1. Reframing the Film Review: Lorraine Hansberry’s and Alice Childress’s Radical Print Journalism

Hansberry and Childress contributed regularly to Leftist newspapers, and they used that platform to advocate for changes in Hollywood movies, from plotlines to film style to casting practices. Their journalistic work exemplified a form of speculative criticism that imagined cinema to come. To do so, they blurred the boundaries between criticism, reportage, and fiction, thereby producing blueprints for a new Black cinema.

Hansberry’s early film criticism showcases her theories and ambitions for cinema as a revolutionary artform. From 1951 to 1952, she wrote movie reviews for New Foundations, a student quarterly affiliated with American Youth for Democracy and the Labor Youth League, both sponsored by the Communist Party. These reviews were later republished as a composite piece, which begins with her critique of Zoltan Korda’s Cry, the Beloved Country (1951), a Hollywood-produced adaption of Alan Paton’s novel. Hansberry opens on a radical note:

Imagine ten thousand people pour into a city square in Johannesburg, South Africa. Their faces are resolute and angry. The loudspeakers around the square sound out the mighty voice of Paul Robeson. Leaders of the people mount the platforms and they say that the black and brown peoples of South Africa are sick unto death of the oppression. . .. In the days that follow, the newspapers of the world report that the jails of South Africa are being filled with a determined people, black South Africans, Indians and Colored People. It is as if a people have lifted their fists as one and shouted out for all the world to hear—“Freedom now!”¹⁵

Highly sensorial, Hansberry’s impassioned description could be the opening of a screenplay: her sentences mark a cinematic rhythm—from crane shot to close-up, from mass protest to individual faces—as she moves fluidly between scales of experience. But that was not the type of film Hollywood wanted to make.

Hansberry’s opening is speculative—she reveals that the exact opposite happens in the actual film. “In the whole movie there is not one word of protest,” she writes, emphasizing her point with italics, “Not one hint of dissatisfaction, hatred or movements for change. Indeed, the only angry words are between black men.”¹⁶ That narrative choice, so incommensurate with the reality of apartheid-era South Africa, stands in tension with the documentary possibilities of location shooting. “Incidental to the story,” Hansberry observes, “the camera picks up some revealing scenes of the living conditions of the Africans. You see poverty and misery of the most hideous description possible. You see workers on their way to the mines, miners who constitute some of the most exploited people on the face of the earth.”¹⁷ For Hansberry, the film’s ultimate failure is that its fictional plotline, focused on a Black man begging a white man’s forgiveness, negates, rather than intensifies, the searing images registered by the camera.¹⁸ Through her critical labor, Hansberry thus reveals a counternarrative within the film’s mise-en-scene, creating in effect another film within her review.

In her other film reviews from the early 1950s, Hansberry similarly argues that Hollywood’s apparent interest in the “Negro problem” comes without “the remotest effort to say why there is a problem.”¹⁹ Hollywood provides a “rich indulgence in individual psychoses,” which sidesteps larger sociopolitical contexts and power structures and paradoxically simplifies individuality by portraying characters without meaningful context.²⁰ Hansberry calls this “the invisible force,” and she analyzes an array of titles to show how, in both subtle and explicit ways, racist beliefs shape the plotlines and visual logics of so-called progressive cinema at mid-century.²¹

But Hansberry is never content just to criticize. Her reviews always offer alternatives. In her review of Jean Negulesco’s Lydia Bailey (1952), set during the Haitian Revolution, she asks, rhetorically, what Black viewers want to see:

The answer is simple—reality. We want to see films about people who live and work like everybody else, but who currently must battle fierce oppression to do so. We want to see films about lynchings that did come off—or that can be stopped by the mass strength of black and white all over the country. Or about job-hunting when you are black; or house-hunting or school-hunting. About restaurants, hotels, theatres that do not admit. We want an end to the evasions of the Invisible Force so that all the world can see who our oppressors are and what lies at the root of their evil.²²

Hansberry later had a chance to try to bring such “reality” to the screen for a mass audience with the 1961 film adaptation of her play, A Raisin in the Sun.

