Filmmakers, Independent

By: Jacqueline Bobo

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Filmmakers, Independent

Black female independent filmmakers belong to an extensive continuum of black women who have labored against tremendous odds to create film, video, and television programs. The legacy of achievement by pioneer black women filmmakers underscores the dedication of contemporary artists who have persevered in crafting visual representations of black women's lives and histories.

Filmmaking Pioneers

The tradition of black women's films stretches back to the early part of the twentieth century with the religious folk dramas of the traveling evangelist Eloyce Gist and her two known films, Hell Bound Train and Verdict Not Guilty, both produced in the 1920s. During this period, other black women created films. Madam C. J. Walker developed her retail business around manufacturing and distributing hair-care products and cosmetics for black women and became one of the first black millionaires. As part of her enterprise, Walker oversaw the production of training and promotional films about her cosmetics factory. She also owned the Walker Theater in Indianapolis, Indiana, which she opened after being charged a higher price at another local theater because of her race.

The novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston, author of Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), produced ethnographic documentaries in the 1930s. Hurston was trained as an anthropologist, earning an MA in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University and working with the noted ethnologist Franz Boas. Eslanda Goode Robeson, who held a PhD in Anthropology, shot ethnographic films in the 1940s, although footage from these films is fragile and as of this writing not available for public viewing.

Among those early black women filmmakers for whom documentation exists of their contributions, two others have received recognition. Madam Touissant Welcome, the personal photographer to Booker T. Washington, produced at least one film about black soldiers who fought in World War I. Another, Alice B. Russell, worked closely and productively on films produced by Oscar Micheaux, whose The Homesteader (1919) was the first feature film produced by an African American.

Later Efforts

Mid-twentieth-century black females who produced a diverse range of films laid a foundation for later, widely recognized films such as Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust (1991), Dianne Houston's Academy Award–nominated Tuesday Morning Ride (1995), and Gina Prince-Bythewood's Love and Basketball (2000). By focusing on grassroots political activism, the lives and works of dedicated creative artists, the beginnings of narrative films, and narrative reconstructions, filmmakers such as Madeline Anderson, Monica Freeman, Jacqueline Shearer, Kathleen Collins, Joanne Grant, and Michelle Parkerson contributed a bounty of creative works that set a high standard of activist media for black female filmmakers who followed.

Madeline Anderson combined her social activism with her filmmaking skills, beginning with her first film, Integration Report I (1961), a short documentary about civil rights struggles. Anderson later directed one of the first contemporary films made by a black woman, I Am Somebody (1970), a groundbreaking documentary about black female hospital workers who staged a successful 113-day strike in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1968, and formed local 1199B of the national union of hospital workers. Anderson was also one of the first black women to serve as executive producer of a nationally aired television series, The Infinity Factory, for the Public Broadcasting Service in 1978, and was one of the founding members of the prestigious public affairs program Black Journal, which began broadcasting in 1965 and aired nationally on PBS. As one of the first black women to teach film at a major university, Columbia Graduate School of the Arts, Anderson was mentor to several of the earliest black women filmmakers, notably Monica Freeman, who earned an MFA in Film Production from Columbia University in 1977.

Monica Freeman overcame the barriers of scarce funds and limited resources to produce quality films about black life. Her film Valerie: A Woman, an Artist, a Philosophy of Life (1975) is a documentary about the Harlem sculptor Valerie Maynard. Rather than a mere telling of the artist's life, the film is a sensitive exploration of Maynard's philosophy—that her art is an integral part of her politics.

Freeman's next film, A Sense of Pride: Hamilton Heights in Harlem (1977), vividly portrays the little-known facets of a legendary neighborhood designated as a historic landmark, where the residents created community out of chaos. Featured in the film were longtime residents, one who was born in Harlem in 1906 and another who inspired a community garden and beautification project. Yet another resident stressed the need for black people to continue to live in the neighborhood to preserve a valuable aspect of black people's past. Eleanor Holmes Norton, who at the time of the documentary was New York's human rights commissioner, emphasized the importance of building community cohesion as a means to sustain Harlem Heights, thereby serving as a testament to black people's esteemed history. Freeman's later film, Learning through the Arts: The Children's Art Carnival (1979), explored the ways in which young black children can be motivated in many areas of their lives through the creative process, such as at the Harlem-based Children's Art Carnival.

