film Q&As

Reconstituting the Image Author(s): Valerie Smith Source: Callaloo, No. 37 (Autumn, 1988), pp. 709-719 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2931721 Accessed: 04-01-2020 20:20 UTC

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RECONSTITUTING

THE IMAGE

Valerie Smith

Editor's Note: In January, 1987, Valerie Smith was curator for an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art entitled "The Black Woman Independent: Representing Race and Gender," a pro- gram of films and videotapes by black women directors. Most of the films discussed in this essay were included in that show.

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Four Women by Julie Dash. Courtesy of Black Filmmaker Foundation.

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RECONSTITUTING THE IMAGE

The Emergent Black Woman Director

By Valerie Smith

Although the origins of black American independent cinema can be traced back to

the second decade of this century, black women entered the ranks of independent

directors and producers much more recently. Madeline Anderson's 1970 documen-

tary, I am Somebody, about a strike of hospital workers in Charleston, South Carolina,

is arguably the earliest, easily accessible film by a black woman. Only during the late

1970s and early '80s did black women emerge as filmmakers in anything like significant

numbers. And as Amy Taubin suggests, that first wave may already be over: cutbacks

in support for the arts during the Reagan years may well have been responsible for

the dearth of films and videotapes by black women since 1982.1

Black women independents share with the broader community of radical filmmak-

ers a problematic relation to mainstream, realist cinematic practice. Realist filmmakers

and video artists manipulate the use of the camera and their techniques of editing, lighting, and synchronization in ways that create the illusion that cinema is like life,

may indeed be the same as life. In contrast, avant garde and many third world and feminist film and video artists resist the convention of cinematic realism precisely be- cause these practices conceal the artificiality of the filmmaking process, implying that

narrative relations, and thus social relations, are inevitable, that circumstances are as

they should be. As Ann Kaplan has written, the very techniques that create the illusion

of visual continuity "smooth over possible contradictions, incoherences, and erup- tions that might reflect a reality far less ordered, coherent, or continuous than Holly-

wood wants to admit or to know."2 Because the industry has been dominated by mem- bers of a white male power structure, it is therefore not surprising that the conventions of the realist films they developed and recapitulated would valorize their class and

political interests. Thus many experimental and feminist film and video artists argue that to tell new stories from new perspectives one must resist the conventions of realist cinema.

The ideological content of these conservative cinematic techniques notwithstand-

ing, most black women independents tend to explore the formal possibilities of realism instead of experimenting with more daring modes. They may choose to work within

the realist form because it is more accessible to a broad audience; or they may work in this mode because of the financial constraints under which they labor. It is important to emphasize, however, that the prevailing notion that only technical experimentation

counts as "experimental" constructs a false dichotomy between form and content. A

realist work which centers on a non-traditional perspective might rightfully be called

experimental in its own way.

Largely because of budgetary constraints, black women directors, like most inde-

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CALLALOO

pendents, have been drawn primarily to the documentary mode of filmmaking. Non-

fiction forms may also have attracted these directors because they provide an oppor- tunity for inscribing the untold accounts of black public and private figures in the

historical record. On the one hand, works such as Ayoka Chenzira's Syvilla: They Dance

to Her Drum (1979); Michelle Parkerson's ... But Then, She's Betty Carter (1980) and

Gotta Make This Journey: Sweet Honey in the Rock (1983); and Carroll Parrott Blue's Var-

nette's World: A Study of a Young Artist (1979) and Conversations with Roy De Carava (1983),

for example, both examine and preserve the lives and work of the visual and per-

forming artists who constitute their respective subjects, installing them more securely

in a space generally denied them in public media. A Mother is a Mother (1982) by Lyn

Blum and Cynthia Ealey, Fannie's Film (1981) by Fronza Woods, and Suzanne, Suzanne

(1982) by James Hatch and Camille Billops, on the other hand, provide the opportunity

for "ordinary" women-unwed mothers, a domestic worker, and an abused mother

and daughter, respectively-to tell their own stories. In the feminist tradition, this

latter group of directors presents the accounts of the kinds of women whose stories

mainstream media have trivialized or ignored.

