Developing Identity Through Form

 In Daughters of the Dust, Julie Dash and Arthur Jafa work to dismantle the Hollywood studio-created image of black Americans. This was probably my favorite film in the class thus far. It was one of the best looking films I've seen in some time, and I am partial to intergenerational sprawling narratives (i.e. books like East of Eden or Go Tell it on the Mountain, or films like The Tree of Life or The Godfather: Part II). You can feel both the pressure and the blessings of family history in these works, and this is something I think about a lot in my daily life. I tend to give narrative art bonus points for ambition, and Daughters of the Dust is certainly ambitious. I don't  have a lot to say about the film as I feel that it essentially speaks for itself, but rather I would like to talk about Jafa's work in connection to Bell Hooks' ideas, as he was mostly all I thought about during the readings.

Still from Daughters of the Dust

Crooklyn, one of the best Spike Lee films (shot by Jafa), functions similarly to Daughters of the Dust in building identity through cinematic form. It feels more "Hollywood", as Spike Lee's form is generally in conjunction with the mainstream. However, it feels unconstrained by developing black identity in proximity to white identity. What is remarkable to me about these two films is, first, they are both extremely beautiful (I think of Jafa as more of an editor than a cinematographer, but I love the slow pans in these two films) but also that they function in the opposite way of Jafa's other work. By this I mean that instead of re-contextualizing white-created images of black people, Crooklyn and Daughters of the Dust develop black identity in a seemingly unconscious/natural way, simply because that visual language was the best for the film rather than as a conscious effort to make something anti-Hollywood. As Dash says: "I didn't want to tell a historical drama about African-American women in the same way that I had seen other dramas. I decided to work with a different type of narrative structure...[and] that the typical male-oriented western-narrative structure was not appropriate for this particular film. So I let the story unravel and reveal itself in a way in which an African Gullah would tell the story, because that's part of our tradition" (from Wikipedia page for Daughters of the Dust). 

Still from Love is the Message, the Message is Death

In Jafa's independent work, such as Love is the Message, the Message is Death, he compiles what I consider to be the mainstream depiction of black America through the lens of white-owned media companies (mostly news and entertainment). As Bell Hooks posits: "mass media [is] a system of knowledge and power reproducing and maintaining white supremacy" (117), and Jafa's film calls attention to this idea. For example, there are clips of black NBA and NFL stars (Kevin Garnett, LeBron James), black musicians (James Brown, Notorious B.I.G.) and black leaders (Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr.) that work to raise the question: "what would America be like if we loved black people as much as we loved black culture?" but also work as a moving celebration of accomplishments by black Americans. There is a sad undertone, though; Malcolm, MLK and Biggie are dead, and we recall that although these black athletes and artists are putting in the labor, much of the profit goes to white ownership. It also includes harsher imagery, such as blackface sequences from Birth of a Nation and body-cam footage of police brutality that are difficult to digest and challenging within the context of the pop culture imagery that the film is mostly comprised of, but these negative images are used purposefully to confront American image culture's racist history as well as mainstream media's use of trauma porn as part of a codified black identity. While it sounds like the film would be sprawling and unfocused from my description, it feels incredibly cohesive and emotionally evocative, being edited in unison with the song "Ultralight Beam" by Kanye West, a powerful song to match the powerful imagery. Jafa also recently made a video for West's song "Wash Us in the Blood" with Travis $cott, another challenging (or thought-provoking) work, although I don't like the song or video as much. Jafa is a remarkable talent who collaborates with many other great artists, and I'm glad to add Julie Dash to this list as I will certainly be seeking out her other work.