowed, just enough for us to register that the children are the future. For a split second, we seem to go beyond time to a realm where children are eternally valid, are eternally the reason for right action. The camera then pulls back, still maintaining crisp focus, as we backtrack across the sand, entering present time again as the grown-ups’ conversation claims our attention again. Not virtuosity for virtuosity’s sake, the past-present-future confluence is in keeping with film’s motive impulse to celebrate continuum.

  There are two things remarkable about the take. One, the camera is not stalking the children. I do not know how that usual predatory menace was avoided, but one contributing factor is that the camera is not looking down on them. Two, no blur occurs as is usual in conventional cinema. Throughout DD, no one is background scenery for foregrounded egos. The camera work stresses the communal. Space is shared, and the space (capaciousness) is gorgeous. In conventional cinema, camera work stresses hierarchy. Space is dominated by the hero, and shifts in the picture plane are most often occasioned by a blur, directing the spectator’s eye, controlling what we may and may not see, a practice that reinscribes the relationships of domination ideology.

  When last we were on this Carolina Sea Island terrain in the movies, it was the 1974 Hollywood/Martin Ritt adaptation of The Water Is Wide, a nonfiction account by European-American Pat Conroy. In the film a blond, blue-eyed charmer (Jon Voight), come to rehabilitate Black youngsters, is pitted against a stern Black principal (Madge Sinclair) who won’t let the children have any fun. The camera is in league with the ingenuous rascal who “teaches” the nine- and ten-year-olds how to brush their teeth. The camera joins the White man in the trees swinging his feet; in foreshortened perspective, it looks like he’s penetrating their skulls. When the shots don’t look like a mauling, they look like an auction-block frisking as teacher, made to look eight feet tall, looks down into the molars of the upturned, worshiping faces. With Voight as educational missionary in this colonial treatise, the history of forcible removal of children of color from their homes by agents of the European settler regimes in the U.S. (Navajo most especially), Australia (Aborigine), and Africa, eager to indoctrinate them in White-run boarding schools, White foster homes, and White-run mission schools, respectively, is masked. My movie guide books refer to Conrack as “a gentle and moving story about a white teacher who goes to help culturally deprived youngsters on a South Carolina island.”

  There are wonderful moments of the children in Dash’s DD that call to mind the children in Burnett’s films. In Killer of Sheep, their ubiquity and vitality help keep the “bad luck” incidents, the cracking of the car engine, from being the flat tire on the family outing. The children try to coax Stan out of his job-benumbed state. His wife (Kaycee Moore, who plays Haagar in DD) tries to coax him into recognizing her needs. Dinah Washington sings “This Bitter Earth” as they dance. It’s hopeless; actress Moore moves out of the frame, frustrated.

  At the end of DD, Haagar (Kaycee Moore) is also frustrated. Her daughter hops from the boat to ride off into the sunset with her Cherokee lover. What a totally corny and thoroughly wonderful and historic moment it is (shades of Osceola). Though children in Burnett’s more recent film To Sleep with Anger are not directed as well as previously (why couldn’t the camera swivel and pivot rather than have the adult performers continually lift the children as though they were disabled?), there is that great moment on the roof when the young boy throws the pigeon into the air and coaxes it to fly, and the pigeon soars, circles, never leaving the shot, and comes right back. An operative metaphor for home; the home that in fact houses a tension, for the householders thought they had resolved the Southern culture-Northern culture contradiction, only to have Harry (the Danny Glover character) track in all the “hoodoo mess” Haagar of DD is eager to flee.

  DD has a look of its own. I recall hearing that it was shot in 35mm and reduced to 16mm to reduce graininess. I don’t think so. It feels in scope like 70mm or higher, encouraging the spectator’s belief in limitless peripheral vision, for indeed a world is being presented. For all the long shots, neither a picture-book nor an unduly distanced feel results. The spaciousness in DD is closer to African cinema than to European and Euro-American cinema. People’s circumstances are the focus in African cinema, rather than individual psychology. The emphasis placed on individual psychology in dominating cinema deflects our attention away from circumstance. Social inequities, systemic injustices, doctrines and policies of supremacy, are reduced to personal antagonisms. Conflict, then, can be resolved by a shrink, a lawyer, a cop, or a bullet. Not, for example, by revolution.

  By the time the unborn Peazant child will come of age in the twenties, the subversive potential of cinema will be in the process of being tapped in this country, by African-Americans in Philadelphia, Kansas, New York, and Texas, and by European-Americans in New York, Philadelphia, and California. By the time U.S., cinema becomes industrialized in California, that potential will have been tamed, will have been brought into line with structures of domination and oppression. But the camera in the hands of Snead, a character who undergoes a transformation from estranged scientist to engaged humanist, and the other two pre-kinescope props, the stereopticon and the kaleidoscope, in the hands of the Peazant women, prompt us to envision what popular narrative, for example, might be like were dread, sin, and evil not consistently and perniciously signified in dominating cinema within a matrix of darkness, blackness, and femaleness. The props and their attachment to particular characters in DD keep central the distinctiveness of conscious Black cinéastes in opposition to commercial filmmakers, and in relation to independent Black filmmakers who regard the contemporary independent sphere as a training ground or stepping-stone to the industry, rather than as a space for contestation, a liberated zone in which to build a cinema for social change.

