Black Women Directors 9781978813373

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BLACK WOMEN DIRECTORS

QU I C K TA KE S : M O V IE S A N D P O P U L A R CU LT U R E Quick Takes: Movies and Popular Culture is a series offering succinct overviews and high-quality writing on cutting-edge themes and issues in film studies. Authors offer both fresh perspectives on new areas of inquiry and original takes on established topics. SERIES EDITORS:

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster is Willa Cather Professor of English and teaches film studies in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Wheeler Winston Dixon is the James Ryan Endowed Professor of Film Studies and professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Christina N. Baker, Black Women Directors Rebecca Bell-Metereau, Transgender Cinema Blair Davis, Comic Book Movies Jonna Eagle, War Games Carmelo Esterrich, Star Wars Multiverse Lester D. Freidman, Sports Movies Steven Gerrard, The Modern British Horror Film Desirée J. Garcia, The Movie Musical Barry Keith Grant, Monster Cinema Julie Grossman, The Femme Fatale

Daniel Herbert, Film Remakes and Franchises Ian Olney, Zombie Cinema Valérie K. Orlando, New African Cinema Carl Plantinga, Alternative Realities Stephen Prince, Digital Cinema Stephen Prince, Apocalypse Cinema Dahlia Schweitzer, L.A. Private Eyes Dahlia Schweitzer, Haunted Homes Steven Shaviro, Digital Music Videos David Sterritt, Rock ’n’ Roll Movies John Wills, Disney Culture

CHRISTINA N. BAKER

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Baker, Christina N., author. Title: Black women directors / Christina N. Baker. Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021031067 | ISBN 9781978813342 (cloth) | ISBN 9781978813335 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978813359 (epub) | ISBN 9781978813366 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978813373 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: African American women motion picture producers and directors—Biography. | Motion pictures— United States—History. | Motion picture industry— United States—History. Classification: LCC PN1998.2 .B348 2022 | DDC 791.4302/80922 [B]—dc23/eng/20211027 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021031067 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2022 by Christina N. Baker All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Rutgers University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. ∞ The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. www.rutgersuniversitypress.org Manufactured in the United States of America

CONTENTS

Introduction

1

1

Recognizing the Pioneers

4

2

Women of the L.A. Rebellion

30

3

Moving into the Mainstream

64

4

More than Mainstream

93

Acknowledgments109 Further Reading

111

Notes113 Bibliography135 Selected Filmography

149

Index157

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INTRODUCTION The transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation [that] always seems fraught with danger. —Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider Wholeness is no trifling matter. —Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters

The sentiments behind Audre Lorde’s declaration and Toni Cade Bambara’s insight exemplify the determination of Black feminist artists and intellectuals who have fought courageously for the liberation that accompanies free artistic expression. In this book, I contribute to the growing body of work that recognizes the overlooked contributions of Black women who have engaged in the creative act of filmmaking. With the words of Black feminist thinkers such as Lorde, Bambara, Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, and Alice Walker as guides, I highlight how Black feminist strategies and perspectives emanate from the films of Black women directors, with a focus on films created in the United States. 1

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The discussion is organized chronologically—from the silent era of filmmaking through the present blend of theatrical, streaming, commercial, and independent cinema options. Chapter 1 starts by remedying the common misconception that there were no Black women directors during the silent era. Black male filmmakers have recently been rediscovered and justly credited for their important work on the many “race films” of the silent era, yet the work of some of the first Black women directors from the early to mid-twentieth century has gone largely unrecognized. The chapter also discusses the films of Black women directors in the mid- to late twentieth century, commencing with an overview of Madeline Anderson and Camille Billops, two of the first Black women to create feature-length documentaries, and rounding out the discussion with Kathleen Collins and Jessie Maple, who were among the first women to make feature-length narrative films (in the 1980s). Overall, the chapter captures the diversity of approaches among Black women directors before their films were widely distributed commercially. Chapter 2 expands on the contributions of Black women directors during the second half of the twentieth century. In particular, it focuses on the women who attended film school at the University of California–Los Angeles (UCLA) between the late 1960s and mid-1980s. This group of Black students, which came to be known

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as the L.A. Rebellion, included Julie Dash, Alile Sharon Larkin, Zeinabu irene Davis, and many others. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the work of Black women who made films for commercial theatrical distribution, beginning with some of the first Black women to do so: Euzhan Palcy, Julie Dash, and Kasi Lemmons. I emphasize the goal of moving forward and carving out significant spaces for Black women in the film industry, centering on the career of Ava DuVernay in chapter 4. Recalling Bambara’s insistence that “wholeness is no trifling matter,” this book offers a succinct overview of Black women directors. It does not represent the entirety of their vast and complex contributions, but I hope it will serve as a jumping-off point for an exploration of the extensive and exceptional work of Black women directors, as part of the process of achieving a more holistic cultural understanding and appreciation of Black womanhood.

1 RECOGNIZING THE PIONEERS Forgotten is the word used in a 2017 article to describe Black women in film during the early to mid-twentieth century.1 The “forgotten Black women of early Hollywood” were the focal point of an exhibit titled Center Stage: African American Women in Silent Race Films.2 It is laudable that this exhibit recognized many previously overlooked silent films and some of the Black women who starred in them, including Evelyn Preer, Iris Hall, Anita Thompson, Lucia Lynn Moses, and Cathryn Caviness. These women had essentially been forgotten. But the list of filmmakers featured in the exhibit—Oscar Micheaux, Harry Gant, David Starkman, and Spencer Williams—highlights the fact that although Black women actors were remembered for their important work in front of the camera, Black women filmmakers of that era were still forgotten. In this chapter, I navigate the maze and roadblocks constructed around the work of Black women directors 4

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in the silent era and beyond. Given the structural and cultural barriers confronting Black women, the powerful action of telling stories through film was inherently courageous. The word womanist may not have been part of the lexicon during this period, but I posit that the work of these Black women reflects a womanist point of view. As Alice Walker explains in her 1983 collection of essays titled In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, the term womanist applies to a feminist of color and stems from the southern colloquial term womanish, which usually refers to behavior that is “outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful.”3 The mere fact that Black women of this era defied cultural norms and picked up a camera to tell stories demonstrates a level of ingenuity that is emblematic of the womanish characteristics described by Walker. In some cases, the search for a complete picture of Black women’s historical contributions to film led to more questions than answers. As such, it is telling that there is no clear answer to the question, Who was the first Black woman filmmaker? Due to the relative lack of support for Black women and the accompanying dearth of historical documents, pinpointing a definitive answer has been difficult. The elusive nature of this answer makes each and every piece of evidence all the more precious. Part of the challenge of identifying the first Black woman

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filmmaker involves another question: What qualifies someone as a filmmaker? To the latter question, I wholeheartedly concur with the film scholar Gloria Gibson, who writes about the early work of Black women filmmakers, “The designation of filmmaker comes not in the number of frames, but in the women’s realization and utilization of the power of the camera.”4

THE SILENT ERA

In this section, I consider some of the first Black women to realize and utilize the power of the camera during the silent era. Recent scholarly attention has been directed toward Oscar Micheaux (generally accepted as the “first” Black film director) and his significant contributions and interventions as a filmmaker,5 but the goal of locating and recognizing the contributions of his female counterparts has been much less straightforward.6 Eloyce King Patrick Gist, Drusilla Dunjee Houston, Eslanda Robeson, Alice B. Russell, Tressie Souders, Madame E. Toussaint Welcome, Maria P. Williams, and Zora Neale Hurston (who achieved posthumous fame as a novelist) are some of the underrecognized Black women who made invaluable contributions to silent film as writers, directors, and producers.7

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I focus my discussion on Tressie Souders, Madame E. Toussaint Welcome, Eloyce King Patrick Gist, and Zora Neale Hurston, who are among the first Black women credited with directing a film.8 Their stories and work illustrate the multitude of ways Black women have approached film as a creative medium. Just as there is no singular experience of Blackness or Black womanhood, there is no single way to represent these identities through film. These remarkable women’s stories reflect the complex relationship between the social context in which they lived and the various ways they embodied a womanist spirit. Tressie Souders (sometimes credited as Tressa or Theresa or with the surname Saunders) wrote and directed the film A Woman’s Error in 1922, arguably earning her the title of first Black woman filmmaker.9 But as noted earlier, being labeled the “first” is not a clear-cut declaration. Notably, in 1918, Madame E. Toussaint Welcome directed a film titled Doing Their Bit that was included in a twelvepart series about African American soldiers in World War I, which she produced with her husband.10 One thing these two films by trailblazing Black women have in common is that, unfortunately, they have been lost to history, exemplifying the extent to which early Black women directors have become nearly invisible.

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The little evidence of Tressie Souders’s career as a film director is an announcement published in Billboard magazine on January 28, 1922, which reads as follows: “The Afro-American Film Exhibitors’ Company has opened branch offices in Baltimore, Md., and Dallas, Tex. .  .  . The company announces closing a contract with Tressie Souders of Kansas City, Mo., for the distribution for her production, ‘A Woman’s Error,’ this being the first of its kind to be produced by a young woman of our race, and has been passed on by the critics as being a picture true to Negro life. They expect to release by January 1.”11 This press announcement indicates that Billboard recognized Souders’s A Woman’s Error as a film that broke barriers— it was “the first of its kind” to be produced by a Black woman and was praised as being “true to Negro life.” Despite the significance of this film, there is no existing footage, and no stills have been located. Nor are there any known photographs of Souders, the woman behind the film. Both the filmmaker and her film remain invisible. Souders’s brief filmmaking endeavor is an intriguing mystery. Contemporary scholars and film enthusiasts are left to wonder about the meaning of the title: A Woman’s Error. Likewise, the loss of the film means we do not know exactly what kind of cinematic vision she created. The little that has been pieced together about Souders’s life indicates that she was born in Kansas, lived in Mis-

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souri when she was young, and then moved to Los Angeles around the time she made her film. She was married for seven years, followed by a move to San Francisco, where she lived and worked (not in the film industry) for the remainder of her life.12 However, as evinced by Billboard’s announcement of Souders’s accomplishment, we can surmise that she defied expectations to create a film that spoke to the racialized experience of being a Black woman during her time and that, in doing so, she exhibited a womanist spirit of courage. Madame E. Toussaint Welcome (born Jane or Jennie Louis Van Der Zee) was the sister of the photographer James Van Der Zee, well known and respected for his creative work during the Harlem Renaissance.13 Although her film has also been lost, her work is not quite as mysterious as that of Souders. This is largely due to her social network, which placed her in close proximity to other artists, and to the existing documentation of her other creative work. Toussaint Welcome was a multitalented and multi­ dimensional artist, but if not for her social connection to the Harlem Renaissance and her relation to James Van Der Zee, it is possible that we would know little about her work. She was born in Massachusetts and attended the Kellogg School of Art in Pittsfield. She moved to Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance and opened the

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Toussaint Conservatory of Art and the Toussaint Motion Picture Exchange with her husband, Ernest Toussaint Welcome.14 Historical documents show that, while living in Harlem, she took out an advertisement in which she referred to herself as the “foremost female artist of the race.”15 Toussaint Welcome’s directorial credit is for one segment of a series titled Doing Their Bit.16 The Toussaint Motion Picture Exchange advertised the film as consisting of twelve chapters, with two reels each. This series was produced in 1918 and focused on African American participation in the military during World War I. Although film historians have been unable to locate the film, a poster that Toussaint Welcome created, titled “We Are Doing Our Bit,” has been found. It was used to advertise the 1918 Liberty Loan campaign, which took place during the final months of the war to encourage citizens to buy savings bonds.17 The nearly identical titles and timing suggest that the poster can reveal something about the lost film. The poster depicts an artist’s rendering of an African American soldier engaging in combat on the battlefields of Europe. According to the Massachusetts Historical Society, the soldier represents “one of the most famous American units in World War I, the segregated 369th U.S. Infantry Regiment,” which came to be known as Harlem’s

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Hellfighters. The Massachusetts Historical Society also notes that the poster image was a copy of Toussaint Welcome’s painting titled Charge of the Colored Divisions: Somewhere in France, which was created to celebrate “African American patriotism and the participation of black New Yorkers in the war effort.”18 We can surmise that Toussaint Welcome’s film was also an effort to use her artistic vision to celebrate the underrecognized contributions of Black soldiers. Her film presumably rebelled against the dominant negative ideologies and representations associated with Blackness by depicting Black men as patriotic war heroes. Fortunately, not all the early twentieth-century films by Black women have been lost. The novelist Zora Neale Hurston shot film footage to document life in the southern United States beginning in the 1920s, and Eloyce King Patrick Gist wrote and directed narrative short films in the 1930s. Thanks in large part to the work of the film scholar Gloria Gibson, the scholarly conversation about their films has gradually grown, solidifying their place in film history.19 Unlike the work of Souders and Toussaint Welcome, the work of Gist and Hurston has been found and restored and is available to contemporary viewers. Hurston and Gist apparently did not make their films with the intention of having them distributed by a film company. Rather, they used the “motion picture

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camera to examine and preserve the African-American way of life.”20 Film was a means to realize greater goals tied to their love of African American people and culture. Thanks to the work and persistence of film scholars and historians to ensure that Gist’s and Hurston’s culturally significant films are accessible to contemporary viewers, I contend that their goal has been realized. In Gibson’s essay “Cinematic Foremothers,” she considers the work of Gist and Hurston together, drawing parallels between their films. They were both creative risk takers who were ahead of their time. Gibson argues that an underlying similarity in the films of Gist and Hurston is that they highlight the importance of African American folk culture. She also offers keen insight into the distinctive ways each woman approached film—a reflection of their different circumstances and outlooks. Gist worked with her husband, James Gist, on films that carried a message of “social uplift and religious morality.”21 Prior to meeting and marrying James, a Christian evangelist, Eloyce was a businesswoman. She studied at Howard University in Washington, DC, and later established the Patrick School of Beauty Culture and Personal Improvements.22 After she married, Gist shifted her focus and directed her creative and entrepreneurial skills toward filmmaking as part of the couple’s vocational and social interests and endeavors. Hurston, now

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widely respected for her prolific writings, filmed footage in the South, initially as part of her ethnographic work with Franz Boaz (a founding figure in the field of anthropology), with whom she studied at Barnard College. Hurston later returned to the South with the financial support of Charlotte Mason, a wealthy patron of the arts, to document aspects of African American life there. As such, Hurston’s interest in film stemmed from her anthropology research, as well as her artistic pursuits. To date, three narrative films have been located in which Gist was involved: Hell Bound Train (1930), Verdict Not Guilty (1933), and Heaven-Bound Travels (1935). Gibson notes that because Gist worked with her husband, it is difficult to pinpoint each one’s contributions to these films.23 In an interview, Gist’s daughter, Homoiselle Patrick Harrison, recalled that her mother wrote the script for and directed the actors in Verdict Not Guilty.24 As of 2020, Columbia University’s Women Film Pioneers Project lists Eloyce King Patrick Gist as producer, director, and screenwriter for Hell Bound Train and Heaven-Bound Travels and as screenwriter and editor for Verdict Not Guilty,25 whereas the Library of Congress’s “American Women: Resources from the Moving Image Collections” notes that she rewrote and reedited Hell Bound Train and produced, wrote, and directed Verdict Not Guilty.26 Because of the restrictive cultural gender roles of the

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time and incomplete records, we may never know what role each of the Gists played behind the camera. But there is general agreement among scholars that Eloyce was involved in directing (among other activities) some, if not all, of these films. As an example of the morality and social uplift underlying Gist’s films, Hell Bound Train depicts the devil as the engineer on a train transporting passengers engaged in bootlegging and drinking alcohol—a warning to viewers that such behaviors endanger their families, their personal well-being, and their souls. Gist’s films seem to be designed to encourage behavior aligned with what scholars now call a “politics of respectability,” which many people at the time embraced as a route to racial uplift.27 The couple traveled in and around Washington, DC, showing their films to Black audiences at predominantly religious venues. Recent scholarship has noted that their films exhibit much more creativity and artistry than one would typically expect from nonprofessional, self-trained filmmakers.28 Historical records indicate that Gist’s films also garnered the attention of the NAACP.29 Zora Neale Hurston’s footage suggests that she approached filmmaking with the curiosity of a researcher, the creativity of an artist, and the empathy of a southerner and, as such, an insider among the people and culture she filmed. According to Gibson, as part of Hurston’s

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anthropology research, she shot ten rolls of film in the southern United States between 1927 and 1929.30 Later, Hurston directed a documentary titled Commandment Keeper Church, Beaufort South Carolina, May 1940 (1940), which Gibson refers to as “celebratory” in the way it showcases “the diverse talents, rituals, and creativity of African-­ American people.”31 Notably, Commandment Keeper Church was added to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 2005, which recognized the film as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”32 Scholars can gain insight into Hurston’s perspective as a filmmaker through her many fiction and nonfiction books and essays. She is most well known for her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God and her 1935 nonfiction autoethnographic collection Mules and Men; but she was an extraordinarily prolific writer, and her contributions to literature are too expansive to cover here. Those who are familiar with the two aforementioned books will recognize parallels in her in-depth exploration of Black southern life in her writing and her filmmaking. The literary scholar Autumn Womack compellingly argues that Hurston’s filmmaking reveals the “skepticism of an artist who was unconvinced of cinema’s documentary powers.”33 Womack notes that the overexposure in some of Hurston’s film footage is representative of her skepticism about the camera’s ability to depict the

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complex reality of Black life. In her (imprecise) efforts to do so, Hurston creatively experiments with various strategies to represent a multitude of activities and portray the “continually moving networking of relations” that make up Black cultural life.34 In addition to Commandment Keeper Church, which shows religious services taking place in a South Carolina Gullah community, Hurston’s early footage showcases children dancing and playing games, adults preparing a barbecue, an outdoor baptism, and a logging and turpentine camp, as well as a piece titled Kossula Last of the Takkoi Slaves in America.35 Hurston’s filmmaking illustrates a desire to convey the diversity and fullness of Black life, and it is an invaluable piece in the mosaic of her work as an artist, which also includes literature, theater, and dance.36

VISIBILITY THROUGH DOCUMENTARY

Moving beyond the silent era, visibility continues to be at the forefront in the films of Black women directors in the second half of the twentieth century. Many of the first documentary films they made are notable for highlighting the experiences, struggles, and achievements of Black women. They include Madeline Anderson’s I Am Somebody (1969) and Camille Billops’s Suzanne, Suzanne (1982) and Finding Christa (1991). They, along with a

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growing number of creative Black women, have chosen to resist the invisibility of Black women by telling stories that have largely been hidden, overlooked, or dismissed. “I am somebody” is a simple declaration of humanity that not only is the title of Madeline Anderson’s documentary but also symbolizes the sentiment underlying many documentary films directed by Black women. This statement challenges the widespread cultural and institutional invisibility and dehumanization of Black womanhood. Anderson has been recognized as the first female African American member of a film industry union to direct a documentary film,37 but I Am Somebody was not her first. It was just one of her documentaries about Black people and the fight for civil rights, and she went on to direct, write, and produce several other films and television programs after its release.38 But I Am Somebody stands out as “the most deeply personal of her films.”39 In recognition of its historical significance, the Library of Congress selected I Am Somebody for inclusion in the National Film Registry in 2019.40 I Am Somebody documents a strike that occurred between March 20 and June 27, 1969, involving approximately four hundred Black women; the strike was triggered when twelve Black union activists were fired from their jobs at the Medical College Hospital of the University of South Carolina in Charleston.41 Thus, the

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documentary rightly recognizes and represents Black women as being at the center of the civil rights movement.42 Anderson’s film masterfully captures the political and personal meaning of the strike, particularly through the in-depth interviews and footage of Claire Brown, one of the women involved. “The focus on Brown in Anderson’s original footage brings the notion of recognition into a distinct register. Not only do the scenes involving Brown particularize the politics of the strike into a specific battle for black women workers, but Brown also instantiates the act of self-recognition.”43 The relationship between the personal and the political was enhanced by Anderson’s experiences as a Black woman, which resulted in a sense of connection to the women in her film. She identified with them as Black women, as mothers, and as Black women working in a profession in which they were regularly devalued. Anderson explains, “The kinship I felt toward the women of I Am Somebody compelled me to translate the essence of their experience to film as genuinely as I could. I identified with them as a black woman, as a black working woman, as a wife and mother of children. Their grit and determination to succeed were evocative of my own efforts to become a member of the film editors’ union. Our obstacles were the same, those of gender, racial discrimination, and politics.”44

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Anderson explained her approach to filmmaking during a 2013 interview with the film scholar Michael T. Martin: “While I wanted to be a filmmaker and give information I also wanted to be an artist. So, I tried to express my artistic sense in my films even though they were documentaries.” Anderson went on to say, “I think that media has to be utilitarian. . . . I wanted my films to be used to improve our people.”45 These two seemingly incongruous ideas—film as both a form of artistic expression and utilitarian—represent an integration of the creative and socially conscious points of view with which many Black women directors approached filmmaking in the late twentieth century. Monica Freeman (Valerie: A Woman, an Artist, a Philosophy of Life!, 1975), Jacqueline Shearer (A Minor Altercation, 1977), and Michelle Parkerson (But Then She’s Betty Carter, 1980), to name just a few, also approached documentary filmmaking in ways that uniquely reflected a cultural and political resistance of the marginalization of Blackness. Similarly, Camille Billops’s films defy the marginalization of Black women. They dive deep into topics that are intimate and personal as well as political, and she uses her own experiences and those of other women in her family as the subjects of her documentaries. Her films are the cinematic expression of Audre Lorde’s words about the empowerment of making visible what was once hidden:

