film Q&As
sharon1997
AvaDuVerneyinterviewwithMichaelMartin.pptxMichael Martin
“Conversations with Ava DuVernay: ‘A Call to Action’: Organizing principles of an Activist Cinematic Practice”
Michael Martin
Michael Martin interviews Ava DuVernay; he states that she is a “undeterred catalyst for what may very well be a Black film renaissance in the making.” (57)
DuVernay has a mission and a call to filmmaking. Her “call to action” is to “further and foster the Black cinematic image in an organized and consistent way, and to not have to defer and ask permission to traffic our films: to be self-determining.” (57)
Martin views DuVernay’s work as an extension of Black independent cinema and documentarians such as William Greaves, Madeline Anderson, and St. Claire Bourne and those of the L.A. Rebellion, Julie Dash, Charles Burnett, Billy Woodberry, and Haile Gerima, as well as the Black Arts Movement, Larry Neal and Amiri Baraka.
Michael Martin
Martin posits that DuVernay’s films involve engagement with “Black women’s agency and subjectivity.” She also “foregrounds the family as [a] site and source of resilience, memory, cultural transmission, generational continuity and dissonance, and as purveyor of all things affirming of Black identity.”
Prior to becoming a filmmaker, DuVernay was a film publicist and marketer. Her work has received awards from the “ReelWorld Film Festival in Toronto, the Los Angeles Pan-African Film Festival, and the Hollywood Black Film Festival, and the Langston Hughes African American Film Festival in Seattle” and she won the Best Director Award at Sundance for Middle of Nowhere (2012). (58)
Michael Martin
DuVernay has also won the “African American Film Critics Association Best Screenplay in both 2011 and 2012, as well as both the Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award and Tribeca Film Institute’s Affinity Award in 2013.”
DuVernay has “six organizing principles of her practice” in addition to her formation of AFFRM, African American Film Festival Releasing Movement.
As a director, DuVernay works closely with her cinematographer and does prep work prior to production.
Michael Martin
Her six principles:
“Establishing the storyline as the first order of business;
Knowing something about potential funders before soliciting support for your project;
Working with what you have, rather than what you want;
Engaging with cinematic aesthetics, no matter the filmmaking context, as a means of signifying something personally and/or politically meaningful;
Avoid working in isolation; and
Being self-determining.” (59)
Michael Martin
Due to her work as a film publicist and marketer, DuVernay knew which doors to avoid regarding the production and distribution of her films.
She considers a film finished “when it’s presented to an audience.” One of the reason she created AFFRM was that filmmakers are “very rarely … taught and given tools to help our films survive to meet an audience.” (63)
DuVernay comes from a position of abundance; she focuses on what she has.
She asserts her “narrative point of view and the stories that [she wants] to tell within any context.” (65)
Michael Martin
DuVernay believes AFFRM bridges “the gap between what happens when [films are made] and how does it actually reach an audience.” (66)
The remainder of the interview examines DuVernay’s films I Will Follow (2010) and Middle of Nowhere.
I Will Follow is autobiographical; DuVernay was a caregiver for her aunt, Denise Sexton. She and her aunt were U2 fans.
DuVernay made Middle of Nowhere to speak to the “incarceration of a generation of Black men.” (79)
