artlesscalamity

Daughters of the dust

In an interview with Film Comment, Julie Dash was asked about her decision to structure her film Daughters of the Dust as a non-linear narrative. She explained how “in the culture, we’re not binary, we speak in rhythms and sensibilities, we’re circular.” In the same interview she resists the categorization of historical document, and describes the film as “a meditation – it’s a cinema of ideas and what-ifs and how-sos. It’s a conversation.”

We can feel the truth of this in the movie’s abundance of ideas and dream-like composition and pacing; languid, somewhat disassociated scenes that intermingle stories and identities and eras, yet always return to a shared history. The film centers the Gullah culture, which while unfamiliar to many people remains a quintessential American story. The pain of slavery as well as the perseverence of the spirit are present and immediate in this snapshot of Gullah life at the turn of the 20th century; woven into their cuisine and crafts, soaked into the very soil itself.

The tension of the story revolves around questions of identity, tradition and change – how to honor the past but survive the present. The opening scene finds two family members, Viola and Yellow Mary, returning home to Ibo Landing by boat. Each brings along a visitor who in some way represents the more modern world. Mary, the free spirit and outcast, is returning from the “big city” with her lesbian lover Trula. Viola is accompanied by the photographer Mr. Snead, a well-dressed man who wishes to document this Gullah alcove before the family leaves it behind. Snead is the director’s stand-in, the documentarian seeking to save a vanishing history. The movie is deeply personal for Julie Dash, and this is felt in its themes, its questions, the sensitivity of the photography and performances.

During the boat trip Mr. Snead introduces Mary and Trula to a new optical gadget – the kaleidoscope. “Kalos – beautiful. Eidos – form. Skopein – to view. If an object is placed between two mirrors, inclined at right angles, an image is formed in each mirror. Then, these mirror images are in turn reflected in the other mirror.”

Like a kaleidoscope, Daughters of the Dust contrasts a variety of angles against each other to create a beautiful whole. Like objects between two mirrors, all the characters reflect a past and a future, while also being part of a connected tapestry. The beautiful imagery of the film allows this tapestry to unfurl in an organic yet mythical way, creating an atmosphere of weighty peace and fatalism even as conflicts arise. Dash explains her intention as such: “I wanted to take the African-American experience and rephrase it in such a way that, whether or not you understood the film on the first screening, the visuals would be so haunting it would break through with a freshness about what we already know.” (Brouwer 1995) This is a movie about understanding who you are – a pursuit that feels more and more desperate and essential as society becomes more modern and detached.

Works:

Brouwer, Joel R. “Repositioning: center and margin in Julie Dash’s ‘Daughters of the Dust.’.” African American Review, vol. 29, no. 1, spring 1995, pp. 5+.

da Costa, Cassie. “Interview: Julie Dash.” Film Comment, 29 February 2016, https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/interview-julie-dash/.Daughters of the Dust. Directed by Julie Dash, Kino International, 1991.

artlesscalamity

Red Rocket

Whether he knows it or not, Sean Baker is one of our most deeply intelligent humanists. He has a singular ability to excavate the complexity and the mundane (self-inflicted) tragedy of modern human life. His protagonists are deeply troubled and problematic people, opportunists and narcissists and survivors, and somehow no matter how badly they behave, there is some small part of you that roots for them, anticipates a redemption that never comes.

Mikey (played by Simon Rex) is terrible, predatory, parasitic – and there are hints that he knows it, and there is that fleeting spark of possibility that maybe this time will be different. And of course, it never is. I think the most telling relationship in the film is between Mikey and Lonnie, that destructive trajectory as Mikey exploits Lonnie then easily abandons him at the first sign of trouble. The palpable hypocrisy when Mikey criticizes Lonnie for a scam that is vastly less malicious than his own behavior.

This is a person who – through whatever untold history – has lost all sense of ethical or empathetic behavior. And yet through charisma and luck and plain harassment, he manages to get his way to a large extent. And this is where the movie’s politics are hiding, the reason that Trump is a motif in the background; another figure who is objectively terrible yet manages to “succeed” through a pattern of lying and exploitation.