At least two of this latter group of documentarians employ the stories of their sub-

jects to problematize the thematic assumptions and stylistic conventions of realist film-

making. Fannie's Film comments subtly upon both the exploitation and the creativity

of the black domestic worker, granting her both narrative and visual authority. A short

documentary about Mrs. Fannie Drayton, a black woman who cleans a Manhattan

dance and exercise studio, Fannie's Film takes the form of an interview, located in the

voiceover, between the filmmaker and the subject. Shots of Mrs. Drayton working

alternate with shots of the dancers working out. This visual play on words comments

implicitly and insistently on the nature of the labor upon which the dancers' work

rests.

The placement of Mrs. Drayton's remarks in a voiceover grants her a measure of

transcendent power within the film; her words frame the images we see before us.

Moreover, Woods's questions allow Mrs. Drayton the opportunity to record her own

history, her life outside the dance studio, and her complex relation to her work. In

contrast to the persistent stereotype of the black maid whose existence is deeply bound

up with the concerns of the lives of the people for whom she works, Mrs. Drayton

does not sentimentalize her relation to the people who use the studio. She feels no

need to collapse her private and her work lives.

The visuals of the film similarly revise the prevailing conception of domestic work.

The cinematographer frames her shots and chooses her angles to capture the grace of

the dancers' forms; likewise, her shots of Mrs. Drayton's movements and the space

she cleans portray her artistry. A lingering shot of Mrs. Drayton's heels rising up out

of her slipper, for instance, suggests a comparison between her flexibility and the dancers'. The film begins and ends with a slow motion shot of Mrs. Drayton cleaning a window or a two-way mirror. Her great sweeping gestures here too possess a quality

of gracefulness that testifies to the work she does. As Fannie's Film revises the narrative of the black woman's relation to domestic

work, Suzanne, Suzanne dismantles the touchstones of the traditional nuclear family to examine the nature of the repression of the mother's and daughter's voices in pa-

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triarchy. Suzanne, Suzanne tells the story of the abuse that Billops's sister Billie and

Billie's daughter Suzanne suffered at the hands of George "Brownie" Browning, their late respective husband and father. Early in the film, we see photographs from the

family album and footage from Bell and Howell home movies. Pictures of Brownie

smiling, embracing his children; footage of the family off to church in their Sunday best; a photograph of the dead Brownie lying in repose in his open casket-all establish

the family in familiar middle-class respectability. These pieces of documentary evi-

dence thus memorialize a picture-perfect family, one whose history might be recon-

structed out of the photographic record of public events: holiday celebrations, deaths,

possibly births, weddings, and so on.

The story that Suzanne, Suzanne tells, however, is largely a critique of the potentially

destructive nature of the middle-class nuclear family; the narrative of the film thus

works to dismantle the image of the ideal family created by these documents. Indeed, the inclusion of these photographs and footage in the film calls into question the very

status of such materials as evidence. However much one might desire to read pho- tographic images as denotative - signs of what really existed - they too are fictive con-

structs; like the techniques of cinematic or literary realism, they represent a body of

conventions that enshrine particular ideological positions. The shot of the Browning family going off to church, then, represents more the popular image of the ostensibly religious nuclear middle-class family -the family that stays together because it prays

together-than it does the felt experience of their domestic situation.

Inasmuch as the film exposes the family story concealed beneath the veneer of pho-

tographs and home movies, it more generally seeks out alternative meanings and

accounts. Billops and Hatch had intended to make a film about Suzanne's battle

against drug addiction. But during the course of their interviews, the story of her and

her mother's experiences of abuse emerged. The film that was to situate Suzanne as

a recovered addict thus became additionally, if not instead, an exploration of the suf-

fering to which women are vulnerable in the nuclear family. The pivotal scenes, in which Suzanne poses a series of questions to which Billie

responds, occur in a darkened sound stage where only the two women are visible,

shot from mid-chest up, both facing the camera. This sound stage provides an alter- native to the domestic spaces in which the rest of the film takes place -spaces that

enshrine the past history of family relations. In this alternative location, the relation-

ship between mother and daughter is altered dramatically.