Initially loath to let Hollywood “put its glossy little paws” on her play, Hansberry agreed to a film adaptation with the stipulation that she write the screenplay.²³ As anticipated by her review of Cry, the Beloved Country, she was especially enthusiastic about the world-building potential of cinema. “I was not in the least ‘lashed’ to the play,” she would later reflect.²⁴ “Like many Chicagoans who are born to the romance of the Sandburg image of the great city’s landscape, I was excited by the opportunity to deal with it visually and sent the formerly housebound characters hither and yon into the city.”²⁵ Her initial screenplay draft evidences her attentiveness to the city spaces through which characters move and to cinematic techniques for representing that movement. To open the film, for example, she calls for panoramic shots of Chicago’s South Side with the text of Langston Hughes’ poem “Harlem,” which inspired Hansberry’s title, superimposed across the city.²⁶ Especially as a first-time screenwriter, Hansberry is meticulous about camerawork, identifying shot types in her script and treating cinematography as an expressive language.

Hansberry’s experiments with cinematic space importantly express a politics: her screenplay expands her play’s attention to structural racism through direct engagement with the cityscape. Her draft film script includes several new scenes that show the Younger family navigating Chicago under Jim Crow—from Walter Lee visiting his white employer to Lena commuting across the city to find fresh produce. As Margaret B. Wilkerson observes, these new scenes reveal “the many subtle ways in which racism invades the characters’ lives on a daily basis.”²⁷ But as Lisbeth Lipari has detailed, Columbia Pictures executives worried about what an internal memo described as “the addition of race issue material,” and those scenes were excised from the final film.²⁸ In total, about one third of Hansberry’s script was cut.²⁹ Essentially confined to the home, the resulting film is less aesthetically interesting, and its critique of American racism is less extensive, than Hansberry intended. Hansberry’s foray into screenwriting unfortunately did not immediately open doors for other Black women—or Hansberry herself—to make more movies.³⁰ At midcentury, Black women’s cinematic visions had to grow in other genres, like Hansberry’s own speculative film reviews.

When Hansberry referenced Robeson in her alternative opening for Cry, the Beloved Country, she was not just citing a celebrity: she was casting her boss. In 1951, at just 21 years old, Hansberry joined the staff of Freedom, Robeson’s Harlem-based, monthly newspaper that James Smethurst has called “the most visible African American Left cultural institution during the early 1950s.”³¹ By the end of 1951, Childress had become a regular contributor as well.

A playwright and an activist, Childress was also an actress with an array of personal and professional ties to film and television. In the 1940s, she performed in American Negro Theatre (ANT) stage productions as did future film stars Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, and Ossie Davis, and in the early 1950s, she joined Robeson at a rally for the blacklisted Hollywood Ten.³² The same year that Childress started writing for Freedom, her husband Alvin Childress accepted a starring role in Amos’n’Andy, a television show that has since become synonymous with the long history of racist representations of Black life on screen. The show was also much criticized in its own day, not least by the writers at Freedom. In one of her early articles for Freedom, Hansberry reported on the show’s transition to television, calling it “the most despised anti-Negro show in the history of radio.”³³ Launching a structural critique of American media industries, she blamed the “television bosses” and explained that Black actors were regularly faced with an impossible choice: “a part that degrades their people or nothing at all.”³⁴

Childress also wanted better screen roles for Black performers. In June 1952, she wrote an article titled “All Those Colored Movies” as part of her monthly column for Freedom.³⁵ Childress’s column, “Conversations from Life,” centered on Mildred, a fictional Black domestic worker whom Mary Helen Washington has described as the “spiritual cousin” of Langston Hughes’s character Jesse B. Semple.³⁶ Unfolding as a one-sided conversation between Mildred and her friend Marge, “All Those Colored Movies” appeared in an issue that also featured coverage of labor strikes, a W.E.B. Du Bois editorial calling for a third political party, and a report on South Africa’s pass system. Childress’s column insists that film was a pressing political topic too.

By placing film criticism within a “conversation from life,” Childress simultaneously transformed the film review into fiction and framed film criticism as an everyday activity to be practiced by anyone anywhere—including, one might speculate, in the Freedom offices with co-workers like Hansberry.³⁷ Childress later revised and expanded “All Those Colored Movies” to be a chapter in her first novel, Like One of the Family (1956), thereby exemplifying the porous boundaries between film criticism and narrative fiction.³⁸

In Childress’s column, a conversational form goes hand in hand with content.³⁹ Mildred establishes her qualifications as a film critic with tell-it-how-it-is rhetorical aplomb: “I go to see a lot of movies about colored people,” she announces, “almost all that they put out . . . and I’m beginning to get a little warm under the collar about what they all say.”⁴⁰ In the novel, Mildred further emphasizes her critical credibility by discussing Hollywood’s representation of domestic workers: “I know that maids don’t be carryin’ on like that over the people they work for, at least none of ‘em that I’ve ever met! I will also bet that we’d never be able to figure out how much brass railin’ we have polished up in movin’ pictures and how many dishes we’ve washed and all such as that.”⁴¹ Mildred’s identity as a Black woman and her experience as a domestic—a job that Childress once held herself⁴²—positioned her to notice things missed by most professional film critics, who especially at midcentury were typically white, male, and middle class.

