Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions
Page 11
The genre that Dash subverts in her indictment of an industry that rejects false images (democracy, U.S. fighting troops, the starlet) is the Hollywood story musical, specifically Singin’ in the Rain, a comic treatment of the Hollywood careers ruined by the “talkies.” In Singin’ there is the obligatory ritual that informs the history of commercial cinema—the humiliation of a (White) woman. While the non-singing star, played by Jean Hagen, is “singing” at a show biz benefit, the stage hands, who resent her fame and fortune, raise the curtain to reveal the singer, played by Debbie Reynolds. 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. Victoria Spivey, Blue Lu Barker, Lena Home, and other musicians contracted by Hollywood for on-screen and off-screen work provide the actual historical trope, for the Reynolds character image is false too. Behind that image, in the dark, behind a screen, in a booth, was a Black woman. Dash’s indictment, as well as her thesis about what cinema could be, carries over from Illusions to DD. The validation of Black women is a major factor in the emancipatory project of independent cinema.
As Zeinabu Davis often points out, a characteristic of African-American women filmmakers is tribute paid to womanish mentors and other women artists. Ayoka Chenzira, formerly a dancer, produced two shorts based on her training—the 1989 animation Zajota and the Boogie Spirit, which chronicles the history of struggle and ends with an image, the drum disguised as a boom box, and the 1979 documentary Syvilla: They Dance to Her Drum, a tribute to her dance teacher Syvilla Fort. In 1975, Monica J. Freeman produced a documentary on sculptor Valerie Maynard. In 1976, Cheryl Fabio (of the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame in Oakland) produced a documentary on her mother, the poet Sarah Fabio. In 1977, Dash based two films on texts by Black women, Alice Walker and Nina Simone. In 1979, Carroll Parrot Blue produced a documentary on artist Varnette Honey wood. In 1981, Kathe Sandler produced a documentary on dance instructor Thelma Hill. In 1985, Michelle Parkerson produced documentaries on singer Betty Carter and on the Sweet Honey in the Rock music troupe. In 1986, Debbie Robinson produced a documentary on four comediennes. In 1987, Davis produced a documentary on trumpeter Clora Bryant. In 1991, Dash collaborated with Jawole Willa Jo Zollar of the dancing/singing/acting performance art group Urban Bush Women to produce Praise House, in which the feminine principle is advanced as divine; one of several breathtaking moments involve dance lifts of sisters by sisters. All of these answer the question posed by Abbey Lincoln in the September 1966 issue of Negro Digest: “Who Will Revere the Black Woman?”
Roll Call:
Julie Dash, Ayoka Chenzira, Camille Billops, Carole Munday Lawrence, Jackie Shearer, Alile Sharon Larkin, the late Kathy Collins, Michelle Parkerson, Carroll Parrot Blue, Kathe Sandler, Jesse Maple, Pamela Jones, Yvonne Smith, Elena Featherstone, Zeinabu Davis, Barbara McCul-lough, Debbie Robinson, Ellen Sumter, Pearl Bowser, Nadine Patterson, Carmen Coustaut, Teresa Jackson, Omomola Iyabunmi, Cheryl Chisholm, Daresha Kyi, Funmilayo Makarah, Ada Mae Griffin, Sandra Sharp, Fronza Woods, Portia Marshall, Carmen Ashurst, Denise Oliver, Gay Abel-Bey, Monica Freeman, Cheryl Fabio, Helene Head, Malaika Adero, Jean Facey, Aarin Burche, Mary Ester, Pat Hilliard, Imam Hameen, Mary Naema Barnette, Shirikana Amia Gerima, Louise Fleming, Ileen Sands, Edie Lynch, Lisa Jones, Barbara O, Madeline Anderson, Yvette Mattern, Darnell Martin, Millicent Shelton, Denise Bird, Desiree Ortiz, Michelle Patton, Stephanie Minder, Claire Andrade Watkins, Annette Lawrence, Linda Gibson, Joy Shannon, Jacqueline Frazier, Sheila Malloy, Sharon Khadijah Williams, Dawn Suggs, Monona Walt, Demetria Royals, Gia’na Garel, Muriel Jackson, Nandi Bowe.
Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust is a historical marker. It’s suggestive of what will hallmark the next stage of development—a more pronounced diasporic and Afrafemcentric orientation. Another marker occurred in the period when DD was in the first stage of production—the September 1989 gathering of independents of the Native American, Latina/o-American, African-American, Asian-American, Pacific Islander-American, Middle Eastern-American, and European-American communities. “Show the Right Thing: A National Multicultural Conference on Film and Video Exhibition” was convened by a committee, predominantly women of color, for and about people of color in the independent sphere. Held at New York University, current base of filmmaker Chris Choy, the two-day series of panels on theoretical and practical concerns were presented by people of color practitioners, critics, and programmers from the U.S. the U.K., Canada, and Mexico. In addition to panels and caucuses, hundreds of tapes of film and video were available for screening. The short subject has advanced greatly since the days of the “chasers,” when theater managers used them to clear the house after the vaudeville show. Interactions among the all-American assembly at “Show” made clear that the conference title was a double injunction: internally, for responsible practice; externally, for a democratized media.
The “Show” conference, the first gathering of its size on record, was in contradistinction of state policy from the days of Cortez through the days of COINTELPRO to current-day cultural brokers manufacturing hype for the upcoming Quincentenary—keep these people separate and under White tutelage. Coming so soon on the heels of the Flaherty Seminar held in upstate New York that August—a predictably mad proceeding in which colonialist anthroethno types collided with “subject people” who’ve already reclaimed their image, history, and culture for culturally specific documentaries, animations, features, experimental videos, and critical theory (the program of lectures and screenings of works primarily drawn from the African diaspora was curated by Pearl Bowser; an unprecedented commandeering of the guest curator’s program time was used to screen post-glasnost works from Eastern Europe, and the highlight of the usurping agenda was a screening of the spare-no-expense-to-restore Flaherty/Korda colonist work Elephant Boy)—“Show the Right Thing” was an opportunity for people of color and their supporters to recognize in each other the power to supplant “mainstream” with “multicultural” in the national consciousness, even as two dozen conglomerates escalate the purchase of the U.S. mind by buying up television stations, radio stations, newspapers, textbook companies, magazines, publishing houses, and film studios that control major production funding, distribution, exhibition, at home and abroad, particularly in neo-colonialist-controlled areas, and continue to exert a profound influence in universities where most filmmakers and critics are trained.
The next stage of development of new U.S. cinema will most certainly be characterized by an increased pluralistic, transcultural, and international sense and by an amplified and indelible presence of women.
BRIEF NOTES
Re: Programming with Daughters of the Dust
PROGRESSIVE REPRESENTATIONS OF THE BLACK WOMAN IN FEATURES
Haile Gerima’s 1974 Bush Mama (Ethiopia/U.S.)
Sharon Alile Larkin’s 1982 A Different Image (U.S.)
Menelik Shabazz’s 1981 Burning an Illusion (U.K.)
Sankofa Collective’s 1987 The Passion of Remembrance (U.K.)
(EuraAm) Lizzie Borden’s 1983 Born in Flames (U.S.)
Julie Dash’s 1991 DD (U.S.)
MAPPING HISTORY FROM THE CONTINENT TO WATTS
Ousmane Sembene’s 1977 Ceddo (Senegal)
Sergio Giral’s 1976 The Other Francisco (Cuba)
Med Hondo’s 1982 West Indies (Mauretania/France)
Raquel Gerber’s 1989 On (Brazil)
Ayoka Chenzira’s 1989 Zajota and the Boogie Spirit (U.S.)
Julie Dash’s 1991 DD (U.S.)
Charles Burnett’s 1990 To Sleep With Anger (U.S.)
ANCESTRAL FIGURES: “AN ELDER DYING IS A LIBRARY BURNING DOWN”—FYE
Safi Fye’s 1979 Fad Jal (Senegal)
Med Hondo’s 1982 West Indies (Mauritania/France)
Euzhan Palcy’s 1986 Sugar Cane Alley (Martinique/France)
Larry Clark’s 1977 Passing Through (U.S.)
Haile Gerima’s 1983 Ashes and Embers (Ethiopia/U.S.)
WOMAN TO WOMAN: FIVE DOCUMENTARIES AND THREE FEATURES
Julie Dash’s 1983 Illusions (U.S.)