  Two Spike Lee performers in key roles—Alva Rodgers as Eula, Tommy Hicks as Snead—are a reminder that Lee, who’d been a member of the Black Filmmakers Foundation alliance in the early eighties, opted for a route not taken by members of the conscious wing of the movement. In harnessing independent strategies with commercial strategies, Lee’s been able to situate a range of spectators, often polarized spectators, thereby meeting the demand for social relevance, that is, the illustration of issues and the representation of Black people (without interrogations), and at the same time not letting go of a basically reactionary sensibility (homophobic/misogynistic/patriarchal) that audiences have been trained by the industry and its support institutions to accept as norm, as pleasurable, inevitable.

  There’s a promo still from DD that shows an expanse of beach and sky. A solitary figure in a long dress strolls along the tidemark carrying a tattered parasol. A moist, romantic scene, it’s reminiscent of a promo still from Diva, the 1982 Beineix film. African-American opera star Wilhelmina Wiggins, in a long dress, holds an umbrella in the dawn drizzle. There’s an expanse of gray sidewalk grounded in fog. The solitary figure is surrounded by misty sky and air. End of comparison. Diva masks a theft-of-the-Third-World shadow text with a mystery-thriller format cover. Although the young, White, French guy steals her voice and her concert gown, the Diva responds with warmth. Their inexplicable friendship is
straight out of the international race-relations files that say we are flattered by rip-off (or, “Everything I Have Is Yours” in the key of F sharp). The happy-go-lucky, roller-skating Vietnamese girl who lives with the romantic White hero in the far-out loft is a character designed to mask French colonialism in Indochina in the past and the more recent terrors of the Vietnam War and Operation Babylift. At war’s end, Saigon was like a burning building from which Vietnamese parents lowered their children to safety, never dreaming that those below would equate catching with owning, with having the right to fly them away, give them away, sell them away. “Like puppies,” say those who are still petitioning the U.S. government for the return of the stolen children. Many of the 1975-1977 petitioners wound up in the concentration camp at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas.

  Larry Clark’s 1977 Passing Through addresses the issue of rip-off. He uses conventions of the action flick to protest cultural banditry. The kidnap-pursuit-shootout plot is driven by a communal sense of urgency: Black improvisational music must be rescued from the mob-controlled recording industry. Passing indicts status quo; Passing proposes a solution. An emancipatory impetus informs the ideology the independent film espouses.

  The precinematic artifacts in the hands of Snead and the Peazant women, then, are like the mojo-bound Bible in the hands of the ancestral figure Nana. They speak to the power in our hands. As actress Smart-Grosvenor from the Bill Gunn work bends to kiss the amulet, we are reminded of Gunn’s relationship to the independent sphere. Twice in the seventies Bill Gunn, contracted to produce Hollywood formulaic work, slipped the yoke and created instead two works of conscious cinema. His 1973 Ganja and Hess, which was supposed to outdo Blacula, a 1972 stylish horror film starring William Marshall, did explore the blood myth, and in the bargain fingered capitalism, Christianity, and colonialist Egypto-anthro-archaeo tamperings as the triple-hell horrors.

  Gunn’s 1975 Stop! was supposed to present a modernized Tarzan plot wherein foregrounded Whites undergo rites of passage against the backdrop of “Third World natives.” The prototypic films—the Tarzan, Trader Horn, King Solomon’s Mines adventures—did not acknowledge the circumstances of the indigenous peoples at all. Their literary sources, the empire literature of the Victorian period, did, but whether apologist (Kipling) or critical (Conrad), no revolutionary alternative was ever envisioned in the Eurocentric approach. In this era, when a revolutionary alternative cannot be denied, the turmoil is used to make dangerous the playing arena in which the White heroes find themselves—as in In the Year of Living Dangerously, for example. In Under Fire, Russell Price (Nick Nolte) pays no price for breaking an agreement and taking pictures of Sandinistas in the camp, nor for failing to guard the pictures from the murderous mercenary Oates (Ed Harris). Price’s “innocence” feeds Oates; and hundreds of Nicaraguans are murdered so that Price can come to consciousness. In Stop! Gunn reverses the colonial-oriented relationship of empire dramas. Actual Puerto Rican independistas are foregrounded as the heroes of the text they determine. The White actors’ characters and plot premises of the genre supply the motivations for moving around the island. Predictably, both films were placed under arrest, that is, shelved in the studio vaults. Fortunately, Gunn kept the work print of Ganja and Hess, and its screening over the years created a sufficient groundswell to buttress his suit against the studio. Shortly before his death, Gunn won full rights to Ganja and Hess. Shortly after his death, Stop! was released in time for a Whitney show.