In both the newspaper and novel versions of “All Those Colored Movies,” Childress combines reviews of specific films with a critique of larger social and media structures, all expressed in Mildred’s propulsive vernacular prose. It’s a dire situation that leads Mildred to confess, “Why, it gets so that every time I see colored comin’ on in a picture, I kind of hold my breath ‘cause I don’t know if I can stand how they gonna have him actin’! Ain’t that a shame? Who writes all that mess anyway?”⁴³ In addition to criticizing the writing and the direction of performers, Mildred castigates Hollywood’s casting practices, unpacking the ironic casting of racial passing films. Discussing Alfred L. Werker’s Lost Boundaries (1949), she explains that it “was all about how these colored folk caused their children so much misery by passin’ for white, only it was so confusin’ ‘cause all the folks that was passin’ really was white and should not be passin’ atall.”⁴⁴

Like Hansberry, Childress criticizes Cry, the Beloved Country for extoling whiteness. Mildred observes, “it ends up with a nice white man givin’ another one some money to help little African boys.”⁴⁵ To Mildred, the film exemplifies Hollywood’s racist propaganda that “we’re to blame for everything that happens to us” and “good white folk can’t help no colored folk ‘cause they will kill good white people instead of thanking them.”⁴⁶ Mildred allows that the popularity of films about race relations did increase the number of prominent roles available for Black actors, including Canada Lee, who starred in Cry, the Beloved Country. But screen time alone, Childress makes clear, is not enough.

Childress ends her article by eulogizing Lee, who had passed away a month earlier, and then launching a call to action for performers and industry professionals alike. “I only wish that those who are still living will make some pictures and plays sometimes all about how we are not to blame for everything that happens to us,” Mildred comments, before upping the urgency of her message: “Yes, Marge, I know that THEY don’t pick out the stories . . . but after all SOMEBODY DOES.”⁴⁷ Childress was herself a screenwriter, although none of her screenplays had been produced. She thus knew personally the power of the film industry’s gatekeeping at midcentury. Her film criticism, like Hansberry’s, was one form of protest.

Decades later, in the 1980s, Childress was contacted by Jacqueline Shearer, a Black independent filmmaker who wanted to direct her first feature-length film, about Black domestic workers in the 1940s.⁴⁸ Shearer asked Childress to serve as a story consultant for the film project, and Childress readily agreed. In her positive response, Childress referenced her 1950s column about Mildred, concluding her letter by saying, “The presentation of domestics in mass media has been hampered by ridicule of the subject matter. Your project promises to undo much of the mischief and to show such women in a true light which reflects the dignity and importance of service workers.”⁴⁹ Childress later shared with Shearer an unpublished screenplay that Childress wrote in 1951, titled “More than a Notion,” and throughout the process, Childress appeared delighted that Shearer might carry on a media agenda that she had begun decades earlier.⁵⁰ Unfortunately, Shearer’s planned film about domestic workers never made it to the screen, despite involvement by Gwendolyn Brooks, among others. Childress’s and Shearer’s unrealized film projects provide further evidence that the history Black women’s film writing—critical and creative—cannot be told only through what was published or produced.

2. Fictions of Filmgoing: Toni Morrison’s and Adrienne Kennedy’s Speculative Cinematic Visions

In 1985, Morrison described how in writing The Bluest Eye, she “pick[ed] up scraps of things that [she] had seen or felt, or didn’t see or didn’t feel, but imagined. And speculated about and wondered about.”⁵¹ “All of those people were me,” Morrison said of her characters, explaining that writing had been empowering: “I reclaimed myself and the world—a real revelation. I named it. I described it. I listed it. I identified it. I recreated it.”⁵² The world of The Bluest Eye is notably mediated by film culture: there are trips to the movies, a Shirley Temple cup plays a pivotal role, the protagonist’s name alludes to a Hollywood melodrama, and more. By weaving together “scraps” of experience with more speculative visions, Morrison not only critiqued mass media, as scholars have long emphasized, but also imagined what an alternative, “recreated” cinema might look like.