Camille Billops’s 1988 Suzanne, Suzanne (U.S.)
Cheryl Chisolm’s/National Black Women’s Health Project’s 1986 On Becoming a Woman (U.S.)
Ngozi Onwurah’s 1989 Body Beautiful (U.K.)
Camille Billops’s 1988 Older Women Talking About Sex (U.S.)
Michelle Parkerson’s 1980… But Then, She’s Betty Carter (U.S.)
Julie Dash’s 1991 Daughters of the Dust
Julie Dash’s 1991 Praise House
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
TEXTS REFERRED TO:
Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby, New York: Knopf, 1981
Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, New York: Dutton, 1984
Toni Morrison’s Beloved, New York: Knopf, 1987
Abbey Lincoln’s “Who Will Revere the Black Woman,” Negro Digest, September 1966; also in Toni Cade’s The Black Woman, New York: New American Library/Signet, 1970
WRITTEN TEXTS THAT INFORM MY TEXT:
Zeinabu Davis’s interview with Julie Dash in Wide Angle, Vol. 13, Nos. 3 & 4 (1991)
Gregg Tate’s interview with Julie Dash in the Village Voice, June, 1991 issue
Pat Collin’s Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, Boston: Un win Hyman, Inc., 1990
bell hooks’s Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, Boston: South End Press, 1990
Betinna Aptheker’s Tapestries of Life: Women’s Work, Women’s Consciousness, and the Meaning of Daily Experience, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989
SPOKEN TEXTS BY AND GABFESTS WITH:
Cheryl Chisholm on the empowered eye and on colonialist metaphors
Françoise Pfaff on Tarzan and ethno footage
Eleanor Traylor on the ancestral place motif in African-American literature
Zeinabu Davis on women paying tribute to women artists
Clyde Taylor (talks, Whitney Museum Program Notes, articles in Black Film Review and elsewhere) on the LA Rebellion.
A. J. Fiedler’s lecture-demonstration/screening at the Scribe Video Center’s Producers Showcase program in Philadelphia, 1991
Ayida Tengeman Mthembe, who will be doing forums on the relationship between U.S. policy toward Africa and the representation of Africa, Africans, and African diasporic people on the commercial screen
LANGUAGE AND THE WRITER
I want to talk about language, form, and changing the world. The question that faces billions of people at this moment, one decade shy of the twenty-first century, is: Can the planet be rescued from the psychopaths? The persistent concern of engaged artists, of cultural workers, in this country and certainly within my community, is, What role can, should, or must the film practitioner, for example, play in producing a desirable vision of the future? And the challenge that the cultural worker faces, myself for example, as a writer and as a media activist, is that the tools of my trade are colonized. The creative imagination has been colonized. The global screen has been colonized. And the audience—readers and viewers—is in bondage to an industry. It has the money, the will, the muscle, and the propaganda machine oiled up to keep us all locked up in a delusional system—as to even what America is. We are taught to believe, for example, that there is an American literature, that there is an American cinema, that there is an American reality.
There is no American literature; there are American literatures. There are those who have their roots in the most ancient civilizations—African, Asian, or Mexican—and there are those that have the most ancient roots in this place, that mouth-to-ear tradition of the indigenous peoples that were here thousands and thousands of years before it was called America, thousands of years before it was even called Turtle Island. And there is too the literature of the European settlement regime that calls itself American literature.
There is no American cinema; there are American cinemas. There is the conventional cinema that masks its ideological imperatives as entertainment and normalizes its hegemony with the term “convention,” that is to say the cinematic practices—of editing, particular uses of narrative structure, the development of genres, the language of spatial relationships, particular performatory styles of acting—are called conventions because they are represented somehow to be transcendent or universal, when in fact these practices are based on a history of imperialism and violence—the violent suppression of any other production of cinematic practices. Eduardo Galeano, the Latin American writer and cultural critic, speaking to this issue of convention and imperialism, once remarked that if Hemingway had been born in Turkey the world would never have heard of Hemingway. That is to say, the greatness of a writer or the greatness of any cultural production is determined by the power of that writer’s country.