Continuing the practice of mentorship, Freeman hired, as part of her films' crew, emerging black women filmmakers who went on to become established veterans. Freeman's film A Sense of Pride had an all-female crew that included Ayoka Chenzira, creator of a groundbreaking animated satire entitled Hair-Piece: A Film for Nappyheaded People (1984) and director of the ambitious 35mm feature-length narrative Alma's Rainbow (1993). Freeman's crew also included Debra Robinson, who would go on to direct the innovative documentary about black female comedians I Be Done Been Was Is (1984) and the subsequent fictional feature story of a young black girl's turmoil Kiss Grandmama Goodbye (1992).

Jacqueline Shearer, director of A Minor Altercation (1977), a dramatic re-creation of the heated events in Boston in the 1970s surrounding the battles over busing, created a different form of filmmaking altogether. At the time of the film, Shearer was working with Boston Newsreel, a collective of activists committed to bringing about positive changes in the community, and A Minor Altercation attempted to evenhandedly depict both sides of the conflict. In a later project, the “Keys to the Kingdom” segment of Eyes on the Prize II in 1989, Shearer more strongly recast her view of the busing conflict in A Minor Altercation as a clear incident of racism against black people. In “The Keys to the Kingdom,” Shearer emphasized the courage of the black mothers who had taken the lead in the busing issues, despite the fear they felt for their children's safety at the hands of hostile white mobs, yet still willing to fight for the rights of their children to have access to the best education available.

Shearer's two segments of Eyes on the Prize II—“Keys to the Kingdom” and “The Promised Land”—featured the artistry of the noted film editor Lillian Benson, the first black woman admitted to the American Cinema Editors, the internationally recognized honorary society of film editors. Benson received a television Emmy Award nomination in 1990 for her editing work with Shearer on “The Promised Land,” a program that focused on the last year in the life of Martin Luther King Jr.

Shearer and Benson also worked on the television documentary “The Massachusetts 54th Colored Infantry,” a 1991 segment of the PBS series The American Experience. Shearer's program was a sorely needed re-examination of the lives and histories of black soldiers who fought in the Civil War. The story was dramatized in the Hollywood film Glory (1989), but Shearer relied on black historians, notably the well-respected Barbara Fields, to correct the misrepresentations in that popular film. Black people—men, women, and families—lobbied and fought for the right of black soldiers to enter the war and be treated with respect. The existence of an active black abolitionist movement in Boston in the nineteenth century was also highlighted in Shearer's documentary, establishing that black people were active agents in the fight for the abolishment of enslavement.

Jacqueline Shearer's work exemplified her principled stance that political activism and media production are integrally intertwined. To further the goals of media developed with honesty and integrity, Shearer fought for funds for independent filmmakers and became the first board president of the funding agency Independent Television Service (ITVS) in 1992.

Documentarians and Activists

Political documentaries focusing on the lives of extraordinary black women who sparked catalytic events within historic movements make up the content of four significant films: Fundi: The Story of Ella Baker (1981), directed by Joanne Grant; Gotta Make This Journey: Sweet Honey in the Rock (1983), created and produced by Michelle Parkerson; A Place of Rage (1991), directed by Pratibha Parmar; and A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde (1995), produced and directed by Ada Gay Griffin and Michelle Parkerson. These works include the necessary elements of political documentaries: historical exegesis, inspiration, and a call to action.

Ella Baker (1903–1986), an important figure in the major civil rights struggles of the twentieth century, acted on her belief that grassroots activists working within the tenets of “participatory democracy”—a belief in group-centered leadership whereby those involved in social justice organizations can be empowered to act on their own behalf if they participate in the decision-making process—were essential to achieving long-term and sustained human rights, such as voting and integrated schools, and public accommodations. Baker was a field organizer for the National Association of Colored People in the 1940s, the first organizer of the newly formed Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the guiding force in forming the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Ella Baker's influence on younger generations of activists was profound. A leading contemporary movement activist, Bob Moses, perhaps most fittingly illustrated this influence by naming Baker “Fundi,” a word from Swahili that refers to someone in a community whose ideals are realized by passing on what they have learned to others. Moses remained in social justice activities, first by working in the voter registration drives in Mississippi throughout the 1960s, and later by taking part in the widely celebrated “Algebra Project,” an initiative begun in 1981 that taught math and science to poor and educationally disenfranchised black youth.