Reading The Bluest Eye and two 1970s plays by Adrienne Kennedy, I show how Morrison explores the potential of cinema born more of image and affect than narrative, and I discuss how Kennedy remixes Hollywood film culture into a cinematic vision that is simultaneously an homage to the commercial movies that she loved and a subversive alternative. In so doing, I build on work by Jacqueline Najuma Stewart who, reading The Bluest Eye and Richard Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son, convincingly argues that scenes of filmgoing in literary fiction “supplement the limited historical archive on Black spectatorship during the era of segregation.”⁵³ Alongside Stewart’s use of fiction as compensatory evidence for historical spectatorship, I unpack what African American literature can reveal about its authors’ own cinematic ambitions.

The Bluest Eye repeatedly lambasts the overwhelming whiteness of Hollywood movies, mapping the insidious racism of U.S. beauty norms and their damaging effects on Black women and girls.⁵⁴ The protagonist Pecola’s attachment to the image of Shirley Temple produces deep psychological trauma, while moviegoing leads Pauline, Pecola’s mother, to “the most destructive ideas” and “the most destructive emotions.”⁵⁵ At the height of her film obsession, Pauline attempts to remake herself in the image of platinum blonde starlet Jean Harlow, leading Stewart to contend, “This is, without question, a negative representation of Black spectatorship, revealing the incongruity between Black lives and the fantasies on screen.”⁵⁶ As Stewart and others have written, Pauline’s filmgoing is propelled by desperation. In Pauline’s daily life, casual racism is pervasive, other Black women belittle her, her husband is abusive, and having a disabled foot makes her feel increasingly self-conscious. The cinema seems to offer an escape, but that is ultimately a mirage, generating “disillusion” and “self-contempt.”⁵⁷ Emphasizing Pauline’s suffering, Morrison produces an especially potent critique of exploitative cultural ideologies, from racism to sexism to ableism, which American movies have long reinforced.

Yet for all the power of Morrison’s critique of popular media, I hesitate to see her depiction of film as categorically negative, in part because I think Pauline has more agency than most critics have allowed. In this I concur with Pardis Dabashi’s view that “Pauline may be getting immersed in the pleasures of the movies, but she knows that she’s doing it.”⁵⁸ Reading the novel alongside archival materials, I argue that Morrison provides glimpses of what the movies could be as she signals that an alternative cinema is already playing in Pauline’s mind.

Morrison’s speculative vision for cinema hinges on her portrayal of Pauline as an artist. Alongside escapism, Pauline’s enthusiasm for movies is also propelled by her acute aesthetic sensibility. As a girl, she “cultivated quiet and private pleasures. She liked, most of all, to arrange things.”⁵⁹ From pine needles to peach pits, canned tomatoes to cottonwood leaves, “whatever portable plurality she found, she organized into neat lines, according to their size, shape, or gradations of color.”⁶⁰ Hers is the sensibility of an artist-curator, and when she goes to school, “she missed—without knowing what she missed—paints and crayons.”⁶¹ Lacking an artist’s tools, Pauline still daydreams, conjuring interior visions similar to what James Baldwin would later describe as “the cinema of my mind.”⁶² When Pauline falls in love with Cholly, she does so partly because his touch evokes a sensuous montage of memories. Picturing a childhood berry picking expedition, Pauline recalls “all the bits of color” as she narrates, “My whole dress was messed with purple, and it never did wash out. Not the dress nor me. I could feel that purple deep inside me. . .. So when Cholly come up and tickled my foot, it was like them berries, that lemonade, them streaks of green the June bugs made, all come together.”⁶³ Upon marrying Cholly, she channels her curatorial energies into housework. But any creative potential in that exercise eventually dissipates. Confined to the home, Pauline resigns herself to the visual pleasure of gazing at “the peeling green paint of the kitchen chairs.”⁶⁴ Until she discovers movies.

