Week #13--Post-millenial Expressions of African-American Cinematic Identity

I invite you to share your thoughts on Barry Jenkins's Medicine for Melancholy (2009).

Week #12--New Media, Representation, and the Neglect of History

One of the most interesting observations of the period when Do the Right Thing (1989) was released is that it was the success of filmmakers such as Lee, John Singleton, and the Hughes Brothers that directed attention towards an earlier generation of Black filmmakers whose training in film schools and independent projects long preceded the boom of Black filmmakers in the early ‘90s. Charles Burnett, Haile Gerima, and Julie Dash would make their most prominent films during this period, in which they received a great deal of critical acclaim for their work, but an inconsistent following of Black moviegoers. The content of their films were a far departure from other mainstream Black-themed films. Dash and Gerima each released historical dramas about slavery and its haunting legacy regarding Black familial unions. Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, released throughout ’91 and ’92, focuses on a matriarch’s attempt to sustain the customs of her family based in the Gullah Sea Islands, as the younger generation relocates to mainland South Carolina. Shortly thereafter, Gerima released Sankofa, a film about a Black model who is transported by ancestral spirits to antebellum slavery in the United States. Unlike previous treatments, Gerima’s film provide the brutal details in which people of African descent were made into commodities, dehumanized through sexual assault (which would produce more “property”) and unspeakable expectations of labor. It was a daunting task for Dash to find a distributor, and it became more bittersweet in that an audience could not be cultivated despite the film’s critical acclaim. Gerima, however, established a do-it-yourself template for distributing his film, by renting out theater houses across the country to show his film because his film was continuously rejected by distributors. Burnett faced a fate similar to Dash with his film, To Sleep with Anger, which is about a Black family in Los Angeles whose generational conflicts are intensified when an old friend of the patriarch comes to visit. In spite of featuring a major movie star (Danny Glover) and receiving favorable reviews, Burnett’s film never was able to reach a consistent audience because of a failed strategy by the distributor. His follow-up film, The Glass Shield, had a more conventional narrative structure, and starred Ice Cube, by now a bankable movie star. A film about a young Black cop who is expected to conform to the crooked practices of the sheriff’s department when a young Black man is being framed for murder, it would nevertheless suffer the same fate as Burnett’s previous effort, in that its lack of availability to an audience caused the film to disappear into the ether.

Spike Lee’s Bamboozled is dependent on the idea that the mainstream viewing public has internalized a short-term memory of history, even amongst Black audience members themselves. Although the film demands a bit too much compliance to the premise so that his point can get across, Lee nevertheless reveals how even something as culturally deplorable as blackface and minstrelsy can be internalized into something that people become comfortable through mere commodification. The normalization of an art form deliberately use to dehumanize people of African descent becomes the industry standard to which Black performers must conform not even so much for stardom, but to earn a modest living. It begins to persists to the central culprits of the show: Pierre Delacroix, hyperperforming his own life as an upper-class Black professional, sees his idea initially as a backfire and then utilizes it as a “retroactive” compensation; Sloan is caught in a tension between her romance with the star of the show and her compliance to an idea she condemns; Womack and Man Ray finally having an opportunity to live the lavish life they dreamed of while living on the streets, yet their talents are confined to what will only appease both mass audiences and corporate profits.

The symposium organized by Cineaste magazine reflects the lasting legacy of Lee’s film, if not the director himself: an ambivalent response towards how the film exhausts itself with its subject matter, but provides a scrutinizing critique of how ideas are articulated, how culture is perceived, and how it is ultimately circulated as a commodity. Zeinabu Davis’ piece reflects that in spite of the pain she undergoes watching the film, both in the historical information it references and the overload of material it presents, she is still able to identify both the filmic strategies of Lee (i.e. the use of color) and the importance that a filmmaker as ubiquitous as he is was able to pursue a culturally loaded project. Greg Tate (a writer who I strongly recommend you follow—he’s often featured in the Village Voice) provides a critique that recognizes the film’s presentation of minstrelsy as currency for economic upward mobility, but questions whether it analyzes the dimensions of humanity beneath the façade of Blackface. Tate provides a profound argument, but I think it suggests that he overlooks the epiphanies that Womack and Man Ray come to when they realize how exhausting it is to maintain the level of success the show has accumulated, especially given how dehumanizing they feel in their temporary transformations. If anyone, a more effective question to raise about this depiction would be whether Lee could provide a more in-depth chronicle of each character’s transformation, expanding them beyond just stock characters to make a larger point about Black talent as a commodity in a corporate landscape.

