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.