Pauline’s artistic sensibility primes her to gravitate towards film as a rapidly evolving medium that could combine images and artforms to create what she calls, “a magnificent whole.”⁶⁵ “Projected through a ray of light,” the images are in black and white, but the resulting spectacle resonates with Pauline’s earlier berry picking-lemonade-green streaks visual mashup.⁶⁶ The movies effectively materialize the proto-cinematic montages running through her mind. At least initially, the films she watches invoke the pastoral landscapes of her past: “There at last were the darkened woods, the lonely roads, the river banks.”⁶⁷ Nourished by those images “at last,” Pauline feels rejuvenated: “there in the dark her memory was refreshed, and she succumbed to her earlier dreams.”⁶⁸ Cinema is both an aesthetic homecoming and a mechanism of wish fulfillment, resulting in a particularly immersive spectating experience: “I’d go early, before the show started,” Pauline narrates, “They’d cut off the lights, and everything be black. Then the screen would light up, and I’d move right on in them pictures.” ⁶⁹ The movies offer the one site where she can find joy and exercise some degree of agency, including the freedom to “move,” albeit imaginatively.⁷⁰ Morrison registers her hesitations even then: Pauline “succumbed” to dreamworlds. And a more damning critique of film is soon to come. Yet in portraying Pauline’s filmgoing pleasure, Morrison may partly have been channeling her own.

At a 1988 symposium on Black cinema that Morrison organized, she recalled what “an extraordinary thing” it was to watch Black Orpheus (1959).⁷¹ Morrison shared that she watched the film “again and again” because of what she called an “elementary response before we got into the analysis of what does it mean.” “It was just the picture,” she explained. “Just looking at that. These faces, this color, this skin, this variety, this story, this touching, this music, those children—I must have been starving to death. That remained in my mind.”⁷² That Morrison was “starving to death” for such an aesthetic experience parallels Pauline’s hunger for images. In a similar way, Morrison’s description of “just looking” at Black Orpheus, in which she references but does not emphasize the film’s “story,” resonates with Pauline’s sensitivity to shapes, colors, and textures. Pauline never gets a chance to watch a film that centers Black life, but nevertheless, there are clear commonalities between Morrison’s fictional portrayal of filmgoing and her memories of Black Orpheus.

Both Morrison’s own moviegoing and that of Pauline also bring to mind Virginia Woolf’s writing about film. In a 1926 essay, Woolf describes how viewing a shadowy shape on a movie screen—perhaps a projectionist’s glitch, “the effect unintentional”—alerted her to the untapped expressive potential of film.⁷³ Critical of cinema’s parasitic attachment to other artforms, Woolf believes that film has the potential to produce a new kind of “visual emotion,” coalescing out of “some momentary assembly of colour, sound, movement.”⁷⁴ Like Woolf, Morrison and Pauline also catch glimpses of a different kind of cinema.

Woolf, however, does not account for the politics of the moving image and its history of representation. Morrison does. Pauline’s spectatorship soon transforms into cultural indoctrination: she “was never able, after her education in the movies, to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty, and the scale was one she absorbed in full from the silver screen.”⁷⁵ This move to categorize beauty recalls Pauline’s earlier propensity for cataloguing: her curatorial sensibilities—once deferred and then redirected—are ultimately scrambled by film spectatorship. The movies metamorphize into yet another emblem of disempowerment, perhaps made more potent because cinema once contained the potential for creative fulfillment.

This reading of the latent potential that Morrison saw in screen images and subtly expresses in The Bluest Eye is bolstered by the history of how the novel came to be. A single archived letter, recovered from and singed by a house fire, reveals that Morrison’s first novel could have been a teleplay instead.⁷⁶ In the spring of 1966, Morrison pitched “a seven part story” to literary editors.⁷⁷ She thought it was the start of a novel, but she was not sure, partly because it included “a tiny play.”⁷⁸ To one editor, she wrote, “If you feel its promise as a novel is questionable, I will sharpen its outlines and maintain it as a short story…or see what can be done to dramatize it.”⁷⁹ One option “to dramatize it” was to take it to television.

That summer, CBS announced a new series, “CBS Playhouse,” which was “designed as a major showcase for the presentation of meaningful original drama on tv.”⁸⁰ To attract writers, including “new talent,” CBS promised “no censorship” and a substantial paycheck, up to $25,000 per script.⁸¹ Trade newspapers regularly reported on the series: Variety called it a “prestige vehicle,” and Back Stage ran the headline “Writers Flood CBS Playhouse” to gloss how established and aspiring screenwriters alike were submitting inquiries and full scripts in droves.⁸² Morrison, then an unknown writer working at a textbook subsidiary of Random House, was one of them.