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“The transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation. . . . And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which is also the source of our greatest strength.”46 Billops explores topics that many other filmmakers might have considered too personal: child abuse, domestic violence, sexuality, adoption, drug use. Although Billops’s films are different in content and style from Anderson’s, they too make visible the otherwise hidden or ignored dimensions of Black women’s lives. And each filmmaker explores the lives of Black women in distinctive ways that challenge the social limitations placed on them. Billops did not limit herself to any one medium, reminiscent of the multimedia artistic approach of Hurston. She was a filmmaker, a sculptor, a painter, and a photographer. With her husband, James Hatch, she prioritized celebrating the diverse body of African American art through, for example, the Camille Billops and James V. Hatch Archives and the publication Artist and Influence: The Journal of Black American Cultural History.47 It is intriguing and illustrative of the connections between Black artists that Billops collaborated on a photography book with James Van Der Zee (the brother of Madame E. Toussaint Welcome).48 Refusing to be pigeonholed into one form of expression, Billops explained in a 1992 inter-

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view that for her, “film was just another art form, just different material.”49 Billops’s refusal to conform to cultural expectations or express herself through tidy narratives is evident in both the form and the content of her films, beginning with her first, Suzanne, Suzanne (1982). Like her other films, Suzanne, Suzanne was a collaboration with her husband, and it centers on the women in Billops’s family— specifically, her niece Suzanne’s recovery from drug addiction.50 In delving into Suzanne’s life, the film uncovers the physical and emotional violence and trauma lurking beneath the surface of a seemingly ideal, traditional, patriarchal, middle-class family. Throughout the documentary, Billops strategically displays photos of Suzanne’s picture-perfect, smiling, seemingly happy family. We hear Billie (Camille’s sister and Suzanne’s mother) reminisce about being a beauty queen. We hear relatives talk about Billie’s husband (Suzanne’s father), Brownie, who was charismatic and well loved by people in the community. But when Billie reveals her guilt about feeling “relieved” when Brownie died, Billops lays the groundwork for the revelation that things were not as perfect as they appeared. By the end of the film, we have seen Suzanne ask her mother how she could have allowed her father to

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physically abuse her. We have seen Billie admit that she too was physically abused by Brownie, even before Suzanne was born. There is a powerful and cathartic moment of connection between mother and daughter when the two women turn to each other, no longer holding back or minimizing the pain Brownie caused. Although this encounter was staged, the emotions seem very real, and in that moment, it appears that they are truly seeing each other for the first time. The burden and trauma each had been holding onto alone have come out in the open. Like Suzanne, Suzanne, Billops’s other films, notably Older Women and Love (1987) and Finding Christa (1991), problematize the limited cultural ideologies associated with Black womanhood and offer counternarratives in which women are empowered to break free of those expectations. Older Women and Love challenges cultural myths related to love, desire, and sexuality by focusing on women who experience empowerment through their romantic and sexual relationships with younger men. It is a “celebration of women’s sexual prowess and independence,” and it was inspired by a romance between Billops’s aunt and a man forty years her junior.51 Finding Christa, Billops’s most personal film, challenges cultural ideas associated with Black motherhood by examining Billops’s reconnection with her daughter,

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Christa, whom she gave up for adoption when the child was four years old. As in her previous films, Black woman­ hood is explored in ways that complicate social expectations. The driving force of the film is the question asked by the now-adult Christa: “Why did you leave me?” Christa’s question mirrors the cultural questioning of a mother who would leave her child. As we see in the film, Billops considered the options available to her as a Black single mother in the mid-twentieth century, and she made a decision that was neither easy nor culturally acceptable. Society stigmatized and disregarded Black single mothers, and Billops chose to pursue her career as an artist instead of motherhood. As she states in the film, although she regrets the pain she caused Christa, she does not regret the act of leaving her. Billops’s decision not to raise her child, and the absence of any visible sign of regret about this decision, shook audiences. Although a womanist framework leaves room to view Billops’s choice as audacious or courageous, this was not how mainstream culture viewed a woman who prioritized career over motherhood. Cultural ideologies paint a mother who gives up her child as “even lower on the scale of civilization than a brutal father” (referencing Brownie’s abuse described in Suzanne, Suzanne),52 and one film reviewer described Billops as one of the most “selfish” and “cruel” people he had ever

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seen.53 Even more telling is the fact that no such disparaging remarks were made about the man who left both Camille and Christa—a gendered bias that Billops points out in the documentary. Both Camille Billops and Madeline Anderson had the courage to defy social expectations. They used their documentary films to engage topics that most people did not discuss openly, even though open expression was the only way to challenge harmful limitations. This same type of open engagement with underexplored topics is central to the work of Black women who create narrative films to assert the value of not only visibility but also wholeness for Black women.

FROM VISIBILITY TO WHOLENESS IN NARRATIVE FILM

In the early 1980s, Kathleen Collins and Jessie Maple were two of the first Black women to direct feature-length narrative films. Although their films did not receive general theatrical distribution at the time they were made, their work has recently attracted some of the attention it has long deserved. Jessie Maple became the first Black union camerawoman in 1974, and she wrote about the challenges she faced in her autobiographical book How to Become a Union Camerawoman.54 She made two documentary

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films in the 1970s,55 before once again breaking the mold to become the first African American woman to direct a feature-length narrative film, Will (1981). In 1982, she founded 20 West, Home of Black Cinema, in Harlem as a venue to bring the work of independent and Black filmmakers to the public.56 Maple used her success to ensure that other Black filmmakers had the opportunity to create and share their work, and 20 West was only one way she did this. Speaking directly to Black women filmmakers during an interview, she said, “My advice is, when you get an opportunity to hire somebody, hire another sister.”57 In her work and in her words, she demonstrated a Black feminist frame of mind by focusing on Black womanhood and supporting a collective well-being. “Kathleen Collins. Now she was a fabulous filmmaker as far as I am concerned,” said Maple in a 2005 interview.58 That was certainly high praise coming from such an accomplished filmmaker. Collins passed away at the young age of forty-six, but during her much-too-short life, she was a filmmaker, a playwright, a writer of short stories, an activist, and a college professor. The complex thoughts, experiences, and hopes of Kathleen Collins can be found in her writing, interviews, and lectures, as well as in the protagonist of her 1982 film Losing Ground (who, like Collins, was a college professor).

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Collins recognized the value of Black women telling their stories through film as part of a “redemptive process” necessary to achieve change.59 In Losing Ground, Collins dares to say that Black women’s innermost thoughts and desires are worthy of being voiced, heard, and fulfilled. I have to agree with the film reviewer who lamented how rare it is that Black women’s inner lives are “generously examined, and sumptuously illustrated in rich, symbolistic terms, bringing to life the dreams and disappointments of black middle-class women who, despite being talented, educated and ambitious, live in the invisible presence of patriarchy.”60 Collins not only makes visible the underappreciated accomplishments and struggles of Black women (as have many of the other Black women filmmakers discussed thus far) but also uses narrative film to express a desire to experience full and embodied joy— conveyed by the Black female protagonist’s philosophical research and personal search for an “ecstatic” experience. With Losing Ground, Collins employs the narrative genre to tell a story about a Black woman character who recognizes and embraces the significance of freedom in body, mind, and soul. “Losing Ground should be required viewing for any black woman” interested in salvation because of “what the film teaches about intellect, creativity, desire, ecstasy, and black women’s agency,” writes the scholar L.  H.

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Stallings.61 These attributes are expressed through Sara, a philosophy professor (played by Seret Scott) searching for an intellectual, spiritual, and embodied understanding of ecstasy. Her husband, Victor (played by Bill Gunn), is so caught up in his own desires (related to his art and other women) that he does not really see Sara. Victor dismisses Sara’s needs and feelings—appearing to assume that ecstasy is a privilege to which Sara does not have access. When Sara is invited to act in a student film, she feels free to express herself in ways that she does not in her marriage. Sara is asked to dance to convey emotions, and this attention to her body as a form of expression allows her to embrace what she feels through movement. In Sara’s search for ecstasy, she also reveals that when she writes, her head “dances” as the ideas flow to her hands. This embodied joy she feels when thinking through ideas and writing them down is a sensation analogous to dancing—it is the merging of her intellect with her body. Collins’s exploration of ecstasy through Sara’s quest to achieve that sensation is akin to Audre Lorde’s essay titled “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” Lorde describes the erotic as a deeply feminine source of empowerment: “When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy

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empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.”62 Just as Sara breaks free from the limiting expectations that others have placed on her, Lorde states that once we are in touch with the erotic, we are “less willing to accept powerlessness.”63 Collins’s film was and is revolutionary in many ways. She created a narrative that grants a Black woman character the space to search for meaning in her life and to desire something more than the supposed safety of a middle-class career and marriage. The poet and scholar Elizabeth Alexander says of Collins, “She does not strive to simplify nor does she fear the complexity of the black female interiority.”64 Collins has been described as a pioneer of “post-black cinematic aesthetics” because her films complicate how viewers see and process race.65 Her cinematic representation of an intellectual, middle-class Black woman’s internal journey toward ecstasy certainly complicates the taken-for-granted unidimensional images and assumptions associated with Black woman­hood. Collins also complicates expectations about the structure of narrative film by applying a variety of cinematic techniques, such as having characters express themselves through music, dance, and theater reenactments. That Losing Ground was not released during Collins’s lifetime is a reflection of Hollywood’s refusal to appreciate the

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voices of Black women and accept holistic humanized images of Black womanhood. According to a lecture Collins gave after completing Losing Ground, she was working on a film script that would provide an introspective look at the life and motivations of the first Black female aviator, thereby continuing her creative work related to the underexplored lives of Black women.66 Sadly, Collins never made this film, but through her daughter, Nina Lorez Collins, her films and writings have enjoyed renewed attention.67 Two collections of Kathleen Collins’s writing have recently been published,68 and her films Losing Ground and The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy (1980) have been restored and are now widely available. This attention to the restoration and distribution of Collins’s work is evidence of a collective desire for Black women’s stories that explore the self-affirming empowerment of what Lorde refers to as the erotic and the accompanying potential for wholeness.

2 WOMEN OF THE L.A. REBELLION

“They can’t tell like we can.” These words, spoken during an intimate moment between two Black women characters in Julie Dash’s 1982 film Illusions, represent a Black feminist point of view.1 That perceptive statement indicates that Black people—and, more specifically, Black women—have experienced things that others have not. Due to structural and cultural factors, their experiences inform their collective perspectives and understanding of the world. Thus, Black women notice and understand things that others do not. The sentiment behind that statement permeates the perspectives and practices of a group of Black filmmakers (of which Dash is one) known as the “L.A. Rebellion.” They met while attending film school at the University of California–Los Angeles (UCLA) between the late 1960s and mid-1980s.2 Although the first wave of students in 30

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this collective was predominantly male, more African American women were admitted to the film school in the early 1970s, resulting in a substantial group of Black women involved in the L.A. Rebellion.3 The shared physical space, communal intellectual experiences, and an overlapping time frame allowed an incomparable sense of “we-ness” and self-empowerment among the Black women filmmakers who were part of the collective. The L.A. Rebellion filmmaker Alile Sharon Larkin states, “As Black women filmmakers, I and my sisters come with a different vision. . . . We strive to present the total picture in an effort to heal and unite our community.”4 Larkin’s fellow L.A. Rebellion filmmaker Zeinabu irene Davis describes the group as the “first sustained movement in the United States by a collective of minority filmmakers aiming to reimagine the media production processes” and “represent, reflect on, and enrich the dayto-day lives of people in our own communities.”5 Larkin’s and Davis’s statements highlight the notion that the L.A. Rebellion aimed to center Black people’s lives in their own communities as a way to reimagine media—indicative of the sentiment that they (non-Black filmmakers) cannot see or understand our people and our communities like we (Black filmmakers) can. In this chapter, I am particularly interested in the sense of connection to others (the community or the collective

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“we”) and to the self. The L.A. Rebellion offers an exceptional and impactful example of how Black women filmmakers’ creative individual self-expression is facilitated and bolstered by the experience of being part of a community. The film scholar Jacqueline Stewart stresses this relationship between self-expression and collective liberation: “These student filmmakers cleared out spaces for exploring their own creativity, with an understanding that their individual artistic processes were linked to the larger project of black liberation.”6 Black feminist theory and praxis emphasize the value of the relationship between the collective “we” and individual identity. For instance, in Patricia Hill Collins’s discussion of the formation of Black feminist thought, she describes how “individual African-American women fashioned their own ideas about the meaning of Black womanhood.” She explains, “When these ideas found collective expression, Black women’s self-definitions enabled them to refashion African-influenced conceptions of self and community.”7 Additionally, the Combahee River Collective’s 1977 statement on Black feminism emphasizes the personal and political empowerment that comes from Black women combining their individual experiences and efforts. The statement discusses the process, challenges, and mutual benefits of bringing Black women together. Having “finally found each

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other,” members of this collective felt a responsibility to share their work and ideas to support a sense of “we-ness” among Black women and to counter the fact that “individual Black feminists are living in isolation all over the country.”8 The L.A. Rebellion’s ability to draw from a liberated sense of self, as well as the sense of being part of a liberated community of artists, amplified the possibility for cultural transformation. As Collins notes, for Black women, individual empowerment is key, yet “only collective action can effectively generate the lasting institutional transformation required for social justice.”9 Using one form of artistic expression—the blues—as an example, Collins states, “When Black women sing the blues, we sing our own personalized, individualistic blues while simultaneously expressing the collective blues of African American women.”10 Black women artists can, and often do, serve as inspiration for collective social action. In the words of the author, artist, activist, and filmmaker Toni Cade Bambara, the job of an artist is “determined by the community you’re identifying with,” and as a Black woman artist, her job is to “make revolution irresistible.”11 Black women blues singers creating progressive art is an example of what Collins refers to as the “connected self.”12 The L.A. Rebellion represents and embraces the

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notion of this connected self, or the relationship between a liberated self and a community of Black women, which, as Collins explains, is needed for social justice and transformation. Larkin describes this desire for transformation beautifully: “We hope that with our films we can help create a new world, by speaking in our own voice and defining ourselves. We hope to do this one film at a time, one screening at a time, to change minds, widen perspectives and destroy the fear of difference.”13 This chapter highlights just a fraction of the work created by some of the Black women who were central to the L.A. Rebellion. Their films resist dominant cultural and cinematic narratives and expectations and reflect the revolutionary social changes of the civil rights era that preceded the group’s formation. Although Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep, 1978; To Sleep with Anger, 1990), Haile Gerima (Bush Mama, 1976; Sankofa, 1993), Billy Woodberry (Bless Their Little Hearts, 1984), and other male filmmakers were integral to the L.A. Rebellion, the films created by the women of this group constitute an invaluable cinematic and cultural legacy. Julie Dash is one of the most recognizable names associated with the L.A. Rebellion. Dash made several short films, including Four Women (1975), The Diary of an African Nun (1977), and the acclaimed Illusions (1982), and went on to become the first African American woman

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to direct a film that received general theatrical release (Daughters of the Dust, 1991). My discussion in this chapter centers on the work of Dash as well as that of Zeinabu irene Davis (Cycles, 1989; A Powerful Thang, 1991; Compensation, 1999) and Alile Sharon Larkin (The Kitchen, 1975; Your Children Come Back to You, 1979; A Different Image, 1982), but the list of other women involved in the L.A. Rebellion is extensive: Gay Abel-Bey, Shirikiana Aina, Melvonna Marie Ballenger, Carroll Parrott Blue, Alicia Dhanifu, Jacqueline Frazier, Ijeoma Iloputaife, O. Funmilayo Makarah, Barbara McCullough, Stormé (Bright) Sweet, and Monona Wali.14 The beauty of the L.A. Rebellion is that its members exercised their creative agency to make films that are as heterogeneous as the filmmakers themselves. As the film scholar Clyde Taylor writes, “Their intellectual independence was married to stylistic insurgencies that are particular and refreshingly different from each other. In fact, many of their films are declarations of creative individuality.”15 This echoes Collins’s point in Black Feminist Thought: “No homogeneous Black woman’s standpoint exists. . . . Instead, it may be more accurate to say that a Black women’s collective standpoint does exist, one characterized by the tensions that accrue to different responses to common challenges. Because it both recognizes and aims to incorporate heterogeneity

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in crafting Black women’s oppositional knowledge, this Black women’s standpoint eschews essentialism in favor of democracy.”16 Correspondingly, one goal of my discussion of the L.A. Rebellion is to reinforce the heterogeneity of the experiences and artistic responses of the women who participated in it and to focus on the different ways their films highlight the value of the connected self.

THE L.A. REBELLION: AN OVER VIEW

The name “L.A. Rebellion” was coined by the film scholar Clyde Taylor in the 1980s. More recently, the UCLA Library Film and Television Archive’s L.A. Rebellion initiative dramatically increased the recognition of this group of filmmakers among contemporary film scholars and critics.17 That initiative supported many endeavors, including the discovery, preservation, and restoration of many L.A. Rebellion films; the creation of a DVD set of twenty-five short films representing a broad selection of L.A. Rebellion filmmakers (released in 2016); a book of critical essays published by the University of California Press in 2015; and a 2011 film exhibition titled L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema.18 Although I refer to this group as the “L.A. Rebellion” for consistency and clarity, it is important to note that a variety of names have been used to describe this

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collective—a reflection of its diverse members and their different approaches to filmmaking. Specifically, “Ntongela Masilela refers to them as the ‘Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers’; Toni Cade Bambara describes them as ‘the Black insurgents at UCLA’; and . . . Michael T. Martin explains his preference for ‘L.A. Collective.’ ”19 It is also worth noting that although some filmmakers in the group have embraced the name “L.A. Rebellion” (such as Zeinabu irene Davis),20 it has not been accepted by all of them.21 As the word rebellion suggests, many of these filmmakers were aspiring to revolutionize film. The L.A. Rebellion filmmaker Barbara McCullough explains that the group was interested in “having another image out there”—an image that was different from the one produced by Hollywood.22 They were rebelling against the controlling, one-dimensional, stereotypical representations of Blackness that dominated the commercial film industry. Correspondingly, they were rebelling against a mainstream culture that refused to see and acknowledge the experiences and humanity of Black people in their communities. The result of this collective reimagining of media was a “fabulous cinematic liberation” that embraced multiple forms of self-expression in which Black people were in “full flight as beings-for-themselves instead of fantasy-beings-for-others.”23

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L.A. Rebellion filmmakers’ avant-garde approaches to filmmaking distinguish their work from other films about Blackness. As a whole, the L.A. Rebellion filmmakers were “far more experimental in their approaches to plot, setting, and character construction, drawing not just on a wider range of cinematic models (including Third Cinema, British documentary, and Italian neo-realism) but also on a range of Black diasporic aesthetic models (such as jazz, blues, griot storytelling, and Black literature).”24 Importantly, they distanced themselves from the “Blaxploitation” films that became popular and commercially successful in the 1970s, coinciding with the time many L.A. Rebellion filmmakers were attending film school at UCLA. The university context in which the L.A. Rebellion formed also meant that its members had knowledge of and access to the historical “race films” of the early twentieth century that foregrounded Black characters and were made by Black filmmakers—another approach to filmmaking from which the L.A. Rebellion diverged.25 It is significant that this community represented the “first group of film school–trained Black filmmakers.”26 The institutionalized, university-centered structure provided access to unprecedented material and social resources to support the filmmakers’ shared “desire to create an alternative—in narrative, style, and practice—to the dominant American mode of cinema.”27 The students’

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filmmaking was “a product of their environment at UCLA and the ways in which the campus focalized the broader cultural and political climate of the time. The reforms and investments of the mid- to late 1960s created opportunities for increasing numbers of Black students to attend elite institutions like UCLA while also providing a critical framework for social critique and the role of media in engaged civic discourse.”28 Yet it was the social context outside the walls of the university that provided the impetus for the group’s formation. Hence, when Clyde Taylor dubbed this Los Angeles–based group of filmmakers the “L.A. Rebellion,” “he surely had the Watts Rebellion of 1965 in mind.”29 The scholar Ntongela Masilela notes that the Watts Rebellion compelled UCLA to open its campus to groups of students that were more diverse than ever before.30 The political and cultural context surrounding the university stimulated a sense of urgency to “bring the resources of the university to bear on what was happening in the ethnic neighborhoods of Los Angeles, to better fulfill its mandate to serve the city’s population with equity.”31 This increased urgency and shift in resources provided the opportunity for student filmmakers to tell stories about Black communities. The social and racial context of the time was tied to a desire to connect with the Black communities in Los