  As a performer, Gunn appeared in Ganja and Hess, and in Kathleen Collins’s 1982 independent film Losing Ground. The film has two settings: Manhattan, where the main character, a philosophy professor, teaches; Nyack (where Gunn and Collins were neighbors, and where much of Ganja and Hess had been shot), where she lives with her husband, a painter (Gunn). A self-controlled woman who has cultivated a resolute rectilinearity in response to both her earthy mother and her Dionysian husband, the professor is looking for change, longs to get loose, find her ecstasy. She finds it when a student filmmaker persuades her to take on the role of a vamp in his version of Frankie and Johnny. The artist husband, meanwhile, is dancing it up with a Latina neighbor. There’s a wonderful moment when the dancing couple hold still for an excruciating, suspenseful second before dropping into the downbeat of a doo-wop ten-watt blue-bulb yo-mama-ain’t-home basement-party memory of a git-down grind-’em-up: the kind of sho-nuff dancing Stan’s wife (Kaycee Moore) was looking for in Killer of Sheep.

  The late pioneer black woman filmmaker Kathy Collins Prettyman was a liberating sign. And the fact that a number of sisters have found their voices in film augurs well for community mental health. The task now is to crash through the cultural embargo that separates those practitioners from both their immediate authenticating audiences and worldwide audiences.

  ARE EE ES PEE EE CEE TEE

  ARETHA

  One of the highpoints in DD is a women’s validation ceremony. Several characters in the drama need it. Two expressly seek it—Eula, “ruined,” and Yellow Mary, despised. From the start, Nana and Eula welcome Yellow Mary into the circle. The other women relatives roll their eyes and mutter at the approach of Yellow Mary and her companion. Actress Verta Mae Smart-Grosvenor (author of the classic cookbook Kitchen Vibrations: or, The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl and librettist of Nyam: A Food Opera; the presence of the culinary anthropologist gives authenticity to the Geechee Girl Productions project, not to mention the merciless preparation and presentation of food) delivers the line, “All that yalla wasted,” which the others take up to shut their relative out. There are beautiful interactions between Nana and Yellow Mary, in the way they look at each other and touch. The two actresses appeared together fifteen years ago in Gerima’s Bush Mama. Dorothy, played by Barbara O, rattled by the noise of sirens, neighbors, social workers, and the police, found little comfort in the niggers-ain’t-shit-talking neighbor played by Cora Lee Day. And there’s a great moment between Yellow Mary and Haagar that comes straight out of Gerima’s Harvest: 3,000 Years. One of the many memorable scenes in Harvest is the long-take walk of the peasant summoned from the fields by the landlord. The camera is at the top of a hill, to the right and slightly behind the murder-mouthing landlord. Without a cut, the peasant tramps across the fields, trudges over to the hill, scrambles up, grabbing at scrub brush, boosting himself on the rocks, and reaches the top, where he’s tongue-lashed by the landlord. In DD, Haagar stands arms akimbo at the top of a sand dune, giving Yellow Mary what-for. The take is not a long one, but the camera placement is the same as Gerima’s. Yellow Mary comes up the dune while the older, married mother of two, who outranks her in this age-respect society, mouths off. Just as Yellow Mary reaches the top, a hundred possibilities registering in her face (will she knock Haagar down, spit in her face, or what?), she gives Haagar a look and keeps on stepping. Hmph.

  Eula initiates the validation ritual by chiding the relatives who were ready enough to seek Yellow Mary’s help when a cousin needed bailing out of jail, but now slander her. “Say what you got to say,” Eli interrupts, impatient. “We couldn’t think of ourselves as pure women,” Eula recounts, “knowing how our mothers were ruined. And maybe we think we don’t deserve better, but we’ve got to change our way of thinking.” Nana contributes wisdom about the scars of the past, then Eula continues, “We all good women.” She presents Yellow Mary to the family circle and continues her appeal. “If you love yourself, then love Yellow Mary.” Both women are embraced by the family. Then the wind comes up, rippling the water in the basin the elder’s feet are being washed in, rippling the waters where the boat awaits for the departing Peazants.

  Dash’s sisters-seeing-eye-to-eye ritual has its antecedents in Illusions. Mignon Dupree (Lonette McKee) is a production executive in a Hollywood studio during the forties. Because of the draft and because she’s mistaken for White, the Black woman has an opportunity to advance a self-interested career. That is not her agenda. She proposes that the studio, cranking out movies to boost the war being
fought “to make the world safe for democracy,” make movies about the Native American warrior clans in the U.S. armed services. The studio heads got no eyes for such a project. All attention is on a problem—the White, blond bombshell star can’t sing. A Black woman, Ester Jeeter (Roseanne Katon), is brought in as “the voice.” Ester sees Mignon and recognizes who she is. Mignon sees Ester and does not disacknowledge her. Ester is placed behind a screen, in the dark, in a booth, to become the singing voice of the larger-than-life, illuminated starlet on the silver screen. 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 openly acknowledges her personhood and their sisterhood.