The first teleplay slated for CBS’s series focused on a Black Vietnam War veteran played by Ivan Dixon, best known for Nothing But a Man (1964) and A Raisin in the Sun (1961). Several other dramas about Black life were also apparently under consideration, including a Lorraine Hansberry play.⁸³ How much Morrison knew about the series is unclear, but sometime between July 1966 and February 1967, she sent a manuscript to CBS. How much her submission looked like a television script is also unclear: what she sent to CBS is not part of her archive. She did preface her submission with the same story outline that she had previously circulated to literary editors, but with a short addendum: “I am aware that some of this might be impossible to reporduce (sic) or even represent on TV, but I had to write it as it is.”⁸⁴ CBS returned Morrison’s manuscript on a technicality—she needed to complete a release form before they would consider her work. Morrison’s archive seems not to contain any related correspondence. She may or may not have tried to submit a second time.

Morrison’s gravitation toward screen media to tell the story that became The Bluest Eye is one more reason to think that her narration of Pauline’s turn to film may include more than just a negative critique. And although The Bluest Eye did not get picked up by CBS, Morrison did, in subsequent drafts, increase the media content of her novel. The protagonist “Eunice” became “Pecola,” a reference to “Peola” from the 1934 film Imitation of Life, and a new character appeared: a movie-lover named Pauline.

If Morrison’s critique of Hollywood can also be read as a subtle call to develop cinema’s aesthetic potential in an alternative direction, her contemporary Adrienne Kennedy articulated a very different take on Hollywood movies. In her experimental memoirs and avant-garde plays, Kennedy both responds to the exclusionary history of the American film industry and asserts her own agency as a cinephile, deriving great pleasure from Hollywood stories and stars alike, but on her own terms. Kennedy thus reframes film fandom as especially active and creative, and she speculatively reimagines Hollywood movies to surrealistic effect.

From an early age, Kennedy was drawn to the movies. In her autobiography People Who Led to My Plays (1987), Kennedy recalls that, growing up, she loved reenacting movie scenes with friends—in one memorable backyard restaging, she played “Mrs. Miniver” after Billy Wilder’s popular 1942 film of the same name. Especially enamored with Hollywood stars, she kept scrapbooks with movie magazine cutouts, and as a teenager, she asked a hairdresser to style her hair like Elizabeth Taylor’s. Kennedy’s film-inspired self-fashioning rhymes with, but then departs from, Pauline’s in The Bluest Eye. Beyond beauty, what was at stake for Kennedy was self-sufficiency, a trait she associated with actresses like Ingrid Bergman and Bette Davis.⁸⁵ And even as she idolized white movie stars, Kennedy also lauded the “glamour” of her mother, with whom Kennedy shared a passion for film.⁸⁶ “Days after a movie,” Kennedy recalls in one interview, “my mother talked to me as an equal. She asked my opinion about actors’ clothes, their possessions, their choices.”⁸⁷ This mother-daughter ritual of cinematic close-reading speaks to how some Black spectators saw film as a site for collaborative interpretation and community.

Kennedy’s childhood experiences parallel those of the Black feminist author and activist Michelle Wallace, who has discussed how the clothes, hairstyles, and gestures of white Hollywood stars became “an intensely important cultural currency between the women in [her] family.”⁸⁸ Her family, Wallace writes, identified so closely with some actresses as to be “possessed” by the movies, and Wallace contends that this orientation was not about “abandoning” racial identity, but rather about “problematizing” and “expanding” the possibilities of cinematic connection.⁸⁹ Reading Wallace’s essay alongside historic accounts in the Black press of Black fandom of white Hollywood, Jacqueline Najuma Stewart proposes that “interest in movie stars may have enabled a complex process of subject positioning and interpretation.”⁹⁰ Stewart’s point also holds for Kennedy, who, like Wallace, insists that pleasure, in addition to various forms of opposition, is a crucial part of Black women’s spectating repertoire.