Week #11--Renaissance of Contemporary African-American Cinema

The late 1980s and early 1990s offered films that centralized the Black gay male subject through the experimentation of documentary conventions. Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston (1988) and Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied (1990) shift the focus of Black gay male identity from the periphery to the center in both a historical and contemporary context. Through the use of archival footage of early 20th century Harlem, a televised performance by Langston Hughes, and the brief voiceover narration of Stuart Hall, Julien uses familiar components of the documentary to create what he identifies as a meditation. This classification offers Julien the flexibility to both explore the sexual identity of Hughes and other male luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance. The lack of cooperation from the poet’s estate limit Julien’s attempts to create a straightforward documentary, but he creates an opportunity to present 1920s Harlem in a funeral and a nightclub setting. Hughes is aligned with other Black gay male writers such as James Baldwin, Bruce Nugent, and Essex Hemphill, which enables Julien to shift back and forth from his dramatized presentation of Harlem nightlife to a dreamlike sequence that includes an ambiguous exterior setting and a sex scene that shifts between intra-racial and interracial sexual desire. In the segment that focuses on sexual intimacy, Julien uses the interracial component to address whether or not artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance were legitimately celebrated for their offerings, or if the essence of their art was appropriated for a brief period of time. The final scene incorporates contemporary club music to illuminate the threat of anti-gay violence, signified by the mob of men who bang outside of the door. By utilizing new techniques with the documentary form, Looking for Langston offers a new insight into a prominent historical figure.

Riggs uses poetry in Tongues Untied to explore the many facets of present-day Black gay male identity (i.e. the late 1980s/early 1990s). The focus of the documentary often shifts from the collective burdens faced by Black gay men to Riggs’s personal reflections on fighting racism, homophobia, and complete isolation. While Riggs uses songs, poems, portraits, and monologues to address topical and intimate matters, one of his most effective conventions is the close-up that reveals one’s mouth, but conceals one’s eyes. One moment is the previously mentioned scene where Riggs talks about his childhood, and these close-ups are used to hurl slurs to reflect a violent infliction of identities. Later, Riggs applies these shots to confront the homophobic perspectives from the Black community, most notably the church and Black activists. Riggs intercuts clips from Eddie Murphy’s concert films Delirious and Raw, plus Spike Lee’s School Daze to illustrate how Black popular culture reinforces the condemnation of Black gay men.

Spike Lee has attracted criticism throughout his career for offering a point of view through his films that rarely privileges women or people from the LGBT community. His third feature film, Do the Right Thing (1989), may not do much to silence these concerns, but the film significantly continues Lee’s attempts to offer a new representation of African-American life in mainstream American cinema. On the hottest day of the year in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn (New York City), Lee not only centralizes both historical and topic issues that concern African Americans, but he does so through the cinematic techniques he employs. As you watch the film, consider how it opens, and how the dance sequence and the setting anticipate what takes place throughout. Also, identify how different spaces are established in the neighborhood by different demographics. How does Lee utilize editing and cinematography, particularly shot/reverse shot and direct address to the camera, when confrontational moments arise? Also with editing and cinematography, how does Lee incorporate mise-en-scene in both interior and exterior shots, and how does the placement of characters and objects reflect the climate of the neighborhood (literally and figuratively)?

Week #10--Blackness and Sexuality

In her film The Watermelon Woman (1996), Cheryl Dunye portrays a filmmaker who uses the documentary medium to investigate the identity of a Black female actor from the early sound era of Hollywood. Through the documentary medium, Cheryl discovers not only her real name, but the community from which she emerged, a wider knowledge of her film career, and the personal relationships she had throughout her life. Cheryl is able to identify parallels between her and her subject, Fae Richards, in terms of being a Black lesbian working in the film medium, plus being involved in an interracial relationship. Cheryl uses documentary conventions such as picture stills and talking head interviews to both present her subject and chronicle her own journey to identifying herself as a filmmaker. Through the ambitious task of making a film, Cheryl comes to learn that there is as much work demanded to learn about the character one possesses in their pursuit of the objective he/she ultimately wants to achieve, even if it means breaking relationships that develop over time (i.e. Diana), testing the lengths of one’s friendship (i.e. Tamara), or resurrecting demons from the past (i.e. June Walker).

