film essay questions
sharon1997
PatriciaMellencamp1.pptxPatricia Mellencamp
“Making History: Julie Dash”
Patricia Mellencamp
Patricia Mellencamp posits that “feminists, whether white, black, brown, or red, are operating another temporality, questioning the timing of history.” (76) This contrasts with how history counts or measures time.
Mellencamp also notes, using scholar bell hooks, that “history must be remembered.” (76)
In her films, Illusions and Daughters of the Dust, Julie Dash creates “speculative fiction,” asking history “what if.”
Patricia Mellencamp
For Mellencamp, Dash creates an “affective history, a history of collective presence both material and spiritual” that “balances the experimental and experiential.” (77) Dash also engages with Mellencamp’s “empirical feminism, “archival and activist – invokes history and acts to alter the course of time.” (77) She believes Dash’s films “expand the contours of female subjectivity.”
Often in film studies, the female subject is not the primary focus.
Patricia Mellencamp
Mellencamp analyzes Illusions and comes to different conclusions than Hartman and Griffin. She introduces Lela Simone, a “sound editor with the Arthur Freed unit at MGM.” Simone was an “executive assistant to Freed and reportedly one of the best editors in the business.”
Women in film editing
https://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/the-4-unsung-pioneers-of-film-editing/
Patricia Mellencamp
Illusions exposes how Hollywood erased Black women historically and in representation. Dash demonstrates how the “cinematic apparatus” can and has repressed African American women. Mellencamp goes onto note that “sound editing and synchronization are strategies that conceal the politics of racism.” (79)
She contrasts Illusions with Singin’ in the Rain (1952) noting that some of the songs Debbie Reynolds sang were dubbed by someone else, the romantic plot, and how the women (Lina Lamont and Cathy Selden) are pitted against one another. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wI4jJq98tU
Patricia Mellencamp
Mellencamp observes how Rita Moreno, the Puerto Rican American actress is whitened for the film.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlMxXrRCMAI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFACep1SThs
The first clip is only the very first part; the second clip start at 4:00.
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Patricia Mellencamp
She exposes the ways whiteness in film is “not neutral, natural, or real – but a system, a ‘racialized” convention of the continuity style of Hollywood cinema.” The Production Code was how the industry tried to regulate itself to keep the government from censoring films. The section on “miscegenation,” “(sex relationship between white and Black races) is forbidden” made segregation overt and limited opportunities for African American actors and actresses.
Bring in PCA slides.
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Patricia Mellencamp
Mellencamp’s structure here is interesting because her “Afterthoughts” sections are personal reflections and this does not often occur in academic essays.
She was advised by Manthia Diawara to look at other writings before she published this piece and to her credit she takes his advice.
She considers why her work differs from Hartman and Griffin but has similarities with hooks and Toni Cade Bambara.
Throughout her piece she cites various films scholars, most of them I have not cited because their work often reinscribes whiteness. Deleuze and Guattari and white Jesus.
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Patricia Mellencamp
Bambara, hooks and Mellencamp argue that Mignon has a productive relationship with Ester Jeeter unlike Hartman and Griffin.
Mellencamp closes the section on Illusions stating that the film “calls into question the ‘White male’s capacity to gaze, define, and know. Illusions problematizes the issue of race and spectatorship. White people in the film are unable to ‘see’ that race informs their looking relations.” (86)
Patricia Mellencamp
Mellencamp’s initial analysis of Daughters of the Dust views the film as the opposite of films created by African American men that traffic in “male fear and high anxiety.” (87) Dash’s film is “told from the multiple, intersecting points of view of women of all ages – historical women, modern women – including the spirits of the unborn.” (87)
The film is set in the Sea Islands, off the coast of South Carolina, in 1902. It was a drop off point of Africans, “Dash calls this the ‘Ellis Island for the Africans,” the main dropping off point for Africans brought to North America as slaves.” (87)
Patricia Mellencamp
The film makes things visual such as intermarrying between African Americans and Native Americans.
St. Julian Last Child riding off victoriously
His future wife “riding off into the sunset for love.” (88)
Dash used the indigo ink stains as a “symbol of slavery…rather than the traditional showing of the whip marks or the chains.” (88)
Patricia Mellencamp
Mellencamp describes Dash’s production as only using natural light and Agfa-Geveart film because “Black people look better on Agfa.” The actresses Dash choose had worked in independent Black films.
Daughters of the Dust has shared space, “wide-angled, deep focus” and this is in contrast with Hollywood films and ‘spatial realism.’
Patricia Mellencamp
In “Psychological character motivation is not the main logic of cutting; neither is the point of view from usually a male perspective.” (93) This is typically a Hollywood convention.
Spatial realism “consists of shots in depth, of long duration, and the use of the moving camera. Thus the spectator has the freedom to look around. In addition, cuts are not motivated according to the same cause-effect logic of continuity style.” (93) Mellencamp argues Dash’s work is more align with spatial realism.
Dash notes the importance of memory and knowledges that were suppressed in her film. Black women are central subjects in her film. The visuals regarding hair grooming in the film are specific to the experiences of Black women.