Kennedy’s theorization of spectatorship is not limited to the relationship between spectator and screen, but also extends to the social dynamics between moviegoers. Her work shows an abiding interest in whether movies can foster connections between audience members of different backgrounds and racial identities. In her 1973 one-act play Diary of Lights, she historicizes and grapples with that possibility. While not strictly autobiographical, the aptly titled Diary maps Kennedy’s artistic and cultural influences.⁹¹ Film is front and center. Set in 1950s New York City—during what Margo Jefferson describes, in an essay about the play, as “the avant-garde of integration,” with all its “promise and menace”⁹²—the play opens with four characters, two of whom are Black and two of whom are white, emerging from the Thalia, a beloved Upper West Side movie theater. They all seem buoyed by what they have just shared, and “they talk collectively as in a chorus with great exhilaration.”⁹³

Yet as Jefferson and others have noted, Kennedy also underscores the different identities and positionalities of the exhilarated filmgoers. Margo, a white woman, repeatedly professes her love for French actor Gérard Phillipe, while Billie, a Black woman, wishes that she looked like Dorothy Dandridge and treasures a napkin signed by William Marshall, a Black stage actor who “knows a lot of people in Hollywood.”⁹⁴ Billie’s real aspiration, however, is to write. Outside of the Thalia, gazing at city lights, she thinks about other Black women writers, including Gwendolyn Brooks, whose work, though celebrated, had not made it to Broadway—or, one might add, to the movies.

Film is a key topic in Diary, but Kennedy’s one-act A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White (1976) is so entangled with film that the play almost becomes its own form of surrealistic cinema. In Movie Star, Kennedy explicitly repurposes and reimagines some of her favorite films: Now, Voyager (1942), A Place in the Sun (1951), and Viva Zapata! (1952). Actors are costumed and made up to appear as white film stars, including Bette Davis and Shelley Winters, in settings that approximate famous scenes from their films. “Movie music” plays at intervals throughout.⁹⁵ But Kennedy also repurposes her earlier plays—and her own life. Rather than reenacting film scenes precisely, the movie star characters speak dialogue about Kennedy’s own family. The play also features Clara, a Black woman, and her family. An aspiring writer, Clara repeatedly quotes from and riffs on Kennedy’s plays, including Diary. And as Margo Jefferson and Elin Diamond have observed, as Clara scribbles in a notebook, she seems to supply the very dialogue of the film stars with whom she shares the stage.⁹⁶ But more than metatheatricality is at stake. Movie Star is a radical thought experiment and a complicated gesture of critical love, as Kennedy implicitly asks: What if famous film stars told the stories of a Black family as written by a Black woman? What if such narratives were celebrated like Bette Davis’s Hollywood hits?

Kennedy’s conceit for Movie Star had been brewing for a long time. She once dreamed of being a movie star, but as she confesses in her memoir/murder mystery The Deadly Triplets, “I couldn’t figure out what roles I would play. If I were an actress I would want to play roles like Bette Davis’s. I abandoned the idea and started to write a play.”⁹⁷ In Movie Star, the “Bette Davis” character not only channels Kennedy’s experiences, but also those of the author’s fictional surrogates. In a reference to the opening of Diary, for example, the Davis character shares, “Eddie and I went to the Thalia on 95^th and Broadway,” and then reports, “There’s a film festival this summer. We saw Double Indemnity, The Red Shoes and A Place in the Sun. Next week Viva Zapata is coming.”⁹⁸ Overflowing with film references, Movie Star takes thematic cues from an array of movies, including some that Kennedy never mentions by name, like George Waggner’s horror flick The Wolf Man (1941). In My Plays, Kennedy describes the lasting effect that Waggner’s popular film had on her, musing, “Metamorphosis and that change of identity would, twenty years later, become a theme that would dominate my writing. The characters in my plays and stories would also change personae at an alarming rate.”⁹⁹ Metamorphosis infuses Movie Star, not only as the characters change, but also in Movie Star’s relationship to Hollywood film: Though never naïve about the film industry’s racial politics, Kennedy could, by the very logic of metamorphosis, reframe cinema itself by re-presenting it in Movie Star as a catalyst for her own creativity.