After the documentary is presented in the film’s ending credits, Dunye reveals that the project’s subject is entirely fictional. In her analysis of Watermelon, Thelma Willis Foote describes it as a hoax, which implies that the viewer is ultimately deceived throughout its entire duration. What further contributes to the initial response upon the revelation is that no hints are given that “The Watermelon Woman” does not exist, and the viewer can safely assume that Cheryl just so happens to seamlessly parallel her discovery of Fae’s relationship with her White director, Martha Page, with the intensifying romance between her and Diana. As she drops this bombshell at the film’s conclusion, she begins her statement by saying, “Sometimes you have to create your own history.” This is consistent to how Cheryl introduces herself to the audience, uncertain of whether or not she has earned the credentials to affirm herself as a filmmaker. As she thinks about what she wants to make her film about, she makes it clear that it has to be about Black women because, as she puts it, “…our stories have never been told.” Through the use of what is learned to be a mockumentary, Dunye points to a larger issue: the urgency of memory and recovery of the past, particularly topics that are embedded within the periphery.

When Julie Dash decided that she wanted to set Daughters of the Dust in South Carolina, near the area known as Ibo Landing, she reveals that her family members were reluctant to disclose details about their past. In the film within the film, Cheryl faces opposition from both Tamara, who rejects the notion that Black female actors confined to playing “mammy” roles are a worthy subject matter, and Fae’s partner, June, who finds Cheryl’s attempt to explore Fae’s romance with Martha a misrepresentation of Fae’s legacy. Cheryl courageously challenges both women in her validation of the aspects of Fae’s life neither wants to confront, which further affirms her self-recognition as a filmmaker. Two experimental documentaries also touch upon sensitive subject matter, particularly in regards to the place of Black gay male identity in a larger Black collective identity. In Looking for Langston (1988), Isaac Julien seeks to explore Langston Hughes’s sexual identity and his romantic relationships with fellow artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance. By centralizing Hughes’s sexuality in his documentary, even at the displeasure of his estate, Julien also incorporates the work of James Baldwin, Bruce Nugent, and Essex Hemphill to establish a legacy of poetry by Black gay men that has gone often ignored. Hemphill’s poems are also featured in Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied (1990). Riggs uses his own discovery as a gay man and ways in which his voice was silence to both identify transgressions gay Black men face, notably isolation from segments of the Black community, physical violence, and stereotyping within White gay popular culture. Ultimately, Riggs uses Tongues to encourage Black gay men to speak out against forces designed to subjugate then. As you watch both films, identify some of the conventions used in this film that differ from more familiar uses of the documentary medium. What is contained in the content of the poetry featured in each film, and what are some the images used to complement these works? How would you describe the overall structure of each of these films, and in what ways are images and sounds juxtaposed to centralize Black gay male sexuality in terms of romance and threats they face?

Week #9--Confronting and Rewriting History

In Daughters of the Dust (1991), Julie Dash seeks to create a historical narrative in which a collective female identity is established. The central conflict in the film is that Nana, the matriarch of the Peazant family has concerns about whether or not they will retain their Gullah roots as they move into the mainland. Two women closely relate to Nana and her efforts to preserve the family. Yellow Mary is the prodigal daughter who returns to Ibo Landing after being sexually violated throughout her travels. Eula has lived in Ibo Landing her entire life, and she faces tremendous conflict with her husband, Eli, after he learns that she was raped. The incident drives him to question the worth of Nana’s traditions if they were not able to protect his wife. For both women, Nana is the only woman who offers love and comfort without any judgment. There are also women who think that it is best to distance themselves from Nana’s traditions as far as possible. Haagar married into the Peazant family, and she sees their entrance into the mainland as an opportunity to dispel many of the rituals she condemns as archaic. Nana’s granddaughter, Viola, has become a born-again Christian since returning from the mainland, and she is responsible for bringing Mr. Snead, a photographer who documents the family’s departure. He serves as the film’s example of self-reflexivity, in which some reference is made to the filmmaking process, albeit a still camera. Within the diegetic world, Snead captures each member of the family and learns more about the history of the Gullah People and Ibo Landing. Outside of the narrative, Dash is very much doing the same way, in which she is challenging the viewer’s orientation not only with the history of African Americans before the 20th century, but with seeing African Americans onscreen as well.

In terms of history, Dash’s uses different kinds of iconography to reflect slavery, such as hands and clothes stained with indigo, to reflect when Nana and other enslaved Africans worked on an indigo plantation. Dash also uses a large wood carving to represent a dismantled slave ship, which holds tremendous resonance when Eli pushes it away to reflect how he has come to terms with what happened with his wife, and his acknowledgment that she is carrying their child. These references to slavery also reinforce why Nana deems it important to keep her family together, because the “peculiar institution” separated families when Africans were brought to America and subjected to enslavement. Eli and Eula’s reconciliation affirms that the Peazant family will remain intact, something that is preserved by the presence of the Unborn Child.