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Angeles, as well as with Black people in the larger African diaspora. Reflective of this connection to the larger African diaspora, Masilela states that the women of the L.A. Rebellion “embraced a type of Pan-Africanism as reconstituted by Toni Morrison as American Africanism,” described as “the denotative and connotative Blackness that African people signify.”32 Masilela argues that the Africanism evident in the work of the L.A. Rebellion women opposes conventional Africanism, which “often replicates the imperialistic tendencies of Eurocentric scholarship.”33 In Your Children Come Back to You (1979), for example, Alile Sharon Larkin “posits the child’s growing cultural and political consciousness—a specifically Pan-African consciousness—as the solution to the damage perpetuated by generations of increasing alienation from an African heritage.”34 This sense of connection to the broad African diaspora is evident in numerous films directed by women of the L.A. Rebellion, including Diary of an African Nun (Dash, 1977), Praise House (Dash, 1991), Daughters of the Dust (Dash, 1991), Cycles (Davis, 1989), Mother of the River (Davis, 1995), A Powerful Thang (Davis, 1991), and A Different Image (Larkin, 1982), to name a few. In addition to a sense of connection to local Black communities and the broad African diaspora, a sense of connection to one another is evident among the women

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of the L.A. Rebellion. As Collins explains, Black women’s relationships with one another constitute a “safe space” for the development of “individual and collective voices.”35 The women of the L.A. Rebellion supported one another through their shared experiences of being Black filmmakers and students at UCLA. For instance, in an essay penned by the L.A. Rebellion filmmaker O.Funmilayo Makarah, she fondly recalls the camaraderie of working beside Larkin: “We spent long days and sleepless nights at the film school—living and breathing film. We took short cat naps on edit-room floors. . . . We would buy oatmeal cookies from the vending machines at the school, put them into the microwave, and try to convince ourselves we were eating nutritious oatmeal.”36 Another aspect of this sense of community is that they worked together, serving as crew, cast, cinematographer, and editor on one another’s films. For example, Charles Burnett is credited as the editor of Dash’s Illusions (1982) and as the cinematographer of Larkin’s A Different Image (1982), Davis is credited as “crew” for Makarah’s Define (1988), and Melvonna Marie Ballenger is credited as the cinematographer for Larkin’s Dreadlocks and the Three Bears (1991). Additionally, Makarah’s film Creating a Different Image: Portrait of Alile Sharon Larkin (1989) is an ode to the work of her fellow filmmaker, and several L.A. Rebellion filmmakers appear in Davis’s 2015

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documentary about the collective: Spirits of Rebellion: Black Cinema from UCLA.37

JULIE DASH: ON BLACK WOMEN SEEING ONE ANOTHER

Julie Dash is most often recognized for her film Daughters of the Dust (1991), which many scholars consider the quintessential Black feminist film.38 However, nearly a decade earlier, Dash made Illusions (1982), a film that, according to the scholar Judylyn Ryan, deserves more credit than it often receives for its vital contribution to Black feminist cinema: “Illusions offers a more complex vision and theoretical analysis of Black women’s cinema, of the responsibilities and challenges confronting Black women in the contemporary filmmaking industry, and of strategies for negotiating these.”39 In Illusions, Dash offers a direct commentary on the racialized and gendered structure of the film industry and provides a narrative that directly questions and reframes the history, culture, and practices of Hollywood. She “asks her audience to consider what might happen if women of color were in a position to create images of themselves.”40 Illusions is set in a Hollywood film studio in 1942, during World War II. As the film scholar Gwendolyn Audrey Foster puts it, it was a time “when Hollywood was fiercely involved in the construction of whiteness,

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particularly in the white male war hero and the white female object of desire.”41 Dash rebels against the institutionalized racism and sexism embedded in Hollywood by creating a narrative that reimagines possibilities for Black women in the film industry. Although problematizing the marginalization experienced by Black women (and other groups) in Hollywood is an essential part of the narrative, Dash does more than tell a story about this marginalization. In Illusions, Dash creates a story in which Black women claim space and agency within the power structure of Hollywood and disrupt that structure. As bell hooks writes, Dash “creates a filmic narrative wherein the black female protagonist subversively claims that space. Inverting the ‘real life’ power structure, she offers the black female spectator representations that challenge stereotypical notions that place us outside the realm of filmic discursive practices. Within the film she uses the strategy of Hollywood suspense films to undermine those cinematic practices that deny black women a place in this structure.”42 It is primarily through the character of Mignon Dupree (played by Lonette McKee) that Dash reenvisions the role of Black women. Mignon is a film-studio executive in Hollywood, which, as her white male boss points out, puts her in the exceptional position of being a woman

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who has some influence over decisions being made at the studio. As hooks notes, the narrative of Dash’s film unfolds like that of a suspense film, in which the mutability of racial identity is gradually revealed within a social context where race is a seemingly rigid and unambiguous characteristic. Race is an illusion—an unknown factor that gradually comes to the fore. Mignon is assumed to be a white woman by those who work within the (culturally and structurally) monolithically white space of the film studio. However, we soon learn that Mignon is “passing” as a white woman because of the discriminatory practices that exclude Black women from positions like the one she currently holds. Unlike the more familiar cinematic trope of passing and the “Tragic Mulatto,” Dash’s film “is designed to reveal and foreground [passing’s] relation to systemic failures of democracy, not to the psychological failure of a single alienated consciousness.”43 As Dash’s fellow L.A. Rebellion filmmaker Larkin puts it, “Dash redefines the role of the ‘mulatto.’ The Tragic Mulatto is not tragic anymore.”44 Dash likens Mignon to a “guerilla fighter.”45 Mignon’s passing as white is ultimately an act she engages in to fight systematic anti-Blackness. Mignon wants to enact changes within the discriminatory and exploitative film industry that will nurture the connection she feels

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to her identity as a Black woman. Mignon’s story is not tragic; it is the story of cultivating agency and connection within a problematic structure. However, Dash’s film also illustrates what Collins describes as the social isolation of Black women intellectuals, whose status may result in decreased access to other Black women and Black women’s communities.46 It is evident that Mignon misses this link to other Black women, such as when we see her alone in her office, making a brief phone call to her mother as a way of reaching out for that connection. Mignon’s aspirations to fight the systematic exclusion of people of color and enact change in the film industry are enlivened through her connection with another Black woman, Ester Jeeter (played by Rosanne Katon). Because of Ester’s phenotype—specifically, her brown skin—others unquestioningly identify her as a Black woman, and with that socially constructed identity, she is expected to participate in the illusion of race as well. Mignon meets Ester when Ester comes to the studio to covertly dub the singing voices of white starlets. Ester’s voice is being used to propel the careers of white film stars and turn a profit for the studio. When Ester and Mignon meet, they recognize in each other what others in the Hollywood context do not see. Mignon uses her position at the film studio to negotiate a higher salary for Ester, for which Ester expresses her

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appreciation. The two women later sit and engage in an intimate conversation during which the veil of illusion hiding Mignon’s racial identity is lifted. “Do you pretend when you’re with them? Or can you just be yourself?” Ester asks Mignon. Sensing Mignon’s reluctance to answer the question while sitting in the unsafe space of the film-studio office, Ester reassures her, “Don’t worry. They can’t tell like we can.” This exchange reveals their shared knowing—the shared insight that others around them do not have. There is no overt reference to race or Blackness during this conversation; Mignon and Ester communicate through their unspoken shared experiences and understanding as Black women. During this pivotal conversation between Ester and Mignon, Dash reveals that their position as Black women provides them with an understanding of culture and identity that eludes the people in the predominantly white space surrounding them.47 As hooks argues, “Problematizing the question of ‘racial’ identity, suddenly it is the white male’s capacity to gaze, define, and know that is called into question.”48 Mignon reveals the white studio executives’ inability to “gaze, define, and know,” and admits her own feelings of disconnection, when she tells Ester, “I’ve become an illusion. . . . They see me but they can’t recognize me.” It is the studio executives, as representatives of the dominant culture, who are blind and

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unenlightened. They cannot recognize what is right in front of them, but it is crystal clear to Ester. This conversation between Ester and Mignon serves as the safe space that Black women have long cultivated, where they can freely share their individual and collective voices.49 According to Collins, “the act of using one’s voice requires a listener and thus establishes a connection. For African-American women the listener most able to pierce the invisibility created by Black women’s objectification is another Black woman. This process of trusting one another can seem dangerous because only Black women know what it means to be Black women.”50 Ester and Mignon are able in this safe space to pierce the invisibility caused by their objectification as Black women. With each other, they listen, they connect, and they are seen. As Foster notes, “Many of the statements made by Mignon Dupree resound with significance in light of Dash’s work. . . . Yet ultimately, Mignon and Dash resolve to stay and fight the system from within.”51 Mignon expresses her intention to use the “power of the motion picture” to tell stories that are not being told by white filmmakers and studio executives. Her conversations with Ester enliven that intention. When Dash went on to make her feature film Daughters of the Dust, she too felt that it was important to share it with Black women audiences

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through theatrical film distribution. She challenged the institution of Hollywood through her approach to film. Using the “power of the motion picture,” Dash brought crowds of Black women moviegoers together to experience her reenvisioning of history and the beautiful imagery of Black womanhood in Daughters of the Dust, which I discuss in more detail in chapter 3.

ALILE SHARON LARKIN: ON FRIENDSHIP AND FORGIVENESS

Like Julie Dash’s Illusions, Alile Sharon Larkin’s A Different Image (1982) illustrates the necessity of really seeing Black women, beyond the surface level of expectations, to experience a real connection. Also like Dash, Larkin emphasizes that the dominant Euro-American social context often gets in the way of this understanding and connection. A Different Image critiques the mainstream objectification of women and European standards of beauty that lead to Black women’s dehumanization and the creation of barriers to the connections Black women seek. Larkin’s message is that Black women can reestablish the fractured connection to ourselves and to other Black people through our connection to the African diaspora.52 The complex work of reckoning with patriarchy’s impact on Black women while embracing the possibility

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of connections between Black women and Black men is the focus of A Different Image. This focus is equally apparent in an essay Larkin penned, in which she writes, “Feminism succumbs to racism when it segregates Black women from Black men and dismisses our history.”53 Importantly, Larkin acknowledges the sexism and gendered violence and abuse within Black communities and adds, “Historically, Black men have abused us, but they have never held the kind of power that white women hold in this culture.”54 Later in the same article, Larkin cites the filmmaker Kathleen Collins’s plea that Black women and Black men must connect if Black communities are to survive: “The only residual softness that’s possible in this culture, as far as I am concerned is in the hands of black women. . . . They must have the capacity to forgive black men. . . . To separate oneself from black men is to allow America the final triumph of division. If they can actually succeed in dividing black men and women, then there is no emotional victory left in this culture.”55 Larkin’s call for Black women to define themselves as feminists requires a redefining of feminism in a way that recognizes its failure to understand the significance of Black women being in community with other Black women and with Black men. It means recognizing that the preexisting language of feminism was not created with the experiences of Black women in mind. Larkin

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writes, “As a Black woman film-maker, my objective is to contribute to the development of our own definitions. . . . I believe that many contemporary Black woman artists have been compelled to speak in a voice that is not really our own. As a Black woman film-maker it is important that I address this in order to deal with this issue of Black women film-makers defining ourselves.”56 Larkin’s exploration of the role of Black men in the lives of Black women aligns with a womanist perspective. Although a womanist, by definition, loves other women and “prefers women’s culture, women’s emotional flexibility, and women’s strength,” Alice Walker’s definition of a womanist is inclusive of women’s connections to men.57 A womanist “sometimes loves individual men sexually and/or nonsexually” and is “committed to survival and wholeness of entire people. Male and female.”58 While Larkin’s A Different Image highlights the problems in male-female interactions stemming from mainstream culture, similar to Dash’s Illusions, Larkin has created a story that leaves room for hope and the possibility of transformation through deep and honest connections among Black people. A Different Image depicts the problems and possibilities of connection between Black women and men through the friendship of Alana (played by Margot Saxton-Federella) and her coworker Vincent (played by

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Michael Adisa Anderson), who, she says, is “like [her] brother.” Larkin first establishes Alana’s relationship with other Black women (for instance, Alana’s first interaction is with her mother, with whom she writes letters), but after establishing that connection to other Black women, the remainder of the film focuses on the relationship between Alana and Vincent. We see the two of them comfortably sitting together on the grass, talking about everything from their childhoods to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Alana tells Vincent that she can relate to the book because people see “only what they want to see” in her—people see only her body, and “the rest is invisible.” Vincent seems to listen with curiosity, one of the first signs that Alana’s experience of being objectified does not resonate with his experience. Larkin presents Vincent as someone who wants to be a good friend to Alana. They talk easily and joke around with each other, and they even attend a dance class together. Alana trusts Vincent. In fact, she has asked him to come up with an African name for her because she considers him a close friend and trusts him to pick a name that fits her. But Vincent is embedded within a larger culture that conveys powerful messages—a culture that pushes him to misread Alana and her friendship. Vincent is surrounded by billboards and pornographic magazines with images of sexualized and objectified white women.

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One of his male friends insists that Vincent must want to “get over” on Alana (i.e., have sex with her). Larkin’s film urges audiences to ask, How can Vincent process and make sense of these overwhelming messages? Larkin explains that her intention was to offer a “new perspective on sexism, reflecting how Black men are also victims of Western sexism.” She elaborates, “The friendship between the two main characters, Alana and Vincent, is eventually destroyed when sexism serves as a destructive force in their relationship. Alana is never ‘really’ seen as a person in her own right by the men in the film because Western society dictates that men view women as sex objects.”59 The dramatic turning point that destroys Alana and Vincent’s friendship occurs when they fall asleep on the floor of Vincent’s apartment after Alana has helped him move. When Vincent wakes up to find Alana still asleep, his actions reflect that his vision of her has been warped by the cultural messages he has been exposed to. He kisses Alana’s hand, gropes her, and attempts to undress her as she sleeps. When Alana is jolted awake, startled and scared, she pulls away and says, “Vincent, you’re hurting me.” He reacts with confusion (“What? How am I hurting you?” he asks), and Alana points out that he was trying to rape her. This leads to a struggle. Alana pulls away, and Vincent tries to pull her back, in defense and denial of his violation. “Why can’t

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you see us?” Alana finally asks. A confused Vincent stares at her, speechless. In many films, this violation would be the impetus for severing the relationship and seeking retribution. Larkin, though, wants her audience to come to terms with the idea that Black men are also the victims of Western sexism. Larkin is concerned that separating Black women and Black men will only empower the pervasive forces that have contributed to a culture in which such harmful actions regularly occur. A Different Image illustrates Larkin’s ardent support for the words of Kathleen Collins: “to separate oneself from black men is to allow America the final triumph of division.”60 Larkin ends the film by envisioning a conversation between a woman and a man after trust has been violated. There is no question that Alana and Vincent’s friendship has been damaged by Vincent’s actions. Given that their prior connection has been broken, what might bring them together? When they see each other for the first time after the violation, Vincent is apologetic and pre­ sents Alana with a gift. She knows this is inadequate. She tells Vincent that he needs to see her differently. “You have to learn to respect me,” she says. If the influence of Western culture has damaged the connections between Black men and Black women, Larkin’s message is that embracing the African diaspora

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can be a source of healing. Vincent’s embrace of his and Alana’s connection to the African diaspora demonstrates his openness to really seeing Alana. The gift he gives her is a pair of earrings with an image of a woman with braids “just like” Alana’s. He then tells Alana that he has been thinking about a fitting African name for her and says, “Your African name should be Isis.” Vincent’s recognition of the significance of Alana’s hairstyle and his acknowledgment of her heritage with an African name symbolize his willingness to see Alana differently—to see her as someone other than a sex object. The film “attempts to reconstitute knowledge as choice in order to decolonize the mind . . . and the soul.”61 The final frame shows Alana and Vincent facing each other, looking directly into each other’s eyes. Vincent’s facial expression seems to say, “I can see you.” Alana’s is one of caution, wondering, “Can I trust you? Can you really see me?” They are at a crossroads. Vincent can choose to see Alana differently, or not. Alana can accept Vincent’s apology, or not. Larkin suggests there is a possibility, even if it is just a small glimmer of hope, that the two of them can really see each other and find community and connection with each other.

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ZEINABU IRENE DAVIS: ON LOVE AND BELONGING

In All about Love, bell hooks contends that the “most precious gift that true love offers” is “the experience of knowing we always belong.”62 Love is belonging. It is being in touch with oneself and one’s community. Hooks’s treatise on love discusses the many ways love enhances our lives, including the belief that love is the connection to our spirit, our community, and ultimately our liberation. “Love is our hope and our salvation,” writes hooks.63 Though love takes many forms, romantic love between Black women and Black men is the focus of this section, and it is the foundation of Zeinabu irene Davis’s A Powerful Thang (1991), which she directed, produced, and co­wrote with Marc Arthur Chery. In A Powerful Thang, Davis reenvisions cinematic love between Black people, thereby resisting what her fellow L.A. Rebellion filmmaker Larkin refers to as the “cinematic genocide” that keeps Black women and men apart onscreen. As Larkin writes, “the real American sexual taboo is a black woman and man in love on screen,” and “it is up to us to break the cinematic taboo on stories of black love.”64 Similarly, as hooks states, the only way to decolonize our minds is by replacing images of lovelessness with “representations of care and affection, of black women and men bound by everlasting ties of mutual

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love.”65 By creating a story about finding love, belonging, and connecting, Davis moves us closer to decolonizing our minds and breaking the cinematic taboo about which Larkin writes. She leads us on the path toward liberation. Davis is clear about her intention to use filmmaking as a means to connect. In fact, she believes that connecting with Black communities is a necessity for Black filmmakers. As she explains, “Film-making, as a Black filmmaker, means not just making the films but also doing the important and necessary work of engaging with a live audience whenever possible. . . . The audience and I determine, as a collective, what Black means today in all its messy, problematic but yet wonderful ways.”66 Blackness, she recognizes, is as much an individual expression as a collective process. Davis creates from her standpoint as a Black woman, but she also keeps her community in mind. Intentionally, her community, her audience, is largely Black women: “My ideal audience is a concentric circle that constantly expands—first, Black women at its core; then Black people of all generations and gender orientations; and then others.”67 In Davis’s essay “Keeping the Black in Media Production,” she shares her perspective that film and other media can be a means of connection, as well as a source of education and entertainment. This is captured in her candid (and humorous) discussion about her daughters listening

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to Bruno Mars’s popular song “Gorilla”: “I love Bruno Mars. . . . But ‘Gorilla’ (2013) works my last nerve. . . . The song also insinuates that making love between humans is the same as sex between gorillas. As much as I wish we were post-racial, many people still construct Black people as savage apes. I do not want young Black men to think that they need to have the savage virility of gorillas! I’m still old school enough to want Otis Redding’s [version of] ‘Try a Little Tenderness’ (1966) to be the anthem of relationships in my girls’ lives.”68 Davis’s desire for her daughters to experience “tenderness” in their romantic relationships, rather than accepting the idea that sex between Black people is an unsentimental, animalistic activity, is echoed in the search for closeness between the two protagonists in her film A Powerful Thang. In A Powerful Thang, Davis depicts acts of tenderness and caring, as well as the powerful yearning for connection and intimacy, between Yasmine (played by Asma Feyijinmi) and Craig (played by John Earl Jelks), a young Black couple who have been dating for a month. They have not yet been sexually intimate. In fact, Yasmine has not been sexually intimate with anyone for two years. For the majority of the film, Yasmine and Craig are seen going through their day, in anticipation of spending an intimate evening together. Davis’s depiction of this anticipation compellingly conveys the human desire for connection,

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as well as Davis’s perspective that “quiet moments need to be discovered and explored” through film.69 Yasmine starts her day by writing an article at her computer, while her son, Akim, sits beside her. Her desire to see Craig that night is so powerful that her mind wanders: “I’d rather be thinking about tonight than writing this article on Black women’s self-image,” she thinks. Meanwhile, as Craig wakes up in the morning and gets to work—he is a saxophone player and a music teacher—he too is thinking of Yasmine: “Get this horn talking about Yasmine.” Though they are not yet together onscreen, Davis intersperses photographs of the three of them (Yasmine, Akim, and Craig) on various outings—to the National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center, the park, the fair—to capture the various times and ways they have been in joyous communion, leading up to this particular day and the evening to come. Yasmine and Craig have their own individual desires and vulnerabilities, but they are also in community with others. As they go through the day, preparing for their night together, their interactions solidify the interconnectedness between self and community. For example, when Yasmine drops her son off at her father’s, they have a conversation during which he casually provides his daughter with condoms. The level of comfort between them is evident as they joke around and discuss (safe)

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sex. Yasmine then attends a dance class with a group of women, where one of her friends hands her a gift box full of dental dams for her “seduction session tonight,” she says. She then adds, “Just because we’re living in dangerous time doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t enjoy the full pleasures of life. You know what I mean?” Yasmine then reciprocates by handing her friend a gift for her own seduction session, to which the friend responds, “Ooh, girl. This is her favorite kind.” They then wish each other luck on their respective nights of seduction and pleasure. The ease with which Yasmine talks to her father and her friend, making lighthearted conversation about sex and her love life, demonstrates the closeness and intimacy between them. Just as we see Yasmine spending time with her community throughout the day, Craig is shown in community with his friends and family. In his interactions, we see the “tenderness” that Davis values. Craig obviously desires Yasmine—this is apparent as he thinks to himself that it has been the “longest day” waiting to see her—but he also cares deeply for Yasmine and actively counters the sexist expectation that men only desire the physical act of sex. As he gets a haircut, the barber and a chorus of male patrons joke and offer advice about doing “the do.” One patron jokingly warns him that no one wants a “sixty-­ second man.” As Craig walks away from the barbershop,

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he thinks to himself that these men probably do not realize how he feels about Yasmine, suggesting that he does not think of her as a sexual conquest. When he returns home, he tells his mother that he is nervous about the evening and then shares, “I think I’m falling in love with Yasmine. I think I can be a good father to Akim, but I want to take it slow. . . . It’s just that I don’t want to get into something that’s just purely physical.” Craig may want to take it slow, but both Yasmine and Craig long for each other. As Yasmine prepares for the evening, her feelings are conveyed through a voice-over of her inner monologue: The ache of wanting that curls itself curiously around my every nerve. Craig, ebony prince or not, he is regal in spirit and may not come charging across a field on a black steed to lift me into storybook endings. But the way he brandishes a poem sends my soul reeling. The way he takes Akim like candy and cherishes the moments we spend together makes butterflies and cornflowers seem plain. . . . I know this is desire. I’ve dated over these past two years and not had this wanting. This needing to feel our connection in every cell of my body.