Both Bob Moses and yet another Ella Baker protégé, Bernice Johnson Reagon, the founding member of the a cappella singing group Sweet Honey in the Rock, were awarded the important and coveted MacArthur Genius grants for their lifelong contributions to social justice movements. Reagon cited Baker as her “political mother,” noting that Baker's example of recognizing the potential for resistance in every individual helped her to realize that music was a potent force in mobilizing concentrated, large-scale opposition to varied manifestations of injustice. Reagon's sentiments are captured vividly in Michelle Parkerson's documentary Gotta Make This Journey: Sweet Honey in the Rock (1996).

Pratibha Parmar's A Place of Rage centers on the public personae and political/cultural histories of the cultural activist June Jordan (1936–2002) and the scholar and activist Angela Davis (b. 1944). In the documentary, Jordan shares her experience of becoming aware of what she perceived as society's persistent malevolence toward black people, and especially toward black women in movement activities. Rage, for Jordan, was a compelling force for continued activism. She states in the documentary that “rage has lost its respectability since the 1960s. The thing that you had in the civil rights revolution was an absolute, upfront embrace of rage and a working with that.” Jordan declares that an absence of rage against persistent evils leads to despair and the plague of drug abuse “taking out our young people in droves today.”

Daughters of the Dust.  An image from the film by Julie Dash.

Photofest; 1992 Kino International Corporation

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Angela Davis, a lifelong political activist who grew up in the segregated South in Birmingham, Alabama, was thrust into the international spotlight in the late 1960s and early 1970s when she was removed from her faculty position at the University of California, Los Angeles, because of her membership in the Communist Party, USA. Davis later became the first female on the most-wanted list of the FBI, charged with murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy when guns registered in her name were found in the possession of Jonathan Jackson, brother of prison activist George Jackson, who sought to free black men on trial in Marin County in northern California. Angela Davis was eventually found not guilty of all charges and has since fought for all manner of social justice causes, including prison reform and women's rights. In A Place of Rage, Davis offers clear evidence of the force of group actions, specifically in the case of organized international efforts on her behalf, but also continued collective battles against manifold forms of political repression.

Commemorating the vision of an influential political, social, and cultural worker who intersected three critical social justice movements—civil rights, feminism, and lesbian and gay rights—A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde is an important latter-day film. Independent filmmakers Griffin and Parkerson showcase Lorde's poetry and archival footage of Lorde in various settings. Interviews with noted artists and activists, including the black lesbian political writer Barbara Smith, the essayist Sonia Sanchez, the fiery black lesbian poet Sapphire, the lesbian poet Adrienne Rich, and the black gay writer Essex Hemphill, are testimony to the life of a woman who demonstrated that political and cultural activism can be effectively translated through cultural forms.

An award-winning film mixing a number of forms, including documentary, dramatic re-creation, and performance, is Camille Billops's Finding Christa (1991). Co-directed by Billops's husband, James V. Hatch, Finding Christa is the story of the artist Billops's reunion with a daughter she gave up for adoption years before. The film received the Grand Jury Prize for documentaries at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival, the premiere showcase for films by independent directors.

The Art of Narrative

One of the first black women to venture into the realm of narrative film was Kathleen Collins,whose two films, The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy (1980) and Losing Ground (1982), expanded black women's film repertoire, moving from documentaries and experimental film toward fictionalized stories tailored for mass audiences.

Command of long-form dramatic narrative films raised black women filmmakers to another level of visibility. Films within this genre directed by black women include Just Another Girl on the IRT (1992), directed by Leslie Harris; I Like It Like That (1994), by Darnell Martin; Watermelon Woman (1996), directed by Cheryl Dunye; Compensation (2000), directed by Zeinabu irene Davis; and Civil Brand (2003), directed by Neema Barnette.

Within the genre of feature-length narrative film, the breakout work was Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust (1991), the first film directed by a black woman to be placed in commercial theatrical exhibition. Dash's film chronicles a multigenerational black family at the turn of the twentieth century. The family struggles, yet eventually triumphs over the oppressive legacies of forced removal from their African homeland and the torturous regimens of enslavement. Daughters of the Dust is an historic, foundational film that has played for receptive audiences hungry for depictions of black life long missing from mainstream commercial productions.