Dash’s film is set at the turn of the century, as the Peazant family departs for the mainland of South Carolina during the summer of 1902. Her engagement with history in this film is preceded by her short film, Illusions (1983), set during World War II. It focuses on Mignon Dupree, a studio executive assistant who is assigned to correct a sync error in an upcoming movie, where she recruits a young Black singer to sing in place of the White actress who stars in the project. Dash’s short, shot in black and white, is a retelling of the passing narrative, in which Mignon is a light-skinned Black woman who (unintentionally) passes for White, which grants her an agency to help make some important decisions at the studio. Like Dash, Cheryl Dunye explores film history to recover and preserve the presence of Black women. In The Watermelon Woman (1996), Dunye portrays herself as an aspiring filmmaker who decides to search for the identity of a Black actress who portrayed mammy characters in Hollywood movies during the 1930s. As you watch the film, how does Cheryl determine that this will be the subject of her film, and how does this relate to her identity as a filmmaker? How does the use of direct address to the camera help reveal about Cheryl’s development as an artist? What other information does she learn about the period in which the Watermelon Woman was a notable figure? How do parts of the Watermelon Woman’s biography parallel with Cheryl’s life? At the film’s conclusion, how does Dunye use documentary conventions, and what revelation is made to question whether or not the non-fiction medium is reliable?

Week #8--Women Filmmakers

In The Passion of Remembrance (1986), Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien of the Sankofa Film and Video Collective combine documentary and fiction conventions to reflect a present a multifaceted identification of Blackness. Both filmmakers use three storylines to establish an inclusive presence of gender and sexuality in past and present discourse about how Black Britons identify themselves. Blackwood and Julien introduce a male and a female to establish their positions in terms of how identity is determined, as well as stagnated. Their stances lead to intense conflict when they share the same space, as the male speaker’s impulse to dominate is countered by the female speaker’s continuous interrogation. Their disputes transfer into the film’s more conventional storyline, in which Maggie often challenges the issues discussed by her father, Benjy, and her uncle, Tony, with respect to normative gender roles and their condemnation of LGBT identity. An aspiring filmmaker, Maggie’s work features footage from demonstrations for workers’ rights and LGBT rights, some of them resulting in physical altercations with aggressive force by the police. Her films serve as another storyline, where she takes images widely circulated through news media and places them within another context through color saturation and rapid editing. These images are an example of self-reflexivity, in that Maggie’s works are very reflective of the kind of films and videos artists of the Black British Film Workshop movement produced.

Black British filmmakers emerged in the early ‘80s as topics such as neo-fascist attacks on Black immigrant residents and questions of police brutality at the Carnival celebrations were brought to the forefront at the beginning of Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as Prime Minister of Great Britain. The films and videos that came out of film and video collectives such as Black Audio, Ceddo, and Sankofa proved to be a subversive counterpart to the dominant images circulated through popular media in both form and content. A majority of documentaries were made from the perspective of Black Britons. Many of these residents emigrated from the Caribbean, West Africa, and South Asia. Previous Black filmmakers whose roots trace to these spaces were making films in Great Britain for at least a decade, yet artists from the Film Workshop section were still seen as very new and appreciated simply for producing images of Black people. Their work provided a crucial source by enabling these populations to tell their own stories, in spite of the fact that their experimental and theoretical approaches raised questions about the accessibility of their work. These filmmakers may have not been granted full reception at times because of their cinematic strategies, but their objectives was to transfer from what Kobena Mercer would call a monologic identity, in which Black identity was confined to a singular agenda, to a dialogic identity, an embrace of multiple voices and representations of how Black people determine their identity privately and publicly.

More vocal efforts to include women within a diasporic Black cultural discourse have been pursued since the years that immediately follow the Black Power movement. The efforts of Black British filmmakers to present issues once condemned by the more aggressively masculine endorsements of Black identity continued what had been pursued by Black women writers, tracing back to the 1970s. Black women filmmakers also attempted to penetrate these positions, often through nonconventional forms of storytelling. Experimentation with narrative structure is most present at Daughters of the Dust (1991), Julie Dash’s film about a family’s departure from the coast of South Carolina at the turn of the 20th century. Similar to the efforts of Black British filmmakers, Dash seeks to include multiple voices and stories that contribute to a collective identity shared amongst Black women. The family’s matriarch, Nana Peazant, has tirelessly sought to preserve the traditions of the Gullah people on Ibo Landing for many years, and as efforts are made to move to the mainland, her objective is to make sure that her family’s traditions are preserved. As you watch the film, think of why Nana is concerned about the family’s anticipated departure. Also consider whose stories are at the center of the narrative, and how each of their personal dilemmas relates to Nana’s objective. In addition, identify some of the women who counter Nana’s traditions and their reasons for migrating to the mainland.