This longing, depicted through waiting and anticipation, is also essential to Davis’s earlier film Cycles (1989), which

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the film scholar Samantha Sheppard describes as portraying the “feeling and embodiment of animatedness, in the waiting rituals of a Black woman, gesturing toward a broader cultural and spiritual Black womanist subjectivity.”70 This emphasis on the stillness and process of waiting, portrayed from a woman’s point of view, aligns with Davis’s statement that the films of the L.A. Rebellion generally have “a slower pace” so as to notice the subtle details and intricacies of who and what are onscreen.71 In A Powerful Thang, Davis infuses the act of waiting with the feeling and embodiment of a desire for connection; this is expressed cinematically through Yasmine’s various spiritual and ritualistic practices. Thoughts and feelings about Craig run through Yasmine’s mind and body as she sits in the bath, water running over her whole body, symbolizing the entirety of her desire to connect with Craig. She wonders what this intense ache to connect means: “I can’t say that I feel ready to say that I love him. It’s just my mind interfering with my spirit and body. . . . Perhaps I do love him.” The dynamic flow of energy between having a strong sense of oneself as a human being and knowing that another human being sees those qualities fosters the kind of connection Yasmine and Craig are seeking. They both yearn to be fully accepted and embraced for their true selves. They are seeking what hooks describes as the most

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precious gift of true love: “the experience of knowing we always belong.”72 This sense of belonging is the epitome and essence of a connected self. As Yasmine sits in front of the mirror, she looks at her reflection and really sees herself, and she hopes Craig can see her too: “Black women are truly like densely woven water baskets. Practical, beautiful, artistic, and adaptable. I hope Craig sees this in me,” she thinks. Craig, too, wants to feel that sense of belonging and connection. Although Craig moves through his day in a confident and self-assured way, Davis presents his vulnerability when he wonders to himself, “Is she willing to take me as I am?” Yasmine and Craig are with each other even when they are physically apart. Their connection is conveyed in their thoughts of each other and their hopes for the relationship. After the long day of anticipation and Craig’s long drive to Yasmine’s house, he eagerly knocks—or, more accurately, bangs—on the door. Yasmine opens the door, and they smile as they finally see each other. There are several awkward moments before Davis, with a tonguein-cheek approach, has a camera person come onscreen to announce that it is time for the seduction scene. This breaking of the fourth wall is a reflection of Davis’s goal to connect with her audience. The soundtrack for the seduction scene is Rufus and Chaka Khan’s “Tell Me Something Good”—a fitting

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choice, indeed. Yasmine and Craig lie in bed, kissing, caressing, and exploring each other’s bodies, wanting to experience the other person completely. If Chaka Khan’s words “What I got will sho’ nuff do you good” are any indication of their thoughts, they want to give of themselves for the “good” of the other person. But when Yasmine turns to Craig and says, “I want you,” she finds that he has fallen asleep and is snoring. Although the two of them spend the night together, they have no need for the gifts from Yasmine’s father and friend. When they wake up, Yasmine tells Craig that she had hoped to make love the previous night, and he responds, “Sex is a powerful thang. You know, people that make love too soon run into serious problems. You see, they fall in love with the bodies before they really get a chance to know each other. I like you. . . . I want to know you.” Craig’s display of love and tenderness—the tenderness Davis wants her daughters to see more of in the media— touches Yasmine deeply. By the end of the film, she says, “If sex is a powerful thing, then love must be omnipotence.” The connection between them, Yasmine realizes, is love. With each other, Yasmine and Craig have found a place where they belong.

3 MOVING INTO THE MAINSTREAM

“It was like having gone to heaven. It was just a magnificent thing. I guess as artists we really are searching for an audience, and you just want to communicate with them. So it was just really beautiful that the story found its way into other people’s hearts.”1 That is how Kasi Lemmons described her reaction to the overwhelming praise for Eve’s Bayou (1997), her directorial debut. In fact, Eve’s Bayou was one of the first feature films directed by a Black woman to get a theatrical distribution, and it became one of the highest grossing independent films of 1997.2 Balancing a director’s artistic vision with film executives’ expectations of commercial success is part of the tightrope walking involved in making a feature film for theatrical release. The Black women who are the focus of this chapter were successful in this endeavor, and their films, made during the 1980s and 1990s, were some of 64

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the first directed by Black women to become available to large US audiences in theaters. The Black feminist scholar bell hooks explains the complex dynamic between individual artistic creation and the socioeconomic context in which the film industry operates: “I am acutely aware of the way in which our longing to experiment, to create from a multiplicity of standpoints, meets with resistance from those whose interest in that work is primarily commercial, from audiences and from critics. . . . Everyone wants more of what sells.”3 Hooks is describing the limitations that have become institutionalized in Hollywood and that marginalize people of color—notably, Black women—because of a misguided notion of what “sells” or what audiences want to watch. This notion is largely based on inadequate data about what audiences have watched in the past. An obvious problem with this calculation is that audiences’ options have been limited by film executives’ decisions about which films to make available, resulting in a continuation of the homogeneous status quo. The tension between an artist’s desire to engage in experimental work and the commercial film industry’s expectations is explained by the filmmaker Julie Dash, who laments that Hollywood “tells you there is no room for the avant-garde.”4 Although the context of capitalism may allow Hollywood executives to cite money as

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the seemingly objective excuse for rejecting a film, cultural and institutional factors, such as anti-Blackness and patriarchy, are clearly operating in tandem with economic factors. This web of marginalization sidelined many Black women filmmakers whose work was labeled too avant-garde or risky for mainstream audiences, and it kept them out of Hollywood for decades—until the late 1980s. How do Black women directors balance the personal, artistic, and political passions that drive their work as filmmakers with the commercial, moneymaking focus that drives Hollywood? Is it possible for Black women directors to “let their imaginations soar when they face a culture that is still so closed?”5 These are the questions that guide this chapter. As I discuss in detail, many Black women filmmakers regularly challenge the perception that the stories they want to tell will not connect with audiences. Resistance to and outright rejection of the ideas of Black women directors are common in the film industry, and money, used as a proxy for race and gender, is the primary explanation for this resistance. Thanks to the ingenuity and bravery of the Black women directors who preceded them, the directors who are the focus of this chapter skillfully navigated the culture of Hollywood, exercising an admirable amount of persistence and creatively leveraging their resources to share their stories. As

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Kasi Lemmons says, they found a way for their stories to reach other people’s hearts. Euzhan Palcy, a native of the Caribbean island of Martinique, was the first Black woman to direct a feature film distributed by a major Hollywood studio (A Dry White Season, 1989), and Julie Dash was the first African American woman to direct an independent feature film with theatrical distribution (Daughters of the Dust, 1991). As I discuss in detail in this chapter, their different approaches demonstrate the diversity of methods used by Black women directors to navigate the film industry. Following the success of Palcy and Dash, Leslie Harris (Just Another Girl on the IRT, 1992), Darnell Martin (I Like It Like That, 1994), Cheryl Dunye (The Watermelon Woman, 1996), Kasi Lemmons (Eve’s Bayou, 1997), and Maya Angelou (Down in the Delta, 1998) all directed theatrically released feature films. Harris, Martin, Dunye, and Lemmons also wrote the original screenplays for their first feature-length films, allowing them a substantial degree of agency throughout the creative filmmaking process. Down in the Delta is significant because it is the only film directed by the renowned Pulitzer Prize–­ nominated author Maya Angelou. In the following sections, I focus on Euzhan Palcy, Julie Dash, and Kasi Lemmons. I am particularly interested in the paths taken and choices made by each of

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these filmmakers, as well as the resistance and support they encountered.

EUZHAN PALCY: EDUCATING AUDIENCES, CHALLENGING INJUSTICE

“I consider myself an educator and, being a black filmmaker from the Caribbean, also a kind of anthropologist or archeologist,” states Euzhan Palcy.6 Her goal in filmmaking is to uncover and share the truth that has been excluded from cultural and cinematic narratives. That Palcy was the first Black woman to direct a feature film in Hollywood is remarkable but not necessarily surprising when one considers her background. She decided to become a filmmaker when she was just ten years old.7 The young Palcy thought to herself, “Why aren’t we a part of something so amazing; how can we [Black folks] be excluded from such a great thing?” And she adds, “I was young, but even then, I couldn’t accept it, so my frustration became anger, and I had to transform that anger into creativity, to do something about it, to learn how to make films, and then try to change this injustice.”8 Faced with the long history of Black people’s voices being excluded from cinematic narratives, Palcy sought to change the trajectory and use film to create a more just society. The

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evidence of her success is resounding: A Dry White Season (1989) was a turning point in film history. A Dry White Season represents Palcy’s Black feminist, or Pan-African feminist,9 approach to filmmaking within the context of Hollywood. This distinction is important because, although she made cinematic history and won praise from US audiences and critics for this film, it was not her first feature. That was a French-language film titled Rue Cases-Nègres (1983), which became available in English as Sugar Cane Alley in 1984. Sugar Cane Alley focuses on the legacy of slavery and colonial oppression in Palcy’s native country and is based on the Martinique native Joseph Zobel’s novel La Rue Cases-Nègres (translated as Black Shack Alley). According to Palcy, that was the first book she read “by a black man, a black of [her] country, a black who was speaking about poor people.”10 Palcy’s direction (and writing) of a film based on a novel by a Black author about Black characters in her native Martinique reflects her motivation to tell stories that reverse the exclusion of Black voices from film. Sugar Cane Alley and A Dry White Season are both narratives that reveal the inhumane and violent history of slavery and the legacy of colonialism from the Caribbean to South Africa. “I’m always digging, trying to look for the truth, for the memory of the past, to find out who we

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are, where we came from, and what we can offer,” Palcy explains in an interview.11 Her statement is reminiscent of Alice Walker’s description of a womanist “wanting to know more and in greater depth than is considered ‘good’ for one.”12 Palcy considers it her responsibility to educate the public about the harmful realities faced by people of the African diaspora that have been disregarded or underexamined. The impact of Palcy’s filmmaking is clear: “The power of these cinematic records disallows forgetting. But more than that, their connectedness keeps alive histories of oppression that cross national and regional borders, and invokes Pan-African imaginaries of resistance to its ongoing and emergent forms.”13 Palcy became a filmmaker for a very specific reason: to educate others about the injustices facing people of African descent. As such, she has been selective about the films she directs and how she chooses to direct them. She explains, “Why should I bother doing something, put my name and my energy in a project that I don’t give a damn about? Just to get some more dollars? I don’t want to do that. If I die tomorrow and I’ve done only five movies, I don’t care because I know that those are five movies I did with my guts. I really fought for them and I’m very happy that I did them.”14 Both Sugar Cane Alley and A Dry White Season are based on novels, and Palcy decided to adapt these two novels for film because she adamantly

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felt that these stories needed to be shared. Much scholarship has analyzed Palcy’s choices as a director in her film adaptations, which point to a Black or Pan-­African feminist perspective. Palcy’s Pan-African feminist embrace of female autonomy and self-reliance, as well as her prioritization of collectivity over individualism, is evident in the female characters in her first feature film, Sugar Cane Alley. The film tells the story of José (played by Garry Cadenat), a boy growing up in Martinique during the 1930s. He lives with his grandmother Ma Tine (played by Darling Légitimus), who works on a sugarcane plantation. Because of Ma Tine’s sacrifices, José is able to attend school, which she hopes will give him an opportunity at a better life. José is the protagonist of the story, but the scholar Christine Gaudry-Hudson argues that the film should also be viewed as “an homage to strong black women.”15 Palcy’s Ma Tine is an expanded version of the character in the novel, emphasizing her as a strong Black female presence and spotlighting the values of female autonomy and self-reliance. Additionally, Gaudry-Hudson suggests that Palcy fused the positive traits of José’s mother and grandmother into the one character, Ma Tine, because the mother has too many flaws in the novel. By strategically extracting and merging the characteristics of the two women, Palcy enhances the strength and positive

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influence of her film’s lead Black female character. Additionally, as a reflection of the value of collectivity over individualism, the scholar Ebrahim Haseenah notes that “women play a prominent role in José’s life—Madame Léonce, Mam’zelle Delice, Madame Fusil, etc., all take care of him from time to time. . . . The love of the women for José, as well as for each other, is reflected in the care that other women take of Ma Tine and of José.”16 Palcy’s narrative also reflects the Pan-African feminist respect for the oral tradition of storytelling as an empowering and invaluable system of knowledge. José develops a connection with an elder named Médouze (played by Douta Seck), who becomes a father figure and acts as a storyteller and historian of Martinique—a counter­balance to the education José receives at school.17 Haseenah argues that Palcy’s film adaptation alters some aspects of José’s relationship with Médouze in order to emphasize a Pan-African feminist–based respect for alternative knowledge systems. For instance, in the novel, Médouze dies before José starts attending school, whereas in the film, Médouze lives for an extended period, allowing him more time to share the society’s oral history and act as “a countervailing force to that of the school and French colonial culture.”18 Palcy also adjusts Médouze’s telling of Black Caribbean history to give “agency to blacks themselves for their role in ending slavery through

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their rebellions, while also exposing the mechanisms by which the whites continue to wield power.”19 As the scholar Judylyn Ryan argues, “Although based on Joseph Zobel’s novel Rue Cases-Nègres (1950), Sugar Cane Alley features several important innovations in its depiction of the community’s struggle to unlock the many doors to freedom.”20 Palcy directed A Dry White Season (1989) under different circumstances. Whereas Sugar Cane Alley was filmed in Martinique and was independently funded through a grant from the French government and with help from Palcy’s mentor, the French director-critic François Truffaut,21 A Dry White Season was supported by a major Holly­wood film studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), and includes a cast of white celebrities—namely, Marlon Brando, Donald Sutherland, and Susan Sarandon. As an independent filmmaker in France, Palcy had to struggle: “At the very beginning, when I started in the business with Sugar Cane Alley, I did have problems when I presented that project. It was difficult for me to find the money, difficult to convince people to trust me because I was female, black, and young.”22 But after she overcame the struggle to make her award-winning film, Hollywood found Palcy.23 Palcy describes A Dry White Season as a “Hollywood production, but not a Hollywood film.”24 This framing

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of the film foregrounds Palcy’s awareness of the context in which she was working (a Hollywood production), while exercising her agency as a Black woman director (not a Hollywood film). The scholar Jacqueline Main­ gard argues that “the fact that a major Hollywood studio funded A Dry White Season, with established parameters with which Palcy had to contend, has not completely disabled the political component of her work. . . . Notwithstanding the compromises of Hollywood production, mainly in the form of the white male protagonist as the primary narrational agent, Palcy’s determination to include local theater and film actors adds a significant level of authenticity.”25 The film is based on a 1979 novel of the same name by the South African writer André Brink. It was inspired by the Soweto uprising of 1976, in which hundreds of Black schoolchildren were killed. As in Palcy’s previous film, she approached her adaptation of this book from a Black feminist perspective.26 In the film, Ben du Toit (played by Donald Sutherland), a white schoolteacher in South Africa, “undergoes a process of political awakening.”27 This occurs after Gordon Ngubene (played by Winston Ntshona), a Black gardener, seeks du Toit’s assistance when Ngubene’s son, Jonathan (played by Bekhithemba Mpofu), is detained and tortured by the police. After the teacher’s initial inaction, Gordon and

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Jonathan are both tortured and die in prison, leading du Toit to seek the help of the lawyer Ian McKenzie (played by Marlon Brando). Palcy explains her approach to adapting the novel to reflect her own standpoint, rather than that of Hollywood executives: “When André Brink wrote that book, it was a story of a white man: how that white man came to awareness, the story of a white Afrikaner’s awakening. My vision was a little different. I decided to tell the story in a way that showed his journey of blindness to consciousness, but I also wanted to tell the story of two families in South Africa. What happens when a man from [the white] community becomes aware? But also, what’s been happening to the Black people in the community?”28 Ben du Toit’s awakening is partly the result of the interventions of Stanley (played by Zakes Mokae), a Soweto taxi driver and a friend of the Ngubene family. As one writer recently noted, “Palcy lets her Black hero have the last word.”29 Du Toit is ultimately killed by the same white police officer who tortured Gordon and Jonathan. Palcy explains, “They [Ben and Stanley] worked together, and Ben died, but Stanley got justice. They exposed the police.”30 Hooks praises A Dry White Season for its “complex representation of whiteness” through Ben’s rejection of white patriarchy, thereby posing “critical questions

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about the intersection of race and gender, about sexuality and power, that are rarely addressed in cinema.”31 The scholar Melvin Donalson reiterates the effectiveness of Palcy’s use of a white male protagonist as a condemnation of white male privilege: “Placing the character of Ben du Toit at the center serves as an effective method for showing the responsibility whites should assume in order to catch up to the freedom fight already waged by black women and men. Du Toit is not a white martyr, but a victim of his own ignorance and indifference.”32 “Given the kind of movies that I make, people might think that my primary audience is black people; but I would say that it’s the world—it’s everybody,” explains Palcy in an interview. She elaborates, “I’m trying to work on both levels with my movies, on the black level to bring information to the black audience, and on a wider level for the rest of the world—white, Japanese, Indians, whoever—to give my message to them as well.”33 Given these statements about her perceived audience, along with her self-identification as an educator, it is clear that Palcy’s vocation is to educate the masses about the history of people of African descent through filmmaking. Palcy is an astute filmmaker, and as such, she was aware of the realities she would have to navigate when she agreed to make A Dry White Season—a film about apartheid with Hollywood packaging. Following a 1990

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screening, Palcy was asked whether it is possible to make a commercial film about South Africa that does not turn into a story about a white middle-class family. She replied, “That is the kind of question that we should ask the people with the money and the power to produce films.”34 A Dry White Season is a commercial film, yet it tells an important story about Black people living under the apartheid system in South Africa. It allowed Palcy to educate everybody—or at least the masses of people who flocked to theaters to see an MGM film starring Marlon Brando—on an issue she felt passionately about. Donalson writes that Palcy’s film may have enlightened audiences: “With the political changes toward democracy that occurred in South Africa in the early 1990s, perhaps Palcy’s film was one of the numerous factors that brought attention to the genocide in that country.”35 After A Dry White Season, Palcy directed several films from her home base in France as well as in the United States, and she has continued to tell stories about Black people. Her films include Siméon (1992), a French film and Palcy’s first feature based on her own original screenplay; Aimé Césaire: A Voice for History (1994), a three-part documentary about the Martinican poet, playwright, and politician Aimé Césaire; Ruby Bridges (1998), a television movie produced by Disney about the first African American child to desegregate a Louisiana elementary school;

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and The Killing Yard (2001), a television movie based on the 1971 Attica prison rebellion. During a groundbreaking and prolific career, Euzhan Palcy has developed a strategy for working in Hollywood. True to her style of filmmaker as educator, she explains, “If I have to compromise, I refuse to distort history. . . . When I’m working with a studio I am very clear about who I am, what I want to do, and how I want to work with them.”36 Palcy is steadfast in her goal of educating audiences about the history of people of African descent. And she is clear about her boundaries: “If it doesn’t work out, I don’t care. I have other stuff to do.”37

JULIE DASH: PRIVILEGING BLACK WOMEN

“I wanted black women first, the black community second, white women third. That’s who I was trying to privilege with this film. And everyone else after that.”38 Julie Dash is referring to her vision for her first feature film, Daughters of the Dust (1991). Dash explains that she “always knew” she wanted to make films about African American women—to “tell the stories that had not been told” and show the images “that had not been seen.”39 Dash was introduced to filmmaking at the age of seven­ teen at the Studio Museum in Harlem. She made her first film when she was nineteen and graduated from City