As usual with Baker’s movies the cinematography is beautiful: stretches of marsh, deserted streets, even the donut shop parking lot with the refinery in the near distance somehow has a glow, an aliveness. Rex is fantastic, inhabiting all the terribleness of Mikey while letting those hints of humanity and self-doubt barely squeak through. Suzanna Son is also very good, and provides the most tension in terms of where things may be heading. Overall an excellent film from an excellent filmmaker.

artlesscalamity

displacement Horror: His House

Wunmi Mosaku’s strong, evocative performance helps to drive the film’s complex themes

It is very, very hard to make a horror film that balances originality, immersion, genuine terror and a compelling message. His House, from first-time director Remi Weekes, is not a perfect movie, but it pulls off this balance while offering the genre an entirely new vision. The film follows a Sudanese husband and wife who seek asylum in London. Right there we begin with a modern, relevant, and provocative premise. The immigrant couple struggles to navigate this new world while also contending with a sinister force haunting their new home. The atmospheres are effective and there is an absolutely brilliant layer of meaning to the entire film, which we won’t go into here but delivers an ending that will generate plenty of thoughtful discussion. This is also one of the first movies I’ve seen in a long time that surprised me with a plot twist! Like I said, making good horror is not easy, and Weekes deserves plenty of praise.

Horror is all about placing characters in tense, dangerous, unpredictable situations, and often this is done by planting them in an unfamiliar environment. This “fish out of water” motif is well-trodden: think of classics like Evil Dead, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Wicker Man, or the more recent Get Out and Midsommar. Part of the horror is being in a new place where the characters don’t know what to expect. Now transfer that motif to a loaded and important contemporary topic like immigration, especially refugee immigration, and you hit upon a truly original and highly sympathetic premise. But don’t misunderstand me: this is not a ‘political’ film, per se. It’s simply a human film. It’s about the obstacles we never expected, the choices we make, and the baggage we carry with us, forever.

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the creator’s presence in akerman’s cinema

To watch Chantal Akerman’s meditative urban study News From Home (1977) is to witness a uniquely personal experimentation of cinema. Akerman deftly subverts common narrative in favor of a combination of sound and visuals that evokes longing, banality, isolation, struggle, movement. She is able to create something profoundly personal without characters or plot, bringing us into a place and a relationship that is grounded in lived experience while feeling like an abstract stream of conscious.

Structurally the film offers an hour and a half of prosaic, mostly street-level footage that is obliquely contextualized by an epistolary voice-over connecting mother and daughter. Time is movement – some scenes are slow, some are fast, some are static, depending on how the camera moves through space, just as our own movements through the city have varying times and speeds depending on our transport. The camera organically inhabits this space, creating a documentarian reflection of New York that somewhat recalls the “city symphonies” of the 20s and 30s.

But this is more than a record of urban life and architecture; Akerman’s New York is omnipresent and interwoven with her displaced identity. The absence of her physical form on the screen has the effect of enmeshing her experience into the fabric of the city itself – anonymous but part of a larger whole. Her voice channels a mother’s worry as she navigates its “murky canyons” (Barker), disembodied and anonymous yet entrenched in the grit of daily life. The soundtrack is plotless and seemingly disconnected from the images that pass on screen, yet these images are “grounded in the human body and its resonance with the body of the city,” (Barker) as Akerman’s camera flows namelessly through these spaces. The camera settles for long moments on people living through their lives – anonymous too, but captured with hyper-realist attention, as if to remind us of the many untold stories swirling around us.

Akerman is “present” as the voice and presumably as the POV, but she avoids letting herself be the object. Despite being a deeply personal film, the mother in those letters could be any of our mothers, and the sense of busy isolation as the camera moves through urban space feels familiar. The combination of her physical disembodiment and the shifting focus of different bodies throughout the city creates a ground-level perspective that’s easily inhabited by the audience. There is also a class consciousness in how the camera moves among the typically unseen, lived-in struggles of daily urban life. There is absolutely nothing forced or artificial here, just the real-world bodies of people going to or from work, caring for children, etc. This is not the glamorous New York of On the Town, or even the heightened world of intrigue of Rear Window or Naked City. It’s a blunt and unadorned shared reality.

We are not given much detail of either the mother or the daughter; only what we can discern through letters recited between them. In a way this lack of information puts us right in the mother’s shoes, who constantly requests more communication and details about her daughter’s life in this big city and its perceived perils. It’s unclear to us whether the daughter is thriving or flailing in her life. The scenes evoke a lonely anonymity and perhaps a homesickness, particularly the last, silent shot of the receding skyline taken from the Staten Island ferry. Throughout the film, this interplay of city scenes and Akerman’s voice (or lack of) creates a resonance and sympathy with both “characters,” one far away in an idyllic and familial home, the other adrift in an urban sea.

Works Cited:

Barker, Jennifer M. (2003). The feminine side of New York: travelogue, autobiography and architecture in ‘News from home’. Gwendolyn Audrey (ed.), Identity and memory: the Films of Chantal Akerman (pp. 41-58). Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press.

News From Home. Dir. Chantal Akerman. Criterion, 2010. Film.