Week #7--Black British Cinema

Last week’s examples of Caribbean cinema were documentaries that focused on two prominent writers of the Caribbean and postcolonial theory: Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, both of whom are from Martinique. In her documentary Aimé Césaire: A Voice for History, Euzhan Palcy devotes the first of a three-part series on how her subject came to emergence, first as a poet, then as a teacher, and ultimately as mayor of Fort-de-France, the capital city of Martinique. Palcy’s documentary captures the tension that Césaire faced in his attempts to transition from being a surrealist poet and a member of the French Communist Party to deciding as mayor what Martinique’s ties should be to France. A lucid observation that Césaire makes is that countries who had become independent had adopted its own brand of totalitarianism (Haiti and the Duvalier regimes), while Communist countries were adopting the same identity. Isaac Julien’s Black Skin, White Mask considers how Fanon psychoanalyzed of colonial relations, particularly the complex presence of desire in the colonist gaze that demands the colonized subject to be condemned. Fanon’s experience in psychoanalysis was crucial to his experience in Algeria, in which he examined the state of de-personalization his patients had undergone, where all notions of agency had been diminished. He would identify violence as the only strategy through which a sense of agency could be attained. Julien’s unconventional structure, in which he combines found footage, talking head interviews, and a dramatization of Fanon’s writings, also grants him some space to interrogate his subject’s blind spots. Julien points to areas in the book Black Skin, White Masks where Fanon looks condescendingly on Black women and homosexuals, which raises questions about whether or not Fanon had deeply internalized the notion of privilege upon which he had criticized the European colonizers.

Returning to Palcy for a moment, her documentary, plus her feature-length debut, Sugar Cane Alley (1983), are both examples of how film is used to instill a pan-Caribbean contemporary identity that is determined by its engagement with history. The historical presence of both Martinique’s early history (through the adaptation of the novel Rue Cases-Négres) and the recognition of ancestral African identity points to a lack of centrality in both Caribbean identity and Caribbean cinema. Both Keith Warner and June Givanni’s interview with Palcy point to the reality that Caribbean-based filmmakers have to work outside of their home country in order to obtain resources to make their film. Palcy talks specifically about the fact that in spite of a film festival in the Caribbean, there still remains no Caribbean film industry that preserves the production, distribution, and exhibition resources for Caribbean filmmakers. These artists, similar to African filmmakers, have to both compete with movies from U.S. and Western Europe that dominate the theaters, plus combat the stigma that their films are inferior simply because they are from a Caribbean country.

For Black British filmmakers during the 1980s, what they found most at stake was the interrogation of history specific to England and the African diaspora, and new ways to make their films and distribute them. The Black filmmaking workshop movement consisted of two collectives: Sankofa and Black Audio. Both of these collectives marked at the point the most significant presence of media-makers who were of African descent. While their films were an immediate response to the climate of tension and political unrest during Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as Prime Minister, they also interrogate the cultural memory of Black Britons to assert a more inclusive space for women and the LGBT community. These filmmakers were part of the first generation to be born in England, as their parents emigrated from West Africa and the Caribbean. In The Passion of Remembrance (1986) by Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien, think of how the different storylines throughout the film reflect the attempts to challenge the masculinization of Black consciousness, the increasing neo-fascist sentiment growing throughout the country, and the inclusion of sexuality within the Black Briton collective identity. What is the relationship between the film’s narrative and meta-narrative, in terms of the questions being raised and what the central characters face?

The Passion of Remembrance (1986)
Dirs. Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien

Cast:
Anni Domingo Female Speaker
Joseph Charles Male Speaker
Antonia Thomas Maggie Baptiste
Carlton Chance Gary
Jim Findlay Tony Baptiste
Ram John Holder Benjy Baptiste
Shiela Mitchell Glory Baptiste
Tania Morgan Tonia
Gary McDonald Michael
Janet Palmer Louise

Questions to consider while watching The Passion of Remembrance:
1. Identify the three different storylines that occur concurrently in this film. How do they all relate to one another?

2. How would you characterize the relationship between the male speaker and the female speaker? What do you notice when they share a space, and when they are in their separate spaces?

3. What do you notice about the images in Maggie’s films in terms of the relationship between image and sound? Based on the readings from Fusco and Mercer, what events do they reference, and how do the viewers of her work respond to her content?

4. What are some of the topics by which Maggie and Tony argue about? How would you describe Tony’s position, and how does Maggie challenge his arguments?