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College of New York with a degree in film production. She moved from New York to Los Angeles because she wanted to make narrative films (rather than documentaries), and that is where she found a community of Black filmmakers at UCLA. Through it all, and throughout her career, Dash has been unwavering in her philosophy of putting Black women first. In chapter 2, I discussed Dash’s work as a filmmaker of the L.A. Rebellion, focusing on one of her short narrative films, Illusions (1982). Here, I broaden my discussion to the trajectory of her career and her philosophy as a filmmaker, with special attention to the process of garnering support for her first theatrically released feature film, Daughters of the Dust.40 In making her first feature film, Dash’s approach mirrored the philosophy and goal of the L.A. Rebellion filmmakers: to avoid Hollywood restrictions and conventions. Daughters of the Dust was funded through various grants and independent supporters, rather than through a Hollywood studio. As Dash pointedly states, “This is not a Hollywood film.”41 Euzhan Palcy made a similar comment about her film A Dry White Season, reflecting a parallel framing that the Hollywood model is not adequate to tell the stories Black women filmmakers want to tell. More so than the usual Hollywood narrative, Dash’s film openly embraces the multisensory possibilities in

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film, allowing viewers to experience its layered visual and emotional sensations. Daughters of the Dust is about multiple generations of Black women living on South Carolina’s St. Helena Island at the turn of the twentieth century and revolves around the family’s migration north. Dash’s nonlinear and multisensory approach to the narrative allows an unborn child and ancestors who have passed on to be part of the present story, and it power­fully conveys the connections between Black women across time and space. Importantly, Dash explains that Daughters of the Dust is “not what ‘Hollywood’ would call a plot-driven story.”42 Dash’s film works on an emotional level, “in ways that have less to do with what happens in the plot than with the ways the characters personalize the broader traumas, triumphs, tragedies and anxieties peculiar to the African American experience.”43 She brings us inside the point of view of several Black women as they engage in intimate conversations and everyday activities. The depth and inclusiveness of Dash’s approach to portraying Black women led Judylyn Ryan to observe that the film demonstrates a “democracy of narrative participation,” referring to a “pattern of representation in which characters who would otherwise be considered ‘marginal’ are allowed to occupy the narrative foreground.”44

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As the scholar Janell Hobson states, Dash’s film “stands unrivaled in American cinema for its complex and profound depictions of sensual and diverse black female bodies,” making this film the benchmark by which Black feminist cinema is often assessed.45 The film also succeeds like no other in highlighting the visual beauty of Black women of various ages, skin tones, and hairstyles, with the camera and light “caressing them rather than assaulting them.”46 Several Black actors who embody this diverse beauty are featured in the film, including Barbara-O, Cheryl Lynn Bruce, Cora Lee Day, Trula Hoosier, Kaycee Moore, Alva Rogers, and Bahni Turpin. Dash began her research for Daughters of the Dust while she was a film student at UCLA. The original goal was to make a short silent film about the migration of an African American family from the Sea Islands off South Carolina. However, her ideas grew to the point that, as Dash explains, “it became clear that a short film would not be large enough for the story. I knew I would have to make a feature. There was too much information, and it had to be shared.”47 Dash ultimately completed ten years of research to fully understand the underlying and underrecognized history of her subject; she then took this factual historical information and infused it with an imaginative construction, creating a story of speculative fiction.48

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Daughters of the Dust represents the merging of Dash’s desire to uncover this underexplored history and her passion for narrative film. She wanted to share information about Black history that Hollywood’s homogeneous narratives about the southern United States had left out. She explains, I see it on TV all the time . . . a false notion of the ante­ bellum South and the postwar South. It’s still false, but people are still going with it. It’s all cotton picking when cotton wasn’t the only thing—it’s indigo, it’s tobacco, it’s all kinds of things. And then there were the enslaved people who lived, for instance, in Charleston. In the city, where my people are from, they didn’t work plantations, they were craftspeople. No one really showed that type of slavery because it doesn’t depict the aesthetic frame that’s been established with Gone with the Wind with picking cotton.49

Researching and envisioning Daughters of the Dust was a long process, but finding the financial support to make the film was a battle. Dash pulled together the necessary resources by leveraging money from organizations such as the National Endowment for the Arts, Fulton County Arts Council, Georgia Council for the Humanities, Women Make Movies Too, and American Playhouse.

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Dash also approached Hollywood studio executives but found no support there: “They could not process the fact that a black woman filmmaker wanted to make a film about African American women at the turn of the century—particularly a film with a strong family. . . . They believed they knew better than we did about what moved black people.”50 Dash’s persistence suggests that she was, among other things, hopeful. She had enough hope and enough belief in herself and in her community to fight for her film—her vision and story—to be made. After she finished the film, Dash explains, “I was certain that now that the film was complete, distribution would not be a problem. . . . I was wrong. All the distribution companies turned it down. I was told over and over again that there was no market for the film.”51 Despite continued resistance, Dash persevered. After showing the film at several festivals, including the Sundance Festival, a small company called Kino International agreed to distribute the film. The executives who turned Dash down were wrong in their assertion that there was no market for her film. The scholar Jacqueline Bobo notes that Daughters of the Dust reached communities of Black women as no other film had: Black women made up 90 percent of the audience, and most of them left the theater with a feeling of empower­ment and connection to other Black women.52

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Daughters of the Dust has had a lasting cultural impact, shaping the frame of Black feminist cinema and media in academia and popular culture. The film was selected for preservation in the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” and was an inspiration for Beyoncé’s hugely popular visual album Lemonade (2016).53 The film has also shaped Dash’s career. She has worked on many projects in film and television, yet, as she explains, “I think people can’t really understand how I did Love Song, Funny Valentines, Incognito, The Rosa Parks Story. They’re all very different types of films, different genres. But they just don’t mention it because they think, she does historical dramas, she can’t do something like a Love Song, a romantic comedy.”54 Daughters of the Dust is such an exceptional and culturally significant film that it has become the framework through which Dash’s entire career is viewed. When Dash was asked in a 2016 interview what she hopes her legacy will be, she responded, “I hope people remember that Julie Dash was a great mother, . . . and I hope some of that mothering, that nurturing, comes through in my films as well.”55 Dash continues to succeed at nurturing and inspiring Black women artists, audiences, and communities through her creative work.

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KASI LEMMONS: THE CREATIVE AS POLITICAL

“My objective is for people to look at my movie as a work of art first. It has an all African American cast and it’s an African American story. That’s incredibly important and also incredibly incidental.”56 This is how Kasi Lemmons described her first feature film, Eve’s Bayou (1997), in an interview a year after its release. Having embodied the roles of director, writer, and actor, Lemmons sees herself as an artist, first and foremost. Blackness is “incredibly important” in her work; her artistic vision is guided by her identity and experiences as a Black woman, and her art centers Black characters.57 Her caveat that Blackness is also “incredibly incidental” is a reflection of her wish to express herself freely, without the external limitations based on a culture of anti-Blackness. Her desire for people to see her film as a work of art first, with its Black cast and Black story as incidental, alludes to mainstream culture’s tendency to compartmentalize and marginalize anything labeled “African American” or “Black.” By insisting that her film not be judged based on preconceptions about Blackness, Lemmons is working to stretch the boundaries of Blackness in film. Lemmons is aware that, as a Black woman, any art she creates is also political. She states, “Inherently my writing is political. Inherently I’m political, just by being and

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creating. . . . Our responsibility is to persevere and to keep creating—and from a place of honesty. Not meaning that everything you write has to be true, but has to have a truth and a truth that is inherent to us.”58 Being true to herself, as a Black woman, makes her art inherently political. By being true to her vision of Eve’s Bayou—a story that takes place in a self-contained all-Black community— Lemmons made both an artistic and a political statement: “It was very important that it was one hundred percent African American, because these are the people of Eve’s life. People asked me to put in white characters, and I would say, ‘Well, there aren’t any. It’s my bayou.’ To me that had its own power and stirred things up.”59 Lemmons’s truth and her identity as an artist shine through in her first feature film. It is her vision and her story, and she exercised agency over how it appeared onscreen. “Certainly Eve’s Bayou is a place where, I felt that, very close to 100 percent of what I wanted got on the screen—very, very close. .  .  . It came very close to being the movie that was in my head, and, that was, kind of, a magical experience,” says Lemmons.60 Lemmons wrote the original screenplay as an exercise in artistic expression—not with the goal of turning it into a film for theatrical audiences. Its subsequent box-office success was never her objective: “I didn’t care if anybody liked it. It made me laugh and cry. And I would sit there and cry

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and laugh, and that was really what I needed to get out of it, and I didn’t really need anything else. All the rest has been icing.”61 Eve’s Bayou tells the story of the Batistes, a wealthy Creole family living in rural Louisiana during the mid-twentieth century. Lemmons’s inspired decision to have ten-year-old Eve ( Jurnee Smollett), the youngest daughter, narrate the story is a reflection of the fact that Lemmons draws, in part, from her own childhood memories.62 The adult Eve begins the narration with a voiceover in which she states, “The summer I killed my father, I was ten years old.” This sets the stage for the unfolding of events that lead to the death of Eve’s father. Lemmons weaves together her research on the history of Creole culture in the South and a narrative that questions the dominant culture’s presentation of one version of history as objective fact.63 Memory and other forms of knowledge that are generally undervalued in the dominant culture are central to the narrative, reflecting the Black feminist appreciation for alternative knowledge systems.64 In addition to Eve, the predominantly female, multigenerational Batiste family includes Cisely (Eve’s older sister, played by Meagan Good), Roz (Eve’s mother, played by Lynn Whitfield), Louis (Eve’s father, played by Samuel L. Jackson), and Aunt Mozelle (played by Debbi Morgan). Diahann

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Carroll also appears in the film, playing Elzora, who, like Eve and Mozelle, is a seer. The visions of Elzora, Mozelle, and Eve function as valuable forms of knowledge within the narrative of Eve’s Bayou. In appreciation of Julie Dash’s seminal work of art, Lemmons recognizes her connection to her fellow filmmaker: “Daughters of the Dust was one of those films where I said, oh, we speak the same language.”65 Lemmons had not seen Daughters of the Dust prior to making Eve’s Bayou, and the two films are distinct in their plot, narrative, historical time frame, geographic context, and characters. Still, the two films have often been compared, based on their incorporation of West African cultural practices,66 their remembrance of the history of slavery and its impact on Black women,67 and their depiction of Black women reclaiming sexual agency in the context of the southern United States.68 One distinction that the scholar Kara Keeling makes between Daughters of the Dust and Eve’s Bayou—a distinction at the heart of my discussion of films made for commercial theatrical distribution—is that the latter film incorporates more techniques employed in Hollywood.69 For instance, Eve’s Bayou includes a cast of well-known actors (Samuel L. Jackson, Lynn Whitfield, Diahann Carroll, Debbi Morgan) and a linear narrative—offering something familiar for film executives to grab onto. This

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distinction probably contributed to the different levels of financial support from stakeholders in Hollywood and the breadth of theatrical distribution and box-office performance.70 Lemmons and Dash were similarly motivated to tell original stories about Black women, and both were able to bring their visions to the screen. However, their prior experiences and perspectives resulted in different films. Specifically, Lemmon’s prior work in Hollywood presented her with a different path for bringing her idea to fruition. Unlike the directors discussed thus far, Lemmons started her career in Hollywood as an actor. Her experiences as an actor inspired her to become a filmmaker and provided invaluable intellectual and social capital when she faced the challenges of making her first feature film. Lemmons had roles in numerous television series and feature films, including Spike Lee’s School Daze (1988) and Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991). Although acting was Lemmons’s first love, it did not allow her to fully express herself creatively. So she attended film school and redirected her love of telling stories as an actor toward writing and directing.71 Lemmons describes her journey toward directing this way: “It happened. . . . It unfolded in ways that I couldn’t have predicted. Looking at it in retrospect, I can say these three things were married and this was a future that

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was inside of me from the beginning. I was a writer and actor, and the marriage of acting and writing was going to be directing.”72 But this description does not capture the barriers she had to overcome to find support for Eve’s Bayou. After writing the screenplay, she enlisted the help of her acting agent, who forwarded the script to a literary agent, who circulated it in Hollywood. Lemmons explains, “Eve’s Bayou is one of these scripts that had a lot of fans, but people weren’t just jumping over each other to make it. They thought it would be a difficult film to make. . . . An all African-American cast was the major reason.”73 After the film was turned down repeatedly, Lemmons’s agent connected her with the producer Caldecot “Cotty” Chubb, whom Lemmons describes as someone who appreciated the film’s story and artistry: “Cotty saw it as a piece of art. He could isolate it. He could look at it and say, ‘I really like this, and I think this is worth making.’ ”74 And most important, he was in a position to make that happen: “He [Cotty] produced half of the film out of his own pocket and my agents lent me the rest.”75 These social connections were key to overcoming the financial barriers that often prevent even the most brilliant script from becoming a film. Lemmons did not originally intend to direct Eve’s Bayou; but it was her story to tell, and she realized that directing the film was the only way to ensure that her

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vision came across onscreen. She describes the moment she made the decision: “One day—it was my birthday—I had an epiphany. I woke up and I thought, ‘Somebody else is going to fuck it up.’ So I decided that I was the person to deliver the film.”76 Chubb urged Lemmons to first direct a short film based on a scene from the screenplay, which would demonstrate her skills as a director (this became Dr. Hugo, 1996).77 The turning point came when Samuel L. Jackson read the script and saw the short film. “Sam was willing to take the chance because he is a very adventurous actor. It was with his support [ Jackson was also a producer] that it got made,” said Lemmons.78 The final piece of the puzzle fell into place when Trimark Pictures agreed to distribute the film. In the end, Lemmons’s film found its way into more hearts than she ever could have imagined. Eve’s Bayou won several awards, including Best Directorial Debut from the National Board of Review and the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature. In 2018, Eve’s Bayou was added to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry as a culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant film. Lemmons has continued to build a prolific career as a filmmaker, directing The Caveman’s Valentine (2001) and Talk to Me (2007) and writing and directing Black Nativity (2013). Lemmons also wrote and directed Harriet

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(2019), the first theatrical feature film about the African American activist and abolitionist Harriet Tubman. When Lemmons was questioned about her decision to cast Cynthia Erivo, a Black British actor, in the role of the iconic Tubman, the director defended her artistic vision: “I certainly understand and respect the conversation. But I think I could tell you, her [Erivo’s] work was so sincere and true that, almost, you have to see the movie. You know what I mean? For me, I’m looking at a woman with recent ancestors from West Africa playing a woman with recent ancestors from West Africa, who is tiny, who is mighty, who can sing as Harriet did. And acts her face off. She’s just so good.”79 Lemmons felt that Erivo was right for the role, and compromising on that decision would have meant compromising on her responsibility to create art from a place of honesty. She stood by her creative choice, which was, drawing from the words of Lemmons, inherently political. And once again, with Harriet, her creative vision found its way into many people’s hearts.

4 MORE THAN MAINSTREAM “My truth is I don’t want a chair at the table. . . . I want the table to be rebuilt. In my likeness. And in the likeness of others long forced out of the room.”1 The filmmaker Ava DuVernay was talking about her role as a Black woman in the film industry. Inclusion in mainstream Hollywood is not good enough; incorporating a few others into an inadequate system (at an unsound table) will only result in a similar outcome with a slightly different facade. Instead, DuVernay is working to disrupt and dismantle the systematic exclusion of marginalized groups from the film industry. By rebuilding the table, so to speak, with a different structure and a different purpose, cultural transformation may be possible. DuVernay’s declaration is akin to the oft-cited statement of the Black feminist Audre Lorde: “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”2 In her renowned speech delivered at a conference in 1979, Lorde pointedly asked, “What does it mean when the 93

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tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable.”3 In other words, we cannot adequately assess progress by applying the existing, taken-for-granted standards and principles of the mainstream culture. Lorde and DuVernay both apply the metaphor of breaking something down and building something new—something that reflects true structural transformation rather than small tweaks to the veneer. There is an extensive history of Black women directors disrupting the status quo and finding creative ways to tell their stories through film. Black women have long approached filmmaking creatively and strategically, utilizing a multitude of tools to build their careers and reimagine what is possible in the film industry. To this day, Black women directors continue to forge opportunities through independent filmmaking, where they enjoy a degree of artistic freedom. However, Black women’s films have also become significantly more abundant and recognizable within the dominant culture, receiving financial support and achieving critical success at unprecedented rates and catching the attention of powerful and resourcerich film studios. For instance, when the director Gina Prince-Bythewood released her breakout feature film Love & Basketball in 2000, its domestic gross earnings

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exceeded $27 million, making it the top-grossing film written and directed by a Black woman up to that point.4 Prince-Bythewood went on to direct the film adaptation of the best-selling novel The Secret Life of Bees (2008), which eclipsed the box-office earnings of her first film. Jumping ahead a decade, Ava DuVernay directed a film adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time (2018), distributed by Walt Disney Studios, which earned more than $100 million at the domestic box office ($133 million worldwide).5 Ava DuVernay has become the most visible Black woman film director of the past decade, earning Glamour magazine’s Woman of the Year Award in 2019. This recognition led to the declaration that “Ava DuVernay is going to fix our country, one film at a time.”6 As hyperbolic as that statement may be, DuVernay has been steadfast in her determination to resist and reframe expectations in Hollywood. True to her goal of rebuilding the film industry in her likeness and that of others who have been forced out of Hollywood, DuVernay wrote, directed, and distributed her first narrative films through her own film distribution collective, ARRAY. She has broken down barriers and crossed boundaries to make both documentary and narrative films, to work in the independent space as well as with large film studios, to create films for both theatrical distribution and streaming platforms. Most importantly, she has done so on her own terms and has

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provided a forum for other filmmakers from marginalized groups to do the same. Because of DuVernay’s multifaceted and highly visible career as a filmmaker, I use her as the frame for this chapter, which is both reflective of the past and hopeful about the future. Certainly, DuVernay is not alone in working to transform the film industry. She has been preceded by and is presently surrounded by other Black women directors whose cinematic visions are reshaping the landscape of the film industry. DuVernay and others continue the work of redesigning the film industry and redefining cultural narratives through documentary and narrative films, including those created for streaming and nontheatrical platforms. Their work is broadening both the stories told through film and the outlets for sharing those stories.

BEING AN OUTSIDER IN HOLLYWOOD

Ava DuVernay gained invaluable insights about the filmmaking business in Hollywood before she made her first film. These insights reflect the “outsider-within” position described by Patricia Hill Collins in Black Feminist Thought in reference to Black women intellectuals in academic spaces: “The assumptions on which full group membership are based—Whiteness for feminist thought, maleness for Black social and political thought, and the

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combination for mainstream scholarship—all negate Black women’s realities. Prevented from becoming full insiders in any of these areas of inquiry, Black women remain in outsider-within locations, individuals whose marginality provided a distinctive angle of vision on these intellectual and political entities.”7 According to Collins, observing from an outsider’s position has yielded valuable forms of knowledge for Black women. Echoing the spirit of the L.A. Rebellion filmmakers (see chapter 2), DuVernay sought alternatives to the traditional offerings of mainstream Hollywood.8 And similar to earlier filmmakers whose work was specifically intended for theatrical distribution, such as Euzhan Palcy, Julie Dash, and Kasi Lemmons (see chapter 3), DuVernay skillfully navigated the art and the business of directing and distributing films. However, unlike the L.A. Rebellion filmmakers, Palcy, and Lemmons, film school was not an option for DuVernay: “Film school was a privilege I could not afford.”9 This reality created a different path for her and reinforced the insights associated with the outsider-within experience. Prior to becoming a filmmaker, DuVernay was the owner of a publicity company that specialized in television and film, and her objective was to create connections to African American audiences.10 That experience as a publicist gave DuVernay “a front-row seat at the best

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film school.”11 This real-world education informed her innovative approach to film production and distribution. In a 2014 interview with Michael T. Martin, she describes the knowledge she gained as a publicist: “I would find myself sitting in rooms listening to all kinds of bizarre things about what black people do, and who we are, and how to reach us. I’d be like, ‘Wow, this is crazy.’ ”12 Reflective of the outsider-within position and perspective, DuVernay was inside these rooms, but she was an outsider to the film-studio executives making the decisions. She recognized that those spaces were not designed for her, and she used this insight to shape her career in ways that validated and valued her own perspective and experience. It may seem paradoxical to point out a beneficial side effect of exclusion and marginalization by mainstream culture, but as Collins explains, the outsider-within perspective “has stimulated creativity for many Black women.”13 Here again, Lorde’s statement about the limitations of the “master’s tools” resonates. With DuVernay’s ingenuity, accompanied by her outsider-within experience, she saw these limitations clearly. It was the “bizarre” ideas she heard about Blackness during her time as a publicist that informed her decision to pursue alternative routes: “I never took my films, reels under my arm, knocking on unwelcoming doors. And it was only because I had the knowledge of a publicist that I knew

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what that place was like. And that’s a unique experience because most new filmmakers have never been in those rooms listening to those conversations. . . . Having been in those rooms, I said, ‘I’m not going to go that route, I’m going to carve out another place.’”14 DuVernay’s background gave her the motivation and knowledge to carve out her own space to create and share the stories that were important to her and to help other marginalized filmmakers do the same. Ava DuVernay directed documentary films before she directed her first narrative film. By 2003, she had written the script for what she hoped would be her first narrative feature film, Middle of Nowhere, which explores the internal journey of a Black woman whose life is changed dramatically when her husband is incarcerated. But the process of bringing the project to fruition took nine years. Even though the filmmaker Gina Prince-Bythewood offered support for DuVernay’s film, Hollywood studios did not get behind it: “Gina Prince-Bythewood and Reggie Bythewood were good friends and clients at the time and said, ‘We really love this. We want to produce it.’ So we went out and we attached Sanaa Lathan and Idris Elba and shopped it in the traditional way that you did in 2003 when you were in black Hollywood. You’d go to the studios and it was, ‘Oh, wow, great script, but we don’t make movies about the interior life of black women.’ ”15

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Instead of focusing energy on gaining entry to these unwelcoming spaces, DuVernay put Middle of Nowhere on hold and made her first documentary. Her directorial debut was the 2008 hip-hop documentary This Is the Life, which she produced and distributed herself. Next, she directed a documentary for television titled My Mic Sounds Nice (2010). Finally, she made her first full-length narrative feature film, I Will Follow (2010), which she wrote, directed, produced, and distributed—with very little in the way of financial resources (the film’s budget was only $50,000). I Will Follow won Best Screenplay from the African-American Film Critics Association and was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Independent Motion Picture. DuVernay then returned to her first screenplay. Middle of Nowhere was released in 2012, and she won the Sundance Film Festival’s directing award for that film. She went on to direct the Oscar-nominated Selma (2014), followed by A Wrinkle in Time (2018), making her the first Black woman to direct a film with a budget of over $100 million. As DuVernay has stressed in public statements, her achievements and recognition are attributable to the countless underrecognized Black women directors who preceded her.16 And the path paved by DuVernay should be viewed as a sign that many more Black women

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directors will continue the work of reshaping the film industry in their likeness.