In an interview, Billops has said that Hatch provided Suzanne with a list of questions

to ask her mother in these scenes. These may well be the questions with which Suz-

anne begins: "Do you love me?" "Do you remember Death Row?" "Why didn't you

stop Daddy from beating me?"3 By providing Suzanne with these questions, Hatch and Billops allow her to assume the role of interviewer. But at some point, Billops

says, Suzanne began to ask her own questions, assuming the role of both interviewer and director. Presumably, Suzanne's questions are those that become increasingly

probing: "Did Daddy beat you from the beginning?" "Was it the same as being on

Death Row?" "Would you like to know what it was like for me?" and so on. Up until

this point in the film, the family members have been remarkably compliant, answering

the questions that are asked of them. But here Billie insists on telling her own story.

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_________ _ CALLALOO -

When Suzanne asks, for instance, if she'd like to know what it was like to wait on

Death Row, Billie doesn't really respond to her, but rather explains both to herself and

to her daughter why she would retreat into the shower whenever her husband came

home.

The staging of these scenes, and the sheer emotional power of Suzanne's questions

and Billie's responses, bestows upon them a quality of authenticity, as if the com-

munication that occurs in these sequences is somehow more real than that which takes

place in the rest of the film. The very fact that the film exists within a frame that calls

"the real" into question, however, renders problematic such a determination. How-

ever, these scenes in the sound stage minimally suggest that in a society in which

domestic relations are captured (if not fabricated) in the movies which we make about

ourselves and our loved ones, the presence of the camera and the move to a strikingly

artificial location may well be required to catalyze the process by which familial rela- tionships can be reconstituted.

Although documentaries predominate in the body of films and videotapes by black

women, several of the directors have explored the possibilities of fiction and experi-

mental forms to embody their narratives. Your Children Come Back to You (1979) by Alile

Sharon Larkin literalizes the meaning of a "mother country" by means of the story of a young girl, Tovi, who is torn between two surrogate mothers: one comfortably bour-

geois, the other nationalist. Naturalistically, the film considers the psychological and emotional bond between mothers and daughters; symbolically, it probes the black

American's cultural situation. This thematic juxtaposition is mirrored in the cross-

cutting from Tovi's story to a dream sequence and to the child's version of an alle-

gorical tale -African resonances that interrupt and counterpoint the surface narrative. Like Your Children, A Minor Altercation (1977) by Jacqueline Shearer is a fiction film

that explores complex economic and political issues within the context of a domestic

situation. The plot of this film is set in motion by a fight between two working class

teenage girls, one black and one white, in a newly integrated public high school in

Massachusetts. The film cuts back and forth from one girl's family to the other to reveal the emotional and financial implications of the girls' consequent suspensions from

school. The similarities and differences between the juxtaposed scenes comment upon the meaning of education in black and ethnic white working-class households and

suggest continuities in the mother-daughter bond that transcends racial difference.

As she does in Your Children, her first film, Larkin, in A Different Image (1982), ex-

amines the destructive impact of Western cultural practices and values on the Afro-

American. In both films, her characters seek renewal and inspiration by immersing

themselves in African art, history, and myth. Stylistically, Larkin represents the Af- rican cultural alternative in sequences that take place at a different discursive level

than that of the main story. Her use of this technique might be read as part of her

critique of Western culture and patterns of representation. A Different Image tells the story of a young woman, Alana, who refuses to be categorized as the object of male

erotic desire and who models her behavior and dress on images of women culled from

African ritual and art. As Alana and Vincent, her male friend, attempt to create a

mutually acceptable relationship, the film presents alternative representations of

women in collages of crosscut still photographs.

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_________ _ CALLALOO

Like A Different Image, Chenzira's Hair Piece: A Film for Nappyheaded People (1982) also

takes as its subject alternative ways in which black women might view themselves

and be viewed in contemporary culture, although Hair Piece considers the issue at a

yet subtler level of experimentation. An animated satire of black hair-care devices and

products, Hair Piece interweaves paintings, collage, line drawings, still photographs,

song, and a medley of narrative voices that parody the resonances of black speech.