Julie Dash's impressive body of work includes the award-winning 16mm short Illusions (1983), a black-and white film set in the war years of the 1940s about a fair-skinned black woman who is an executive at a Hollywood studio. Illusions was declared the best film of the 1980s by the Black Filmmaker Foundation. Another Dash film, Funny Valentines (1999), an adaptation of a short story by the black female author J. California Cooper, starred the executive producer and actor Alfre Woodard, C. C. H. Pounder, and Loretta Devine. Other films include Incognito (1999), financed by the newly created cable production unit Encore/BET/Starz 3, and which helped launch the network's film division, Arabesque Films. Dash also directed Love Song (2000), starring Monica Arnold, which was produced and shown on MTV Original Movie Showcase. Later, she directed the made-for-television film The Rosa Parks Story (2002), which starred Angela Bassett and aired on CBS network television.

A significant benchmark for black women filmmakers occurred when Dianne Houston's Tuesday Morning Ride (1995) was nominated in 1996 for an Academy Award in the Best Live Action Short Film category. Just thirty-five minutes long, Tuesday Morning Ride, starring the legendary actors Ruby Dee, Bill Cobbs, and Vondie Curtis Hall and based upon the 1933 short story “A Summer's Tragedy” by Arna Bontemps, is loaded with meaning and importance. Houston's portrait of a loving, elderly black couple facing debilitating age and illness is unique in cinema history.

Houston later became the executive story editor and one of the directors for Steven Bochco's television series City of Angels, the only prime-time network television series in 1999–2000 to have a predominantly black cast and production personnel. Houston served in a similar capacity for the 1990 television series Brewster Place, produced by and starring Oprah Winfrey. She also directed for the television series The Education of Max Bickford and a two-part episode of NYPD Blue.

Following Houston's success, another hallmark for black female filmmakers was the director Kasi Lemmons's writing and directing debut film Eve's Bayou (1997), the highest-grossing independent film of 1997. Suffused with spirituality, black folk practices, and the little-known religion Voudou, Eve's Bayou opens with the narration of the adolescent Eve Batiste (Jurnee Smollett) telling of the summer her Louisiana family began to disintegrate: “The summer I killed my father I was ten years old.” The film unfolds in a beautifully photographed, evocative visualization of the secrets, spiritual mysticism, and haunting story of a black family in the South. The film features a carefully selected cast—Samuel L. Jackson, Lynn Whitfield, Debi Morgan, Vondie Curtis Hall—coupled with the cinematography of Amy Vincent, who also shot Houston's Tuesday Morning Ride, and the evocative music of Terence Blanchard.

The director Cauleen Smith's Drylongso (1999) premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, aired on the Sundance cable channel, and was named the Best Feature in the 1999 New York Urbanworld Film Festival. Smith also received the Movado Someone to Watch Award at the 2000 Independent Spirit Awards. Drylongso starts with the idea of “the endangered black male,” then evolves into a presentation of young black women's lives and experiences. In doing so, Smith illustrates that with all the emphasis on one segment of black lives, what has been overlooked is that young black females are constantly at risk, but have struggled valiantly against the obstacles and dangers in their lives. It is a touching and important film, and Smith is a talented and courageous filmmaker who handled the idea of “endangered black youth” fully, with integrity and skill. Smith's earlier short experimental film, Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron) (1992) was celebrated at the noted Flaherty Documentary Film Festival.

The most commercially successful film directed by a black female is Gina Prince-Bythewood's Love and Basketball (2000), which has a cult following among young black girls. On the heels of the film's box office and critical reception, Prince-Bythewood was selected to direct cable channel HBO's film version of the novelist Terry McMillan's Disappearing Acts (2001), which starred Sanaa Lathan and Wesley Snipes.

Further Contributions

The contributions of black women to film and media history have been many and varied. Among those who have achieved noteworthy positions include Carol Munday Lawrence, who set a high standard with her innovative series You Were There (1981), which explored the cultural history of African Americans, along with her Nguzo Saba folklore series of animated films of the 1970s and 1980s. Neema Barnette, who has directed many network television programs, including episodes of The Cosby Show, Frank's Place, China Beach, and A Different World, was one of the first black women to receive a television Emmy Award in a non-acting category as producer of the ABC After School Special To Be a Man. Barnette's directing credits include the Showtime cable television film Run for the Dream: The Gail Devers Story (1996), with a screenplay by Dianne Houston, and the highly regarded television play written by and starring Ruby Dee, Zora Is My Name (1989), broadcast nationally on PBS.

These later filmmakers constituted a cultural movement of creative artists who sought to transform the status of black women in popular imagination and in the minds of black women themselves. With this sustained and artful emphasis on the development of consciousness and self-determination—the will to act on one's own behalf—films by black women have long possessed the potential to alter black women's social conditions for the better.

See also Dash, Julie; and Film Industry.

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