MOVING FORWARD

The first two steps in DuVernay’s process of carving out a space that was not dependent on Hollywood executives and their misguided ideas about Blackness were the founding of her production company, Forward Movement, and the creation of her distribution collective, called the African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement (AFFRM; its name has since been changed to ARRAY). She explained her perspective and approach during her interview with Martin: “It was something about . . . concentrating on what was in front of me and what was really beautiful, and organic within my own community and culture that started to ignite interest from the outside in.”17 The name of her production company, Forward Movement, is significant and relates to one of DuVernay’s goals as an artist. Despite her awareness and appreciation of the past, DuVernay understands the importance of looking toward the future. She is only one person, and each film is just one part of the whole process of building and transforming the future. DuVernay explains, “That’s what I’m all about—moving forward. I’m always trying to move it

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ahead and keep creative energy around me. . . . I consider my films forward movements, each one on a step to the next one.”18 Creating her own production company was a way to harness whatever resources she could find to tell stories that are meaningful and authentic. “Forward Movement is really my assertion of my narrative point of view and the stories that I want to tell within any context, whether I’m working for ESPN on a documentary about sports, to fashion film, to my own work. It’s the way that I have my say,” explains DuVernay.19 Forward Movement was the production company for several of DuVernay’s film projects, including her first two documentaries, This Is the Life (2018) and My Mic Sounds Nice (2010), and her first two feature films, I Will Follow (2010) and Middle of Nowhere (2012). It was also the production company for her Oscar-nominated documentary 13th (2016), her Emmy Award–nominated Netflix series When They See Us (2019), and her television series Queen Sugar (2016–). Moving from production to distribution, ARRAY is a community-based distribution collective dedicated to supporting films by people of color and women filmmakers.20 It emphasizes the “mission 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.”21 DuVernay discussed

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the strategy and goals of ARRAY in her 2014 interview with Martin: I didn’t want to make a film about the interior lives of black people and not know where it was going to land. That just doesn’t make sense for someone who had been in business as a publicist. I had to bridge the gap between what happens when I make a film and how does it actually reach an audience. I know that behind those “doors” I referred to earlier they won’t put a lot of value in the film until I show them value, and they may not understand it. It’s hard to embrace something that you don’t understand. So, I had to figure out how to bridge the gap. And I had these relationships with black film festivals around the country. While they’re not the ones that you hear about in the papers— Sundance, Toronto, or Tribeca—they’re beautiful. . . . All these amazing people, who I knew separately, but who didn’t know each other, and whose concerns were similar to mine as an aspiring filmmaker, showing their films that then don’t go anywhere. And so the idea was, if we could band together and work as one unit under one umbrella, calling ourselves AFFRM [ARRAY], we could be stronger than we are individually.22

This emphasis on the formation of a self-determining community of filmmakers who understand the value of

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stories about the inner lives of Black people is consistent with DuVernay’s Black feminist approach and goals. Collins explains that much of Black feminist thought reflects an “effort to find a collective, self-defined voice and express a fully articulated womanist standpoint.”23 Being self-determining means having the freedom to truly see the beauty in places like the Black film festivals that DuVernay refers to in her interview. It means having the autonomy to draw from underappreciated and underutilized resources to create a culture that is not designed with the same tools that shaped the past and present structure of Hollywood. And it means having the courage rooted in the definition of a womanist to create something new. The Black feminist value of supporting a collective voice, based on the understanding that people are stronger together than any one person is individually, is evinced by the collection of films ARRAY has supported. In addition to distributing DuVernay’s first features, ARRAY is responsible for distributing the films of numerous underrepresented filmmakers, including the Black women directors Tina Mabry (Mississippi Damned, 2009), Nailah Jefferson (Vanishing Pearls: The Oystermen of Pointe à la Hache, 2014), and Numa Perrier (Jezebel, 2019). To circle back to a crucial point, DuVernay is not the only Black woman engaged in transforming the contem-

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porary film industry. The actor-writer-producer Lena Waithe, another Black woman who has achieved success in Hollywood, has recently taken up the work of building a self-determining community within the film industry. Waithe caught the eye of many people when she became the first Black woman to win a prime-time Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series in 2017 for Master of None (2015–21), in which she also starred.24 Significantly, Waithe is the founder and CEO of Hillman Grad Productions, described as a “development and production company committed to creating art that goes against the status quo and gives a platform to marginalized storytellers by providing a platform for diverse voices across all mediums.”25 As evidence of Waithe’s commitment to marginalized storytellers, Hillman Grad Productions has supported (as of 2021) the directorial debuts of two Black women filmmakers: Queen & Slim (2019), directed by Melina Matsoukas, written by Waithe (her screenwriting debut), and released in theaters by Universal Pictures; and The Forty-Year-Old Version (2020), a semiautobiographical feature film written and directed by Radha Blank (winner of the directing award at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival) and released on the streaming platform Netflix. “Radha Blank is a rare talent, . . . and I wanted to do everything in my power to help get this movie made,” explains Waithe.26

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Waithe’s eagerness to do everything in her power to support Blank’s film parallels the work of Hillman Grad’s Mentorship Lab, which, according to the company’s website, is “committed to infusing new narratives and perspectives in front of and behind the camera” by providing “a robust slate of workshops, educational resources, and professional development and networking opportunities for a cohort of diverse writers, actors, and aspiring creative executives.”27 Thanks to Waithe’s platform, Matsoukas, Blank, and other Black women are finding support for their creative work.

THE COURAGE TO CREATE

Reflecting on all the revolutionary Black women directors discussed in this book—from Tressie Souders and Eloyce King Patrick Gist in the silent era to the first Black women to make feature-length documentary and narrative films, such as Madeline Anderson, Jessie Maple, and Kathleen Collins—I cannot help but admire their bold ingenuity. They had a desire to share stories that were important to them, and they had the drive to do so with little or no clear path forward. They had the courage to create something new. With a sense of awe, I think about the women of the L.A. Rebellion: Julie Dash, Alile Sharon Larkin, Zeinabu

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irene Davis, and many more. They were determined to resist Hollywood’s marginalizing narratives and creatively experimented with different narratives and styles, rejecting the assumption that a film must fit Hollywood’s limited and problematic expectations. Together, as a collective of film students, they too created something new. With an eye toward the future, I reflect on the work of contemporary Black women directors, including but not limited to Euzhan Palcy, Kasi Lemmons, Julie Dash, and Ava DuVernay. They are telling their stories on their own terms and in an increasing number of new spaces. Many of the films made by Black women are more visible than they were just a couple of decades ago, accessible to countless viewers in theaters and on popular streaming platforms. Because of the Black women directors who came before them, they have more spaces to tell their stories and more freedom to tell them however they want to. And they are each uniquely, creatively, courageously— and collectively—rebuilding the film industry.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to the filmmakers, writers, and scholars whose work I have viewed, read, referenced, cited, and learned so much from over the years. Many thanks to the Quick Takes series editors, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster and Wheeler Winston Dixon, for their invaluable advice, advocacy, and encouragement and to Nicole Solano at Rutgers University Press for her guidance throughout this project. Thank you to Linda Lotz and Andrew Katz for their meticulous work and attention to detail on this book and to Alicia Grey for being my second pair of eyes and sounding board for this book and so much of my writing. Thanks to my colleagues in the Department of History & Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and to the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts at University of California, Merced—because of the support of the department and school, I was able to devote the necessary time and energy toward completing this project. Thank you to the colleagues whom I have had the honor and pleasure of working with during the past several 109

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years—especially Patricia Kim-Rajal, Patrick Johnson, and Kim Hester-Williams—for the inspirational conversations, exchanges of ideas, and friendship as I worked on this book. Thank you to Belinda Robnett for always supporting me throughout my career—from graduate school and beyond. I am endlessly and tremendously appreciative of my family—my parents ( Jerri Anne, Mitchell, and Gloria), grandparents, sisters, bothers, niece, nephew, aunts, and uncles. Thank you for being there for me, for believing in me, and for inspiring my love of learning and movies. And thank you to Dean for never ceasing to amaze me with your brilliance and creativity.

FURTHER READING

Alexander, George. Why We Make Movies: Black Filmmakers Talk about the Magic of Cinema. New York: Harlem Moon, 2003. Baker, Christina N. Contemporary Black Women Filmmakers and the Art of Resistance. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2018. ———, ed. Kasi Lemmons: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020. Bobo, Jacqueline, ed. Black Women Film and Video Artists. New York: Routledge, 1998. Dash, Julie. Daughters of the Dust: The Making of an African-­ American Woman’s Film. New York: New Press, 1992. Donalson, Melvin. Black Directors in Hollywood. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. Field, Allyson Nadia, Jan-Christopher Horak, and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, eds. L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey. Women Filmmakers of the African and Asian Diaspora: Decolonizing the Gaze, Locating Subjectivity. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997. Gillespie, Michael Boyce. Film Blackness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. 111

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Mills, Brandale N. Black Women Filmmakers and Black Love On Screen. New York: Routledge, 2018. Ryan, Judylyn S. Spirituality as Ideology in Black Women’s Film and Literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. Stallings, L. H. The Afterlives of Kathleen Collins: A Black Woman Filmmaker’s Search for New Life. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021. Welbon, Yvonne, and Alexandra Juhasz, eds. Sisters in the Life: A History of Our African American Lesbian Media-­ Making. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.

NOTES 1. RECOGNIZING THE PIONEERS 1. Nadra Nittle, “Forgotten Black Women of Early Holly-

wood Are Saved from Obscurity in New Exhibition,” KCET, July 17, 2017, https://www.kcet.org/shows/ artbound/forgotten-black-women-of-early-hollywood​ -take-center-stage-at-caam. 2. California African American Museum, Center Stage: African American Women in Silent Race Films, 2017, https:// caamuseum.org/exhibitions/2017/center-stage-african​ -american-women-in-silent-race-film. 3. Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983; repr., Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2003), xi. 4. Gloria J. Gibson, “Cinematic Foremothers: Zora Neale Hurston and Eloyce King Patrick Gist,” in Oscar Micheaux and His Circle: African-American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era, ed. Pearl Bowser, Jane Gaines, and Charles Musser (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), 195. 5. Gibson, “Cinematic Foremothers”; bell hooks, “Micheaux: Celebrating Blackness,” African American Review 50, no. 4 (2017): 814–24. 6. Sergio Mims, “Who Was the First African American Woman Director? (The Answer Isn’t as Obvious as You 113

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May Think),” Shadow and Act, June 14, 2016, https:// shadowandact.com/who-was-the-first-african-american​ -woman-director-the-answer-isnt-as-simple-as-you​-may​ -think. 7. Kyna Morgan and Aimee Dixon, “African-American Women in the Silent Film Industry,” in Women Film Pioneers Project, ed. Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta (New York: Center for Digital Research and Scholarship, Columbia University Libraries, 2013), https://wfpp.cdrs.columbia.edu/essay/african​ -american-women-in-the-silent-film-industry/. 8. It is important to note that being credited as the “director” of a film was an imperfect practice. The lines between directing and producing were not always clear, and it is unlikely that women were given full credit for all their contributions when working with a team of filmmakers. 9. Janell Hobson, “Viewing in the Dark: Toward a Black Feminist Approach to Film,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 30, nos. 1–2 (2002): 45–59; Kyna Morgan, “Tressie Souders,” in Gaines, Vatsal, and Dall’Asta, Women Film Pioneers Project; Yvonne Welbon, “Sisters in Cinema: Case Studies of Three First-Time Achievements Made by African American Women Feature Film Directors in the 1990s” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2001). 10. Morgan and Dixon, “African-American Women in the Silent Film Industry”; Katherine Manthorne, Film and Modern American Art: The Dialogue between Cinema and Painting (New York: Routledge, 2019); Paula J. Massood,

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Making a Promised Land: Harlem in Twentieth-Century Photography and Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013). 11. “Film Company Expanding,” Billboard, January 28, 1922. 12. Lora Ann Sigler, Medieval Art and the Look of Silent Film: The Influence on Costume and Set Design ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2019). 13. Margaret Olin, Touching Photographs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 14. Kate Abbott, “One of the First Black Woman Filmmakers in the Country,” Berkshire (MA) Eagle, March 29, 2019, https://www.berkshireeagle.com/history/one-of​ -the-first-black-woman-filmmakers-in-the-country/ article​_730ca680-cb2a-52c7-8896-b1b5c8940112.html. 15. Olin, Touching Photographs, 102. 16. Olin, 102. 17. Massachusetts Historical Society, “We Are Doing Our Bit: A 1918 Liberty Loan Poster with an African American Theme,” September 2014, https://www.masshist​ .org/object-of-the-month/september-2014. 18. Massachusetts Historical Society. 19. Gloria J. Gibson-Hudson, “Recall and Recollect: Excavating the Life History of Eloyce Patrick Gist,” Black Film Review 8, no. 2 (1994): 20–21; Gibson, “Cinematic Foremothers.” 20. Gibson, “Cinematic Foremothers,” 209. 21. Gibson, 199. 22. Gibson-Hudson, “Recall and Recollect.” 23. Gibson, “Cinematic Foremothers.”

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24. Gibson-Hudson, “Recall and Recollect.” 25. Kyna Morgan, “Eloyce King Patrick Gist,” in Gaines,

Vatsal, and Dall’Asta, Women Film Pioneers Project, https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-0fdd-a762. 26. Library of Congress, “American Women: Resources from the Moving Image Collections (The Silent Era),” accessed February 1, 2021, https://guides.loc.gov/ american​-women-moving-image/motion-pictures/ silent​-era. 27. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). 28. Charles Tepperman, Amateur Cinema: The Rise of North American Moviemaking, 1923–1960 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014). 29. Gibson, “Cinematic Foremothers.” 30. Gibson. 31. Gibson, 206. 32. Library of Congress, “Librarian of Congress Adds 25 Films to National Film Registry,” December 20, 2005, https://www.loc.gov/item/prn-05-262/librarian-of​ -congress​-adds-25-films-to-national-film-registry-2/2005​ -12-20/. 33. Autumn Womack, “‘The Brown Bag of Miscellany’: Zora Neale Hurston and the Practice of Overexposure,” Black Camera 7, no. 1 (2015): 117. 34. Womack, 120. 35. Elaine Charnov, “The Performative Visual Anthropology Films of Zora Neale Hurston,” Film Criticism 23, no. 1 (1998): 38–47.

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36. Anthea Kraut, “Between Primitivism and Diaspora: The

Dance Performances of Josephine Baker, Zora Neale Hurston, and Katherine Dunham,” Theatre Journal 55, no. 3 (2003): 433–50. 37. “Madeline Anderson, I Am Somebody (1969),” Signs, November 20, 2012, http://signsjournal.org/madeline​ -anderson-i-am-somebody-1969/. 38. Her other films include Integration Report One (1960) and Malcolm X: Nationalist or Humanist? (1967). 39. Michael T. Martin, “Madeline Anderson in Conversation: Pioneering an African American Documentary Tradition,” Black Camera 5, no. 1 (2013): 72. 40. Library of Congress, “Women Rule 2019 National Film Registry,” December 11, 2019, https://www.loc​ .gov/item/prn-19-116/women-rule-2019-national-film​ -registry/2019-12-11/. 41. Shilyh Warren, “Recognition on the Surface of Madeline Anderson’s I Am Somebody,” Signs 38, no. 2 (2013): 353–78. 42. Belinda Robnett, How Long? How Long? African American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 43. Warren, “Recognition on the Surface,” 370. 44. Martin, “Madeline Anderson in Conversation,” 79. 45. Martin, 74. 46. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Berkeley, CA: Crossing, 2013), 42. 47. Rose Library, Emory University, The Camille Billops and James V. Hatch Archives, accessed February 11, 2021, http://rose.library.emory.edu/collections/

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african-american-history-culture/billops-hatch-archives​ .html. 48. James Van Der Zee, Owen Dodson, and Camille Billops, The Harlem Book of the Dead (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Morgan and Morgan, 1978). 49. Ameena Meer, “Camille Billops,” BOMB, July 1, 1992, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/camille-billops/. 50. Barbara Lekatsas, “Encounters: The Film Odyssey of Camille Billops,” African American Review 50, no. 4 (2017): 825–38. 51. Lekatsas, 826. 52. Lekatsas, 828. 53. Ken Tucker, “P.O.V.: Finding Christa,” Entertainment Weekly, June 12, 1992, https://ew.com/article/1992/06/​ 12/pov-finding-christa/. 54. Black Film Center/Archive, “Into the Archive: Exploring the Jessie Maple Collection,” Black Film Center/ Archive Blog, April 12, 2012, https://blackfilmcenter​ archive.wordpress.com/2012/04/12/exploring-the​ -jessie​-maple-collection/. 55. Methadone: Wonder Drug or Evil Spirit (1976) and Black Economic Power: Reality or Fantasy (1977). 56. Black Film Center/Archive, “Into the Archive.” 57. Black Film Center/Archive, 9. 58. Black Film Center/Archive, 9. 59. Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Women Filmmakers of the African and Asian Diaspora: Decolonizing the Gaze, Locating Subjectivity (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 130.

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60. Tambay Obenson, “Kathleen Collins’ Must-See

Restored/Remastered ‘Losing Ground’ Hits Blu-Ray/ DVD in 2-Disc Deluxe Set,” Shadow and Act, March 19, 2016, https://shadowandact.com/kathleen-collins-must​ -see​-restoredremastered​-losing​-ground​-hits​-blu​-raydvd​ -in​-2​-disc​-deluxe-set. 61. L. H. Stallings, “‘Redemptive Softness’: Interiority, Intellect, and Black Women’s Ecstasy in Kathleen Collins’s Losing Ground,” Black Camera 2, no. 2 (2011): 48. 62. Lorde, Sister Outsider, 55. 63. Lorde, 58. 64. Elizabeth Alexander, “Foreword: In Search of Kathleen Collins,” in Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? Stories by Kathleen Collins (New York: Ecco, 2016), xi. 65. Michele P. Beverly, “Phenomenal Bodies: The Metaphysical Possibilities of Post-Black Film and Visual Culture” (PhD diss., Georgia State University, 2012), https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/communication_diss/37. 66. Kathleen Collins Master Class, 1984 (Milestone Film & Video, 2017), https://vimeo.com/203379245. 67. Nina Lorez Collins, “How Kathleen Collins’s Daughter Kept Her Late Mother’s Career Alive,” Vogue, September 5, 2016, https://www.vogue.com/article/kathleen​ -collins-filmmaker-career-daughter-nina-lorez-collins. 68. Kathleen Collins, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? Stories (New York: Ecco, 2016); Kathleen Collins, Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary: Selected Works of Kathleen Collins, ed. Nina Lorez Collins (New York: Ecco, 2019).

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2. WOMEN OF THE L.A. REBELLION 1. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (New York:

Routledge, 2000). 2. Allyson Nadia Field, Jan-Christopher Horak, and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, introduction to L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema, ed. Allyson Field, Jan-Christopher Horak, and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 1–53. 3. Field, Horak, and Stewart, introduction to L.A. Rebellion, 16. 4. Alile Sharon Larkin, “Black Women Film-makers Defining Ourselves: Feminism in Our Own Voice,” in Female Spectators: Looking at Film and Television, ed. E. Deidre Pribram (London: Verso, 1988), 168. 5. Zeinabu irene Davis, “Keeping the Black in Media Production: One L.A. Rebellion Filmmaker’s Notes,” Cinema Journal 53, no. 4 (2014): 157. 6. Jacqueline Stewart, “Defending Black Imagination: The ‘L.A. Rebellion’ School of Black Filmmakers,” From the Digital Archive of the Exhibition “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980” at the Hammer Museum (blog), 2016, https://hammer.ucla.edu/now-dig-this/ essays/defending-black-imagination. 7. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 10. 8. Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” in How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, ed. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 24.