Apart from Chenzira's animated piece, the fiction films which confront the tech-

niques of realism most directly take as their subject the issues that complicate the lives

of black women in the workplace. Grey Area (1982) by Monona Wali and Illusions (1982)

by Julie Dash are self-reflexive films that center on individual black women involved

in film production. Grey Area is about Yvonne, a black woman producer of television

documentaries, who is at work on a bank-financed project entitled Kids and Cons. Pat-

terned loosely on Scared Straight, Kids and Cons is designed to deter juvenile delin-

quency by arranging and then filming confrontations between adolescents and prison-

ers. Grey Area explores the way that filmic narrative - specifically the narrative of Kids

and Cons -is vulnerable to the demands of funding sources. At one point, for instance,

the bank manager insists that a speech delivered by Cecil (one of the prisoners) be

edited: "Leave in the swear words, take out the politics."

An early version of Kids and Cons included within Grey Area contains a sequence in

which Yvonne as narrator indicts the bank for its complicity in the destruction of the

black community. To change the direction of the plot of the film, the bank quickly

finances a renovation that converts the former local Black Panther Party headquarters

into a Martin Luther King Youth Center. When Yvonne asks whether this renovation

is a great humanitarian act or a bank promotion, she refers at once to her own film

and to the creation of the King Center. The shaping of her film by economic circum-

stances thus problematizes the notion of narrative inevitability.

Grey Area ends in the editing room with the playing and replaying of discarded

footage from the ending of Kids and Cons. Yvonne's inability to conclude the film with a platitudinous plea to her viewers' sense of individual responsibility reveals both her

and Wali's own anxiety about the easy sense of closure that characterizes realist film

narrative.

Set in 1942 Hollywood, Illusions is about Mignon Dupree, a black woman studio

executive who passes for white. Her deception is one among many that characterizes

the world in which the film takes place. Mignon speculates repeatedly, for instance,

about the nature of historical reality. By means of an early voiceover, she considers

the way in which collective notions of the past are shaped by cinematic images. She

is thus driven to make her own films by her desire to determine what perceptions are

installed in the public imagination. At a literal level, the film thus explores the artifi-

ciality of history, the interconnectedness between the real and the fictive.

The plot of Illusions problematizes realist techniques even more concretely by ex-

amining the implications of synchronization. In realist film, image and voice track are

synchronous, creating the illusion that we are watching a real person speak, not a

visual image coordinated with a voice track. But in a scene in one of the musicals on

which Mignon has worked, the sound and visual tracks are out of sync; she must

therefore find a way to create the impression of synchronicity. She hires Esther Jeeter,

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a young black singer, to match her voice to the image of the white star lip synching.

Esther remarks at one point that she prefers to perform in the customary manner; she

would prefer to sing as she chooses and require the star to conform her movements

to her voice. As Esther explains it, when voice track precedes image track, she is free

to be expressive, to sing with her eyes closed. But even if under ordinary circum-

stances the singer is allowed metaphoric mastery over the actor, the fact remains that

Esther is only performing vocals for a role she is too dark to play. Thus, by setting up

a situation in which voice track is subordinated to image, Illusions establishes the more

apt metaphoric relation between the white performer whose image we see and the

black singer whose voice we hear.

By revealing one way in which cinematic illusion is manufactured, Dash exposes

the kind of exploitation that underlies mainstream cinematic practice. This detailed

exploration of one aspect of filmmaking technique likewise reveals the artificiality of her own film, a point underscored all the more dramatically when we read in the final

credits that the vocals are performed not by Roseanne Katon, who appears as Esther

jeeter, but by Ella Fitzgerald. Because the body of work by black women filmmakers and video artists is still rel-

atively small, I am reluctant to generalize about its character or to attempt to articulate

here the contours of a black feminist cinematic aesthetic. I would particularly resist

an essentialist argument that seeks to identify a cinematic language or perspective

unique to black women directors. To make such an argument would be to deny the

ideological content of cinematic technique and to suggest that by virtue of gender or race alone, a filmmaker might entirely circumvent or transform that content. The par-

ticular circumstances of these directors do, however, equip them to record the stories

of people like themselves with a specificity that has, for the most part, eluded non- black and male filmmakers. These artists have given voice to a variety of stories that remain untold by others in public media. They undertake to tell the previously sup-

pressed accounts of black mothers; they render the complex position of black women

in the workplace; and they offer unique perspectives on the relation of the woman of

color to Western patterns of socialization.