So there is the commercial cinema; there is also in this country the independent cinema or new American cinema or the new alternative American cinema, and it’s being advanced by practitioners, theoreticians, programmers, and supporters of various cultural communities: the African-American community, the Native American community, the American Latino community, the Pacific Rim and American Asian community, and the American European community. And they insist on, or rather by their very existence challenge, the notion that there is only one way to make a film: Hollywood style; that there are only two motives for making films: entertainment and profit; and that there is only one set of critical criteria for evaluating these products. Within that movement there is an alternative wing in this country that is devoted to the notion of socially responsible cinema, that is interested in exploring the potential of cinema for social transformation, and these practitioners continue to struggle to tell the American story. That involves assuming the enormous tasks of reconstructing cultural memory, of revitalizing usable traditions of cultural practices, and of resisting the wholesale and unacknowledged appropriation of cultural items—such as music, language style, posture—by the industry that then attempts to suppress the roots of it—where it came from—in order to sustain its ideological hegemony. And so, there is no single American reality. There are versions, perspectives, that are specific to the historical experiences and cultural heritages of various communities in this country.
Many contemporary independent filmmakers were provoked into picking up the camera and trying to devise filmic equivalents for our cultural and social and political discourse as a result of their encounters with the guardians of English language purity. That is to say, they were moved by the terrorism—systematic, random, institutional, and personal—of those thugs who would have youngsters going through their educational careers believing that they need remedial English, that the language they speak at home may be OK for home but in the real world they are going to have to learn standard English in order to participate in this society. Many of the independent filmmakers have been hearing all their lives that you can’t speak Spanish on school grounds, what you’re speaking is not standard, is not appropriate, or you Chinese people have got to learn how to speak up and stop squeaking.
Before we get to the issue of what idiom one should speak in, there is the prior struggle of who may speak. The normalization of the term “minority”—for people who are not white, male, bourgeois, and Christian—is a treacherous one. The term, which has an operational role in the whole politics of silence, invisibility, and amnesia, comes from the legal arena. It says that a minority or a minor may not give testimony in court without an advocate, without a go-between, without a mediating something or other, without a professional mouthpiece, without someone monitoring the speaking and the tongue—which is one of the many reasons I do not use the term “minority” for anybody, most especially not myself. The second question is what will be the nature of the tongue? The independent filmmaker, who may not have any particular political agenda, who may not even have coherent politics but simply wishes to tell a story, discovers all too soon
that the very conventions—the very tools, practices—in which that filmmaker has been trained were not designed to accommodate her or his story, her or his people, her or his cultural heritage, her or his issues, and that filmmaker will then face a choice: either to devise a new film language in order to get that story told or to have the whole enterprise derailed by those conventions.
If time were to permit it, I would look at the career of Luis Valdez, looking at two films, La Bamba and Zoot Suit, the first made for so-called crossover audiences, while the second was made for his authenticating audience: the Chicano community. So we can see the difference in film language, the difference in film practices. But we’ll jump over that.
The importance of Sembene, as a practitioner, is an occasion for twenty-five years of film talk throughout the African diaspora, indeed throughout world film culture. And Sembene as an exemplary model of persistence and insistence on cultural integrity is at the moment immeasurable. So I’ll jump over that and simply call attention to the language of space in Sembene’s work. In Hollywood, space is hidden as a rule. For a more cogent, comprehensive, and coherent version of what I’m getting ready to say, I would refer you to an interview conducted in Ouagadougou at the Pan-African film festival in 1989 with Sembéne by Manthia Diawara, the African cinema theorist, but here is the short drift: In Hollywood space is hidden. Once you get an establishing shot—Chicago skyline, night, winter—most of the other shots are tight shots. We move up on the speaker, we then shift for a reaction shot, tight space, and the spectator is supposed to do the work and figure out what is happening outside of the frame. But for a people concerned with land, with turf, with real estate, with home, with the whole colonial experience, with the appropriation of space by the elite or by the outsider, the language of space becomes very crucial within the cinematic practice. In Mandabi, recall the women in their space: the shadows from the building, the sun, the legs stretched out, the calabashes. We don’t have to work to invent or re-create contiguous reality; we are very aware of the space, so that when someone intrudes and messes it all up, a tremendous statement is getting made that resonates historically.