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9. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 290. 10. Collins, 106. 11. Toni Cade Bambara, “An Interview with Toni Cade

Bambara: Kay Bonetti,” in Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara, ed. Thabiti Lewis ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 35. 12. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 118. 13. Larkin, “Black Women Film-makers Defining Ourselves,” 196. 14. UCLA Library Film and Television Archive, “L.A. Rebellion Filmmakers,” accessed February 12, 2021, https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/la-rebellion/filmmakers. 15. Clyde Taylor, “Preface: Once upon a Time in the West . . . L.A. Rebellion,” in Field, Horak, and Stewart, L.A. Rebellion, xxi. 16. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 29. 17. Jan-Christopher Horak, “What’s in a Name? L.A. Rebellion,” UCLA Library Film and Television Archive, October 28, 2011, https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/blogs/ archival-spaces/2011/10/28/what%e2%80%99s​-name​-la​ -rebellion. 18. UCLA Library Film and Television Archive, “The Story of L.A. Rebellion,” 2011, https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/ la-rebellion/story-la-rebellion. 19. Field, Horak, and Stewart, introduction to L.A. Rebellion, 2. 20. Davis, “Keeping the Black in Media Production.” 21. Field, Horak, and Stewart, introduction to L.A. Rebellion. 22. Field, Horak, and Stewart, 3.

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23. Taylor, “Preface,” xxi. 24. Field, Horak, and Stewart, introduction to L.A. Rebel-

lion, 4. 25. Field, Horak, and Stewart, 4. 26. Field, Horak, and Stewart, 1. 27. Field, Horak, and Stewart, 1. 28. Field, Horak, and Stewart, 5. 29. Field, Horak, and Stewart, 6. 30. Ntongela Masilela, “Women Directors of the Los Angeles School,” in Black Women Film and Video Artists, ed. Jacqueline Bobo (New York: Routledge, 1998), 21–41. 31. Field, Horak, and Stewart, introduction to L.A. Rebellion, 7. 32. Masilela, “Women Directors of the Los Angeles School,” 23. 33. Masilela, 23. 34. Field, Horak, and Stewart, introduction to L.A. Rebellion, 25. 35. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 102. 36. O.Funmilayo Makarah, “Fired-Up!,” in Bobo, Black Women Film and Video Artists, 136. 37. UCLA Library Film and Television Archive, “L.A. Rebellion Filmmakers.” 38. Daughters of the Dust is discussed in more detail in chapter 3. 39. Judylyn S. Ryan, “Outing the Black Feminist Filmmaker in Julie Dash’s Illusions,” Signs 30, no. 1 (2004): 1320. 40. John Williams, “Re-creating Their Media Image: Two Generations of Black Women Filmmakers,” Black Scholar 25, no. 2 (1995): 48.

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41. Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Women Filmmakers of the

African and Asian Diaspora: Decolonizing the Gaze, Locating Subjectivity (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 45. 42. Bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” in Reel to Real (New York: Routledge, 2009), 271. 43. Ryan, “Outing the Black Feminist Filmmaker,” 1324. 44. Larkin, “Black Women Film-makers Defining Ourselves,” 170. 45. Cassie da Costa, “Interview: Julie Dash,” Film Comment, February 29, 2016, https://www.filmcomment.com/ blog/​interview​-julie​-dash/. 46. Collins, Black Feminist Thought. 47. Scholars have proposed various readings of the relationship between Mignon and Ester. For example, S. V. Hartman and Farah Jasmine Griffin refer to Mignon’s identification with Ester as “ambivalent and narcissistic,” in “Are You as Colored as That Negro? The Politics of Being Seen in Julie Dash’s Illusions,” African American Review 50, no. 4 (2018): 862. Nick Davis states, “[Dash’s] increasingly tight frames and other formal choices allow me to argue for Illusions as a lesbian film, even as the script superficially elides this possibility,” in “The Face Is a Politics: A Close-Up View of Julie Dash’s Illusions,” Camera Obscura 29, no. 2 (2014): 153. 48. Hooks, “Oppositional Gaze,” 271. 49. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 100. 50. Collins, 104. 51. Foster, Women Filmmakers of the African and Asian Diaspora, 47.

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52. This is an example of the type of Pan-Africanism that

Masilela discusses in his essay about the women of the L.A. Rebellion, “Women Directors of the Los Angeles School.” 53. Larkin, “Black Women Film-makers Defining Ourselves,” 158. 54. Larkin, 159. 55. Larkin, 169. 56. Larkin, 158. 57. Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983; repr., Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2003), xi. 58. Walker, xi. 59. Larkin, “Black Women Film-makers Defining Ourselves,” 171. 60. Larkin, 169. 61. Masilela, “Women Directors of the Los Angeles School,” 25. 62. Bell hooks, All about Love (New York: Harper Perennial, 2001), 164. 63. Bell hooks, Salvation: Black People and Love (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 187. 64. Alile Sharon Larkin, “Cinematic Genocide,” Black Camera 18, no. 1 (2003): 15. 65. Hooks, Salvation, 187. 66. Z. Davis, “Keeping the Black in Media Production,” 161. 67. Z. Davis, 159. 68. Z. Davis, 160. 69. Z. Davis, 159. 70. Samantha N. Sheppard, “Bruising Moments: Affect and

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the L.A. Rebellion,” in Field, Horak, and Stewart, L.A. Rebellion, 241. 71. Z. Davis, “Keeping the Black in Media Production,” 159. 72. Hooks, All about Love, 164. 3. MOVING INTO THE MAINSTREAM 1. Wheeler Winston Dixon, Film Talk: Directors at Work

(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 200. 2. Annie Nocenti, “Writing and Directing Eve’s Bayou: A Talk with Kasi Lemmons,” Scenario: The Magazine of Screenwriting Art 4, no. 2 (1998): 192–99. 3. Bell hooks, Reel to Real: Race, Class and Sex at the Movies (New York: Routledge, 2008), 129. 4. Hooks, 130. 5. Hooks, 131. 6. Joan M. West and Dennis West, “Euzhan Palcy and Her Creative Anger: A Conversation with the Filmmaker,” French Review 77, no. 1 (2003): 1194. 7. Christine M. M. Gaudry-Hudson, “‘Raising Cane’: A Feminist Rewriting of Joseph Zobel’s Novel ‘Sugar Cane Alley’ by Film Director Euzhan Palcy,” CLA Journal 46, no. 1 (2003): 478–93. 8. Tricia Danielle Keaton, “Euzhan Palcy: Creative Dissent, Artistic Reckoning,” Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International 1, no. 1 (2002): 122. 9. Ebrahim Haseenah, “‘Sugar Cane Alley’: Re-reading Race, Class and Identity in Zobel’s ‘La Rue Cases

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Nègres,’” Literature/Film Quarterly 30, no. 2 (2002): 146–52. 10. Gaudry-Hudson, “Raising Cane,” 480. 11. West and West, “Euzhan Palcy and Her Creative Anger,” 1194. 12. Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983; repr., Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2003). 13. Jacqueline Maingard, “A Pan-African Perspective on Apartheid, Torture, and Resistance in Euzhan Palcy’s A Dry White Season,” Black Camera 11, no. 1 (2019): 201. 14. West and West, “Euzhan Palcy and Her Creative Anger,” 1203. 15. Gaudry-Hudson, “Raising Cane,” 482. 16. Haseenah, “Sugar Cane Alley,” 151. 17. Carolyn A. Durham, “Euzhan Palcy’s Feminist Filmmaking: From Romance to Realism, from Gender to Race,” Women in French Studies 7 (1999): 155–65. 18. Haseenah, “Sugar Cane Alley,” 148. 19. Haseenah, 147. 20. Judylyn S. Ryan, Spirituality as Ideology in Black Women’s Film and Literature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 124. 21. Irene Lacher and Jack Kelley, “Euzhan Palcy Has a Face the Camera Loves but Finds the View Better behind the Lens,” People, October 16, 1989, https://people.com/ archive/euzhan-palcy-has-a-face-the-camera-loves-but​ -finds-the-view-better-behind-the-lens-vol-32-no-16/. 22. West and West, “Euzhan Palcy and Her Creative Anger,” 1199.

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23. Rue Cases-Nègres (Sugar Cane Alley) won a Silver Lion

for best first film at the Venice Film Festival and the prize for best first work at the 1984 French Césars. 24. Hunter Harris, “Euzhan Palcy Remembers the Fight to Make A Dry White Season in Hollywood,” Vulture, June 17, 2020, https://www.vulture.com/2020/06/ euzhan​-palcy​-remembers-the-fight-to-make-a-dry-white​ -season​.html. 25. Maingard, “Pan-African Perspective,” 211. 26. Durham, “Euzhan Palcy’s Feminist Filmmaking.” 27. Maingard, “Pan-African Perspective,” 202. 28. Harris, “Euzhan Palcy Remembers the Fight.” 29. Harris. 30. Harris. 31. Durham, “Euzhan Palcy’s Feminist Filmmaking,” 160. 32. Melvin Donalson, Black Directors in Hollywood (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 178. 33. West and West, “Euzhan Palcy and Her Creative Anger,” 1194. 34. John Higgins, “Documentary Realism and Film Pleasure: Two Moments from Euzhan Palcy’s A Dry White Season,” Literator 13, no. 3 (1992): 101. 35. Donalson, Black Directors in Hollywood, 179. 36. West and West, “Euzhan Palcy and Her Creative Anger,” 1200. 37. West and West, 1202. 38. Julie Dash, Daughters of the Dust: The Making of an African American Woman’s Film (New York: New Press, 1992), 40.

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39. Dash, 4. 40. My focus is on the process of making the film rather than

its content. Because of the significance of Daughters of the Dust, many scholars have published analyses of the film, including Toni Cade Bambara, bell hooks, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Gloria J. Gibson, Janell Hobson, and Judylyn Ryan, to name a few. A film by Yvonne Welbon titled The Cinematic Jazz of Julie Dash (1992) is another invaluable resource. 41. Dash, Daughters of the Dust, 40. 42. Dash, 55. 43. Dash, 40. 44. Ryan, Spirituality as Ideology, 132. 45. Janell Hobson, “Viewing in the Dark: Toward a Black Feminist Approach to Film,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 30, nos. 1–2 (2002): 56. 46. Dash, Daughters of the Dust, 52. 47. Dash, 6. 48. Dash, 29. 49. Cassie da Costa, “Interview: Julie Dash,” Film Comment, February 29, 2016, https://www.filmcomment.com/ blog/interview-julie-dash/. 50. Dash, Daughters of the Dust, 8. 51. Dash, 16. 52. Jacqueline Bobo, Black Women as Cultural Readers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 30. 53. Yohana Desta, “How Beyoncé’s Lemonade Helped Bring a Groundbreaking Film Back to Theaters,” Vanity Fair, August 22, 2016, https://www.vanityfair.com/ hollywood/2016/08/daughters-of-the-dust-exclusive.

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54. Da Costa, “Interview.” 55. IU Cinema, “Julie Dash: An IU Cinema Exclusive,” You-

Tube, April 19, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v​ =vyidjfZMMhw+%28. 56. Erika Muhammad, “Kasi Lemmons: The Woman behind Eve’s Bayou,” Ms., April 1998. 57. Janell Hobson, “Black Feminist in Public: Kasi Lemmons on Telling Harriet Tubman’s Freedom Story,” Ms., March 8, 2019, https://msmagazine.com/2019/03/08/black​ -feminist-public-kasi-lemmons-telling-harriet​-tubmans​ -freedom​-story/. 58. Joi-Marie McKenzie, “‘Eve’s Bayou’ Screenwriter Kasi Lemmons Says Black Women Writers Have a Responsibility,” Essence, February 5, 2019, https://www.essence​ .com/​entertainment/the-writers-room/eves​-bayou​ -screenwriter​-kasi​-lemmons​-says​-black​-woman​-writers​ -have​-a​-responsibility/. 59. Cynthia Fuchs, “Caveman’s Valentine: I Just Like to Stir It Up a Little—Interview with Kasi Lemmons,” Nitrate Online, March 9, 2001, http://www.nitrateonline.com/​ 2001/fcaveman.html. 60. Christina N. Baker, Contemporary Black Women Filmmakers and the Art of Resistance (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2018), 161. 61. Susan Bullington Katz, Conversations with Screenwriters (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2000), 76. 62. Although Lemmons’s childhood memories inspired some aspects of the film, Eve’s Bayou is not auto­ biographical. 63. George Alexander, Why We Make Movies: Black Film­

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makers Talk about the Magic of Cinema (New York: Harlem Moon, 2003). 64. Gloria J. Gibson-Hudson, “The Ties That Bind: Cinematic Representations by Black Women Filmmakers,” in Black Women Film and Video Artists, ed. Jacqueline Bobo (New York: Routledge, 1998), 46. 65. Nocenti, “Writing and Directing Eve’s Bayou,” 197. 66. April Biccum, “Third Cinema in the ‘First’ World: Eve’s Bayou and Daughters of the Dust,” CineAction 49 (1999): 60–65; Sandra Grayson, Symbolizing the Past: Reading “Sankofa,” “Daughters of the Dust,” and “Eve’s Bayou” as Histories (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000); Montré Aza Missouri, Black Magic Woman and Narrative Film: Race, Sex and Afro-Religiosity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 67. Biccum, “Third Cinema in the ‘First’ World.” 68. Lisa B. Thompson, Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012). 69. Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 150. 70. Daughters of the Dust had a budget of $800,000 and grossed approximately $1.7 million worldwide. Eve’s Bayou had a budget of $5 million and grossed approximately $14.8 million worldwide. See The Numbers, “Daughters of the Dust (1992)—Financial Information,” accessed August 15, 2021, https://www​.the​-numbers​ .com/​movie/​Daughters​-of​-the​-Dust; The Numbers, “Eve’s Bayou (1997)—Financial Information,” accessed

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August 15, 2021, https://​www​.the​-numbers​.com/​movie/ Eves​-Bayou. 71. Muhammad, “Kasi Lemmons.” 72. Natalie Chang, “Third Act: The Journey of a Holly­wood Director,” Atlantic, 2016, https://www.theatlantic​.com/ sponsored/forevermark-2016/third​-act​-the​-journey​-of​-a​ -hollywood-director/816/. 73. Katz, Conversations with Screenwriters, 80. 74. Katz, 80. 75. Nocenti, “Writing and Directing Eve’s Bayou,” 196. 76. Muhammad, “Kasi Lemmons.” 77. Nocenti, “Writing and Directing Eve’s Bayou,” 196. 78. Muhammad, “Kasi Lemmons.” 79. Brooke Obie, “‘Harriet’ Director Kasi Lemmons Responds to Backlash over Cynthia Erivo’s Tubman Casting: ‘I Understand It,’” Shadow and Act, February 17, 2019, https://shadowandact.com/harriet-director​-kasi​ -lemmons​-responds​-to​-backlash​-over​-cynthia​-erivos​ -tubman​-casting-i-understand-it. 4. MORE THAN MAINSTREAM 1. “Woman of the Year: Ava DuVernay’s Speech at Glam-

our’s 2019 Women of the Year Awards Must Be Read,” Glamour, November 12, 2019, https://www.glamour​ .com/​story/​ava-duvernay-glamour-women​-of​-the​-year​ -2019​-speech. 2. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Berkeley, CA: Crossing, 2013), 112. 3. Lorde, 111.

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4. The Numbers, “Love & Basketball (2000)—Financial

Information,” accessed February 12, 2021, https://​ m.the-numbers.com/movie/Love-and-Basketball. 5. The Numbers, “A Wrinkle in Time (2018)—Financial Information,” accessed February 12, 2021, https://​ m.the-numbers.com/movie/Wrinkle-in-Time-A-(2018). 6. Elaine Welteroth, “Ava DuVernay Is Going to Fix Our Country, One Film at a Time,” Glamour, October 23, 2019, https://www.glamour.com/story/women-of-the​ -year​-2019​-ava​-duvernay. 7. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000), 12. 8. Interestingly, she inhabited the same physical space as the L.A. Rebellion but at a different time. She attended UCLA in the 1990s, earning a BA in African American Studies and English. 9. Carrie Rickey, “She’s a Graduate of an Unusual Film School,” New York Times, October 5, 2012, https://www​ .nytimes.com/2012/10/07/movies/ava-duvernay-and​ -middle-of-nowhere.html. 10. Rickey. 11. Rickey. 12. Michael T. Martin, “Conversations with Ava DuVernay—​ ‘A Call to Action’: Organizing Principles of an Activist Cinematic Practice,” Black Camera 6, no. 1 (2014): 62, https://doi.org/10.2979/blackcamera.6.1.57. 13. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 100. 14. Martin, “Conversations with Ava DuVernay,” 62. 15. Nekisa Cooper, “Love on the Outside,” Filmmaker,

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November 12, 2012, https://filmmakermagazine.com/​ 57145​-love​-on​-the​-outside/. 16. Rollo Ross, “‘13th’ Director DuVernay Says Enough of ‘Firsts’ for Black Women,” Reuters, February 15, 2017, https://www.reuters.com/article/us​-awards​-oscars​-13th​ -idUSKBN15U01G. 17. Martin, “Conversations with Ava DuVernay,” 62. 18. Martin, 65. 19. Martin, 65. 20. “The ARRAY Companies,” Ava DuVernay’s website, accessed February 12, 2021, http://www.avaduvernay​ .com/#/array/. 21. Martin, “Conversations with Ava DuVernay,” 67. 22. Martin, 66. 23. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 100. 24. Waithe also created the TV series The Chi, Boomerang, and Twenties and writes for each one. 25. Hillman Grad Productions, “About Hillman Grad,” accessed October 22, 2020, https://www.hillmangrad​ .com/about-us. 26. Dave McNary, “Lena Waithe Producing Comedy ‘The 40-Year-Old Version,’” Variety, August 5, 2019, https:// variety.com/2019/film/news/lena-waithe-producing​ -radha-blank-40-year-old-version-1203291749/. 27. Hillman Grad Productions, “Hillman Grad Mentorship Lab,” accessed January 10, 2021, https://www.hillman​ grad​.com/mentorship-labs.

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New York Times, October 5, 2012. https://www​.nytimes. com/2012/10/07/movies/ava-duvernay-and​-middle​ -of-nowhere.html Robnett, Belinda. How Long? How Long? African American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Rose Library, Emory University. The Camille Billops and James V. Hatch Archives. Accessed February 11, 2021. http://rose.library.emory.edu/collections/african​ -american-history-culture/billops-hatch-archives.html. Ross, Rollo. “‘13th’ Director DuVernay Says Enough of ‘Firsts’ for Black Women.” Reuters, February 15, 2017. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-awards-oscars-13th​ -idUSKBN15U01G. Ryan, Judylyn S. “Outing the Black Feminist Filmmaker in Julie Dash’s Illusions.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30, no. 1 (2004): 1319–44. ———. Spirituality as Ideology in Black Women’s Film and Literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. Sheppard, Samantha N. “Bruising Moments: Affect and the L.A. Rebellion.” In L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema, edited by Allyson Nadia Field, Jan-Christopher Horak, and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, 225–50. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. Sigler, Lora Ann. Medieval Art and the Look of Silent Film: The Influence on Costume and Set Design. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2019. Stallings, L. H. “‘Redemptive Softness’: Interiority, Intellect, and Black Women’s Ecstasy in Kathleen Collins’s Losing Ground.” Black Camera 2, no. 2 (2011): 47–62.

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Stewart, Jacqueline. “Defending Black Imagination: The ‘L.A. Rebellion’ School of Black Filmmakers.” From the Digital Archive of the Exhibition “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980” at the Hammer Museum (blog), 2016. https://hammer.ucla.edu/now-dig-this/ essays/defending-black-imagination. Taylor, Clyde. “Preface: Once upon a Time in the West . . . L.A. Rebellion.” In L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema, edited by Allyson Field, Jan-Christopher Horak, and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, ix–xxiv. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. Tepperman, Charles. Amateur Cinema: The Rise of North American Moviemaking, 1923–1960. Oakland: University of California Press, 2014. Thompson, Lisa B. Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012. Tucker, Ken. “P.O.V.: Finding Christa.” Entertainment Weekly, June 12, 1992. https://ew.com/article/1992/06/12/pov​ -finding-christa/. UCLA Library Film and Television Archive. “L.A. Rebellion Filmmakers.” Accessed February 12, 2021. https:// www.cinema.ucla.edu/la-rebellion/filmmakers. ———. “The Story of L.A. Rebellion.” 2011. https://www​ .cinema.ucla.edu/la-rebellion/story-la-rebellion. Van Der Zee, James, Owen Dodson, and Camille Billops. The Harlem Book of the Dead. Dobbs Ferry, NY: Morgan and Morgan, 1978. Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. 1983. Reprint, Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2003.