Notes

1. Amy Taubin, "Exile and Cunning," The Village Voice 13 January 1987, p. 68. 2. E. Ann Kaplan, Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera, New York: Methuen, 1983, p. 132. 3. The phrase "Death Row" is the family expression for the times when Suzanne would retreat to

her bedroom to await her beatings.

Selected Bibliography

Bogle, Donald. Brown Sugar: Eighty Years of America's Black Female Superstars. New York: Harmony Books, 1980.

Brunsdon, Charlotte. Films for Women. London: British Film Institute, 1986. Cripps, Thomas. Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900-1942. New York: Oxford UP,

1977.

Harris, Kwasi. "New Images: An Interview With Julie Dash and Alile Sharon Larkin." The Independent 9 (December 1986): 16-20.

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Hooks, Bell. "Black Women Filmmakers Break the Silence." Black Film Review 2 (Summer 1986): 14- 15.

Kaplan, E. Ann. Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera. New York: Methuen, 1983. Kuhn, Annette. Women's Pictures: Feminism and Cinema. London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1982. Taubin, Amy. "Exile and Cunning." The Village Voice 13 January 1987, 68. Wali, Monona. "L.A. Black Filmmakers Thrive Despite Hollywood's Monopoly." Black Film Review 2

(Summer 1986): 10, 27.

Filmography

Madeline Anderson. I Am Somebody. 1970, 16mm, color, 28 min. (Icarus Films) Carroll Parrott Blue. Varnette's World: A Study of a Young Artist. 1979, 16mm, color, 26 min. (Carroll

Parrott Blue) . Conversations With Roy De Carava. 1983, 16mm, color, 28 min. (First Run Features)

Lyn Blum and Cynthia Ealey. A Mother is a Mother. 1982, videotape, color, 27 min. (Cynthia Ealey) Ayoka Chenzira. Syvilla: They Dance to Her Drum. 1981, 16mm, color, 25 min. (Visions in Film)

. Hair Piece: A Film for Nappyheaded People, 1982, animated, 10 min. (Visions in Film) Julie Dash. Illusions. 1982, 16mm, black and white, 34 min. (Black Filmmaker Foundation) James Hatch and Camille Billops. Suzanne, Suzanne. 1982, 16mm, black and white, 26 min. (Third

World Newsreel) Alile Sharon Larkin. Your Children Come Back to You. 1979, 16mm, black and white, 27 min. (Black

Filmmaker Foundation) . A Different Image. 1982, 16mm, color, 51 min. (Black Filmmaker Foundation)

Jacqueline Shearer. A Minor Altercation. 1977, 16mm, color, 30 min. (Black Filmmaker Foundation) Monona Wali. Grey Area. 1982, 16mm, black and white, 40 min. (Black Filmmaker Foundation) Fronza Woods. Fannie's Film. 1981, 16mm, black and white, 15 min. (Black Filmmaker Foundation)

Directory of Distributors

Black Filmmaker Foundation 80 Eighth Avenue Suite 1704 New York, NY 10011 (212) 924-1198

Carroll Parrott Blue 5324 Santa Maria Terrace San Diego, CA 92114

Cynthia Ealey Child Care Resource Center 3602 Fourth Avenue South Minneapolis, MN 55409 (612) 823-5261

First Run Features 153 Waverly Place New York, NY 10014 (212) 243-0600

Icarus Films 200 Park Avenue South Suite 1319 New York, NY 10003 (212) 674-3375

Third World Newsreel 335 West 38th Street Fifth Street New York, NY 10018

Visions in Film P.O. Box 315 Franklin Lakes, NJ 07417 (201) 891-8340

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Illusions by Julie Dash. Courtesy of Black Filmmaker Foundation.

I ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ . . .......A.

Your Children Come Back to You by Alile Sharon Larkin. Courtesy of Black Filmmaker Foundation.

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A Minor Altercation by Jacqueline Shearer. Courtesy of Black Filmmaker

Foundation.

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