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Warren, Shilyh. “Recognition on the Surface of Madeline Anderson’s I Am Somebody.” Signs 38, no. 2 (2013): 353–78. Welbon, Yvonne. “Sisters in Cinema: Case Studies of Three First-Time Achievements Made by African American Women Feature Film Directors in the 1990s.” PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2001. Welteroth, Elaine. “Ava DuVernay Is Going to Fix Our Country, One Film at a Time.” Glamour, October 23, 2019. https://www.glamour.com/story/women-of-the​ -year​-2019​-ava​-duvernay. West, Joan M., and Dennis West. “Euzhan Palcy and Her Creative Anger: A Conversation with the Filmmaker.” French Review 77, no. 1 (2003): 1193–1203. Williams, John. “Re-creating Their Media Image: Two Generations of Black Women Filmmakers.” Black Scholar 25, no. 2 (1995): 47–53. Womack, Autumn. “‘The Brown Bag of Miscellany’: Zora Neale Hurston and the Practice of Overexposure.” Black Camera 7, no. 1 (2015): 115–33. “Woman of the Year: Ava DuVernay’s Speech at Glamour’s 2019 Women of the Year Awards Must Be Read.” Glamour, November 12, 2019. https://www.glamour.com/ story/ava-duvernay-glamour-women-of-the​-year​-2019​ -speech.

SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY

Given the abundance of films directed by Black women, this is not an exhaustive list of Black women directors, nor is it a complete filmography for the listed directors. These are, however, some key titles in the history of Black women in cinema. Abel-Bey, Gay Happy Valentine’s Day (1980) Fragrance (1991) Aina, Shirikiana Brick by Brick (1982) Through the Door of No Return (1997) Footprints of Pan Africanism (2018) Anderson, Madeline Integration Report 1 (1960) Malcolm X: Nationalist or Humanist? (1967) I Am Somebody (1970) The Walls Came Tumbling Down (1975) Angelou, Maya Down in the Delta (1998) Ballenger, Melvonna Marie Rain (Nyesha) (1978) Nappy-Headed Lady (1985) 149

150 

• 

S elected F ilmography

Billops, Camille Suzanne, Suzanne (1982) Older Women and Love (1987) Finding Christa (1991) The KKK Boutique Ain’t Just Rednecks (1994) Take Your Bags (1998) A String of Pearls (2002) Blank, Radha The Forty-Year-Old Version (2020) Blue, Carroll Parrott Varnette’s World: A Study of a Young Artist (1979) The Dawn at My Back: Memoir of a Black Texas Upbringing (2003) Bravo, Janicza Gregory Go Boom (2013) Lemon (2017) Zola (2020) Chukwu, Chinonye The Dance Lesson (2010) Alaska-Land (2012) Bottom (2012) A Long Walk (2013) Clemency (2019) Collins, Kathleen The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy (1980) Losing Ground (1982) DaCosta, Nia Little Woods (2018) Candyman (2021)

S elected F ilmography  

Dash, Julie Working Models of Success (1973) Four Women (1975) Diary of an African Nun (1977) Illusions (1982) Daughters of the Dust (1991) Praise House (1991) Funny Valentines (1999) Incognito (1999) Love Song (2000) The Rosa Parks Story (2002) Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl (2017) Davis, Zeinabu irene Cycles (1989) Trumpetistically, Clora Bryant (1989) A Powerful Thang (1991) Mother of the River (1995) Compensation (1999) A Period Piece (1999) Co-Motion: Tales of Breastfeeding Women (2010) Momentum: Conversations with Black Women PhDs at UCSD (2010) Spirits of Rebellion: Black Independent Cinema from Los Angeles (2016) Dhanifu, Alicia Bellydancing—A History & an Art (1979) Dunye, Cheryl The Watermelon Woman (1996) Stranger Inside (2001)

• 151

152 

• 

S elected F ilmography

My Baby’s Daddy (2004) The Owls (2010) Mommy Is Coming (2012) Black Is Blue (2014) DuVernay, Ava This Is the Life (2008) I Will Follow (2010) My Mic Sounds Nice (2010) Middle of Nowhere (2012) Selma (2014) 13th (2016) A Wrinkle in Time (2018) Frazier, Jacqueline Hidden Memories (1977) Shipley Street (1981) Freeman, Monica J. Valerie, a Woman, an Artist, a Philosophy of Life (1975) A Sense of Pride: Hamilton Heights (1977) Gist, Eloyce King Patrick Hell Bound Train (1930) Verdict Not Guilty (1933) Heaven-Bound Travels (1935) Gordon (Chism), Tina Peeples (2013) Little (2019) Hamilton, Tanya The Killers (1995) Night Catches Us (2010) Good Country People (2013)

S elected F ilmography  

• 153

Harris, Leslie Just Another Girl on the IRT (1992) Bessie Coleman’s Dream to Fly (1993) Hurston, Zora Neale Commandment Keeper Church, Beaufort South Carolina, May 1940 (1940) Iloputaife, Ijeoma Atilogivu: The Story of a Wrestling Match (1982) The Snake in My Bed (1995) Jefferson, Nailah Vanishing Pearls: The Oystermen of Pointe à la Hache (2014) Plaquemines (2016) Larkin, Alile Sharon The Kitchen (1975) Your Children Come Back to You (1979) A Different Image (1982) Dreadlocks and the Three Bears (1991) Mz Medusa (1998) Lemmons, Kasi Eve’s Bayou (1997) Dr. Hugo (1998) The Caveman’s Valentine (2001) Talk to Me (2007) Black Nativity (2013) Harriet (2019) Mabry, Tina Mississippi Damned (2009) Makarah, O.Funmilayo Define (1988)

154 

• 

S elected F ilmography

Creating a Different Image: Portrait of Alile Sharon Larkin (1989) Diversity (1989) Fired-Up or How I Turned My Rage into Art (2006) L.A. in My Mind (2006) Maple, Jessie Methadone: Wonder Drug or Evil Spirit (1976) Black Economic Power: Reality or Fantasy (1977) Will (1981) Twice as Nice (1989) Martin, Darnell I Like It Like That (1994) Their Eyes Were Watching God (2005) Cadillac Records (2008) Matsoukas, Melina Queen & Slim (2019) McCullough, Barbara Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification (1979) World Saxophone Quartet (1980) Shopping Bag Spirits and Freeway Fetishes: Reflections on Ritual Space (1981) Horace Tapscott: Musical Griot (2017) Meghie, Stella Jean of the Joneses (2016) Everything, Everything (2017) The Weekend (2018) The Photograph (2020) Palcy, Euzhan Sugar Cane Alley / La Rue Cases-Nègres (1983) A Dry White Season (1989)

S elected F ilmography  

• 155

Siméon (1992) Aimé Césaire: A Voice for History (1994) Ruby Bridges (1998) The Killing Yard (2001) Parkerson, Michelle Sojourn (1973) . . . But Then She’s Betty Carter (1980) Storme: Lady of the Jewel Box (1991) A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde (1995, with Ada Gay Griffin) Peoples, Channing Godfrey Carry Me Home (2009) Red (2013) Miss Juneteenth (2020) Perrier, Numa Jezebel (2019) Porter, Dawn Gideon’s Army (2013) Spies of Mississippi (2014) Trapped (2016) John Lewis: Good Trouble (2020) Vernon Jordan: Make It Plain (2020) The Way I See It (2020) Prince-Bythewood, Gina Disappearing Acts (2000) Love & Basketball (2000) The Secret Life of Bees (2008) Beyond the Lights (2014) The Old Guard (2020)

156 

• 

S elected F ilmography

Rees, Dee Pariah (2011) Bessie (2015) Mudbound (2017) The Last Thing He Wanted (2020) Shearer, Jacqueline A Minor Altercation (1977) Souder, Tressie A Woman’s Error (1922; as of this writing, film footage has not been located) Sweet, Stormé (Bright) The Single Parent Family: Images in Black (1977) Toussaint Welcome, Madame E. Doing Their Bit (1918; as of this writing, film footage has not been located) Wali, Monona Grey Area (1982) Maria’s Story (1990) Welbon, Yvonne The Cinematic Jazz of Julie Dash (1992) Sisters in the Life: First Love (1993) Remembering Wei-Yi Fang, Remembering Myself (1996) Sisters in Cinema (2003)

INDEX

Beyoncé, 84 Billops, Camille, 2, 16–17, 19–24 Black feminism, 69–72, 87; P. Collins on, 32, 34, 35, 96–97; Combahee River Collective on, 32–33; Dash on, 30; DuVernay on, 103; Gaudry-Hudson on, 71; Larkin on, 31, 34, 48–49. See also hooks, bell Blank, Radha, 105–106 Blaxploitation films, 38 Bless Their Little Hearts (Woodberry), 34 Blue, Carroll Parrott, 35 blues music, 33, 38 Boaz, Franz, 13 Bobo, Jacqueline, 83 Brando, Marlon, 73, 75, 77 Bridges, Ruby, 78 Brink, André, 70–71, 74–75 Brown, Claire, 18 Bruce, Cheryl Lynn, 81 Burnett, Charles, 34, 41 Bush Mama (Gerima), 34 Bythewood, Reggie, 99

Abel-Bey, Gay, 35 African-American Film Critics Association, 100 African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement (AFFRM), 101, 103 Afro-American Film Exhibitors’ Company, 8 Aina, Shirikiana, 35 Alexander, Elizabeth, 28 “American Africanism,” 40 American Playhouse, 82 Anderson, Madeline, 2, 16–19, 24, 106 Anderson, Michael Adisa, 50–51 Angelou, Maya, 67 ARRAY film distribution collective, 95, 101–104 Attica prison rebellion (1971), 78 avant-garde films, 38, 65–66 Ballenger, Melvonna Marie, 35 Bambara, Toni Cade, 1, 3, 33, 37 Barbara-O, 81 157

158 

• 

I ndex

Cadenat, Garry, 71 Carroll, Diahann, 87–88 Caviness, Cathryn, 4 Césaire, Aimé, 77 Chery, Marc Arthur, 55 Chubb, Caldecot “Cotty,” 90, 91 Collins, Kathleen, 2, 24–29, 106; on Larkin, 49, 53 Collins, Nina Lorez, 29 Collins, Patricia Hill, 32–36, 41, 45, 47, 96–98, 104 Combahee River Collective, 32–33 Creating a Different Image (Makarah), 41 Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy, The (Collins), 29 Dash, Julie, 3, 42–48, 78–85, 97, 106–107; Daughters of the Dust, 34–35, 40, 42, 67, 78–82, 88; The Diary of an African Nun, 34, 40; Four Women, 34; Funny Valentines, 84; hooks on, 43, 44; Illusions, 30, 34, 41–47, 79; Incognito, 84; Larkin and, 48; Lemmons on, 88; Love Song, 84; on marginalization, 43, 65–66; Praise House, 84; The Rosa Parks Story, 84 Davis, Zeinabu irene, 3, 31, 55–63, 106–107; Compen-

sation, 35; Cycles, 35, 40, 61; “Keeping the Black in Media Production,” 56–57; Mother of the River, 40; A Powerful Thang, 35, 40, 55–63; Spirits of Rebellion, 41–42 Day, Cora Lee, 81 Define (Makarah), 41 Demme, Jonathan, 89 Dhanifu, Alicia, 35 Different Image, A (Larkin), 35, 40, 41, 48–54 Disney Studios, 77–78, 95 Doing Their Bit (Toussaint Welcome), 7, 10 Donalson, Melvin, 76, 77 Down in the Delta (Angelou), 67 Dry White Season, A (Palcy), 67, 69–71, 73–77, 79 Dunye, Cheryle, 67 DuVernay, Ava, 93–104, 107; awards of, 95, 100; documentaries of, 100, 102; on inclusion, 93; I Will Follow, 100, 102; L.A. Rebellion filmmakers and, 97; Middle of Nowhere, 99, 100, 102; My Mic Sounds Nice, 100; outsider perspective of, 96–99; as publicist, 97–99; Queen Sugar, 102; Selma, 100; 13th, 100; This Is the Life, 100, 102; When They

I ndex  

See Us, 102; A Wrinkle in Time, 95, 100 Elba, Idris, 99 Ellison, Ralph, 51 Emmy Awards, 105 Erivo, Cynthia, 92 feminism, Pan-African, 69–72. See also Black feminism Feyijinmi, Asma, 57 film adaptations, 70–72 film industry, 94–95, 104–105; Dash on, 43, 47–48, 79, 82; DuVernay on, 95–96, 98–99, 103; Foster on, 42–43; gender/race issues in, 42–44, 64–67; Lemmons on, 89; McCullough on, 37; Palcy on, 73–78 Finding Christa (Billops), 16–17, 22–24 Fleming, Victor, 82 Forty-Year-Old Version, The (Blank), 105–106 Forward Movement (production company), 101 Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey, 42–43, 47 Frazier, Jacqueline, 35 Freeman, Monica, 19 Gant, Harry, 4 Gaudry-Hudson, Christine, 71

• 159

gender/race issues, 64–67, 88, 93–94; in Dash’s films, 42–44, 78, 82; in Davis’s films, 55–57; in Duvernay’s films, 93–94; in Larkin’s films, 48–49, 55; in Lemmons’s films, 85; in Palcy’s films, 76–78. See also Black feminism; whiteness Georgia Council for the Humanities, 82 Gerima, Haile, 34 Gibson, Gloria, 6, 11–12, 14–15 Gist, Eloyce King Patrick, 6, 7, 11–14, 106 Gist, James, 12 Glamour magazine, 95 Gone with the Wind (Fleming), 82 Good, Meagan, 87 griot storytellers, 38, 72 Gunn, Bill, 27 Hall, Iris, 4 Harlem Renaissance, 9–10 Harris, Leslie, 67 Harrison, Homoiselle Patrick, 13–14 Haseenah, Ebrahim, 72 Hatch, James V., 20 Hillman Grad Productions, 105–106 Hobson, Janell, 80 Hollywood films. See film industry

160 

• 

I ndex

hooks, bell (Gloria Watkins), 55–56; on Dash, 43, 44; on film industry, 65, 66; on Palcy, 75–76; on whiteness, 44, 46, 75–76 Hoosier, Trula, 81 Houston, Drusilla Dunjee, 6 Hurston, Zora Neale, 6, 7, 11–16 I Am Somebody (Anderson), 16–19 I Like It Like That (Martin), 67 Illusions (Dash), 30, 34, 41–47 Iloputaife, Ijeoma, 35 inclusion, 35–36, 106; Dash on, 78; DuVernay on, 93, 98; Palcy on, 76–77. See also marginalization Independent Spirit Award, 91 Italian neo-realist films, 38 Jackson, Samuel L., 87, 88, 91 jazz music, 38 Jefferson, Nailah, 104 Jelks, John Earl, 57 Jezebel (Perrier), 104 Just Another Girl on the IRT (Harris), 67 Katon, Rosanne, 45 Khan, Chaka (Yvette Marie Stevens), 62–63 Kidd, Sue Monk, 95 Killer of Sheep (Burnett), 34, 41 Kino International, 83

L.A. Rebellion, 79, 97, 106– 107; alternative names for, 36–37; Davis on, 41–42, 61; men of, 30–31, 34; Taylor on, 35, 36; women of, 3, 31–63 Larkin, Alile Sharon, 3, 55, 106–107; on Black feminism, 31, 34, 48–49; K. Collins and, 49, 53; Dash and, 44, 48; A Different Image, 35, 40, 41, 48–54; Dreadlocks and the Three Bears, 41; The Kitchen, 35, 48–54; Your Children Come Back to You, 35, 40 Lathan, Sanaa, 99 Lee, Spike, 89 Légitimus, Darling, 71 Lemmons, Kasi, 85–92, 97, 107; acting career of, 89; awards of, 91; Black Nativity, 91; The Caveman’s Valentine, 91; on Dash, 88; Dr. Hugo, 91; Eve’s Bayou, 64, 67, 85–90; Harriet, 91–92; Talk to Me, 92 Lemonade (Beyoncé), 84 Library of Congress’s National Film Registry, 84, 91 Lorde, Audre, 1, 19–20, 27–28, 93–94, 98 Losing Ground (K. Collins), 25–29

I ndex  

Love & Basketball (Prince-​ Bythewood), 94–95 Mabry, Tina, 104 Maingard, Jacqueline, 74 Makarah, O. Funmilayo, 35, 41 Maple, Jessie, 2, 24–25, 106 marginalization, 64–67, 107; P. Collins on, 45, 96–98; Dash on, 43, 65–66; DuVernay on, 98; hooks on, 65, 66; Lemmons on, 85–86; Palcy on, 68, 77; Ryan on, 80. See also inclusion Mars, Bruno, 57 Martin, Darnell, 67 Martin, Michael T., 19, 37, 98, 101, 103 Martinique, 69, 71–73 Masilela, Ntongela, 37, 39–40 Mason, Charlotte, 13 Matsoukas, Melina, 105, 106 McCullough, Barbara, 35, 37 McKee, Lonette, 43 Mentorship Lab, Hillman Grad, 106 Micheaux, Oscar, 4, 6 Middle of Nowhere (DuVernay), 99, 100, 102 Mississippi Damned (Mabry), 104 Mokae, Zakes, 75 Moore, Kaycee, 81 Morgan, Debbi, 87, 88 Morrison, Toni, 40

• 161

Moses, Lucia Lynn, 4 Mpofu, Bekhithemba, 74–75 mulatto role, 44 NAACP Image Award, 100 National Board of Review, 91 National Endowment for the Arts, 82 National Film Registry (Library of Congress), 84, 91 Ntshona, Winston, 74–75 Older Women and Love (Billops), 22 Palcy, Euzhan, 68–78, 97, 107; Aimé Césaire, 77; A Dry White Season, 67, 69–71, 73–77, 79; on film industry, 73–78; The Killing Yard, 78; on marginalization, 68, 77; Ruby Bridges, 77–78; Siméon, 77; Sugar Cane Alley (La Rue Cases-­ Nègres), 69–73; Truffaut and, 73 Pan-Africanism, 40, 69–72. See also Black feminism Parkerson, Michelle, 19 Perrier, Numa, 104 Powerful Thang, A (Davis), 35, 40, 55–63 Preer, Evelyn, 4 Prince-Bythewood, Gina, 94–95, 99

162 

• 

I ndex

Queen & Slim (Matsoukas), 105, 106 race. See gender/race issues “race films,” 2, 4, 7–9, 38 Redding, Otis, 57 Robeson, Eslanda, 6 Rogers, Alva, 81 Russell, Alice B., 6 Ryan, Judylyn, 42, 73, 80 Sankofa (Gerima), 34 Sarandon, Susan, 73 Saxton-Federella, Margot, 50 School Daze (Lee), 89 Scott, Seret, 27 Seck, Douta, 72 Secret Life of Bees, The (Prince-­ Bythewood), 95 Shearer, Jacqueline, 19 Sheppard, Samantha, 61 silent films, 6–16, 81 slave rebellions, 72–73 Smollett, Jurnee, 87 Souders (or Saunders), Tressie, 6–9, 106 South Africa, 73–77 Stallings, L. H., 26–27 Starkman, David, 4 Stewart, Jacqueline, 32 Studio Museum (Harlem), 78 Sugar Cane Alley (La Rue Cases-­Nègres) (Palcy), 69–73

Sundance Film Festival, 100, 105 Sutherland, Donald, 73–75 Suzanne, Suzanne (Billops), 16–17, 21–23 Sweet, Stormé (Bright), 35 Taylor, Clyde, 35, 36, 39 Third Cinema (Tercer Cine), 38 Thompson, Anita, 4 To Sleep with Anger (Burnett), 34 Toussaint Welcome, Madame E., 6, 7, 9–11 Trimark Pictures, 91 Truffaut, François, 73 Tubman, Harriet, 91–92 Turpin, Bahni, 81 20 West, Home of Black Cinema, 25 Van Der Zee, James, 9, 20 Van Der Zee, Jennie Louise, 6, 7, 9–11 Vanishing Pearls ( Jefferson), 104 Waithe, Lena, 105–106 Wali, Monona, 35 Walker, Alice, 5, 50, 70 Watermelon Woman, The (Dunye), 67 Watts Rebellion (1965), 39 whiteness, 75–77; P. Collins on, 96–97; Dash on, 44–47;

I ndex  

Foster on, 42–43; hooks on, 44, 46, 75–76; Larkin on, 51–52. See also gender/ race issues Whitfield, Lynn, 87, 88 Will (Maple), 25 Williams, Maria P., 6 Williams, Spencer, 4 Womack, Autumn, 15–16 “womanist,” 5, 50, 70, 104

• 163

Woman’s Error, A (Souders), 6–9 Women Make Movies Too (organization), 82 Woodberry, Billy, 34 World War I, African American soldiers of, 10–11 Zobel, Joseph, 69, 71–72, 73

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christina N. Baker is an associate professor in the Department of History & Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at University of California, Merced. Her work focuses on the intersection of race and gender, with an emphasis on Black feminism and Black women in film and media. She is the editor of the collection Kasi Lemmons: Interviews and the author of Contemporary Black Women Filmmakers and the Art of Resistance and several articles and essays.