Late in Movie Star, Clara sets the terms of Kennedy’s intervention. Describing her dream of being a writer—a dream no one believes is possible—Clara explains that her husband thinks that “to me [i.e., to Clara] my life is one of my black and white movies that I love so…with me playing a bit part.”¹⁰⁰ In Movie Star, Kennedy critiques the fact that Black women have been given only peripheral consideration—a “bit part,” in Hollywood cinema—but she simultaneously recuperates cinematic immersion as a source of artistic agency. It is a radical critique: Kennedy “co-opts the cinematic image,” writes Diamond, and Jefferson adds, “Here the little-known world of her black family enters, appropriates, and incorporates the iconic world of white Hollywood movies.”¹⁰¹ Kennedy is similarly transgressive in her insistence that Black women can love such Hollywood movies. “These movie stars are romantic and moving, never camp or farcical,” Kennedy asserts in her opening stage directions.¹⁰² And early in the play Clara asks, “Each day I wonder with what or with whom can I co-exist in a true union?”¹⁰³ Kennedy significantly adds “with what” as an option. Her own answer would almost certainly include cinema.

3. Memories of Making: Alice Walker’s Life Writing as Cinematic Critique and Cinematic Dreaming

Starting in the 1970s, Black women—including Black women writers—gradually gained more opportunities to make movies themselves. But as is still the case today, the filmmaking process remained shaped by larger industrial and social structures of power that often limited Black women’s creative agency and the kinds of stories that could be told on screen. Partly in response, a number of Black women writers, including Alice Walker, June Jordan, Maya Angelou, and Kathleen Collins, turned to life writing to map the behind-the-scenes production process. By sharing their personal experiences on set and thinking speculatively about how film production might function differently, they built new blueprints for cinema. In so doing, they also nominated the production process, in addition to finished films, as a key site for cinematic critique and cinematic dreaming. This section analyzes that use of life writing for film criticism by looking closely at Alice Walker’s work.

In 1984, Walker began the process of bringing her womanist novel The Color Purple to the big screen. Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book had already generated passionate praise and acerbic censure. The film adaptation made headlines immediately—not least because it was helmed by two men, director Steven Spielberg, who is white, and producer Quincy Jones, who is Black.¹⁰⁴ A lifelong diarist, Walker documented the production process en route. As an ongoing conversation with herself, journaling gave Walker space to grapple with her ambivalence about the film and to interrogate the possibility of creative agency in Hollywood for Black women writers.¹⁰⁵ Slightly over a decade later, in 1996, Walker published many of those entries in a multi-generic book, The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult, about the making of the film.¹⁰⁶ Alongside her diary entries, Walker’s book also features her unproduced screenplay and contemporaneous press coverage in order to reveal the “behind the scenes struggles” of what she calls “one of my life’s most complex public events.”¹⁰⁷ In its pages, Walker demonstrates that diary entries, letters, autobiography, and even narrated dreams can be vital vehicles for film criticism.

Before the Hollywood opportunity arose, Walker had not dealt with a major film studio, although she had written a screenplay for her short story “Finding the Green Stone” and had consulted on an ill-fated Zora Neale Hurston film for public television.¹⁰⁸ Initially skeptical of a Hollywood film adaptation, Walker was reassured by her immediate rapport with Jones and Spielberg. Writing about their first meeting in her journal, she reports, “We went out to Ernie’s for dinner where Quincey (sic) and Steven and I got slightly tipsy and energetic in our thoughts of a movie about Celie and Shug and Nettie.”¹⁰⁹ Dining at Ernie’s, a San Francisco establishment made iconic by Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo (1958), Walker may well have thought that “high-risk collaborative creativity,” as she described it, could change the trajectory of American film. She agreed to write the screenplay.¹¹⁰

Although Walker was satisfied with her script, it was ultimately rejected by the production team, and its presence in The Same River Twice is itself a critical statement: a vision for what could have been. In part because of physical and emotional exhaustion—Walker was struggling with undiagnosed Lyme disease at the time—she did not attempt a rewrite and agreed to a replacement screenwriter: Menno Meyles, a white Danish man. She did continue to work as a production consultant. In one letter to Spielberg and Meyles, she criticizes a planned ending as “too John Wayne-ish,” explaining, “this is a reunited family, and no one would be off on his horse at this thrilling time. Except John Wayne. And need I say, us ain’t he?”¹¹¹ Later in her diary, Walker reflects that although her feedback on the script’s language was generally accepted, more substantial comments, born from lived experience, were typically ignored.

In her journals, Walker often records her dreams, which offer another register for speculative thinking and critique. In a diary entry penned on the first day of filming, for example, she recounts an anxiety dream in which her books were stolen before a public speaking event. Dreams have long been associated with cinema and vice versa, and Walker notably narrates the events of her dream with cinematic aplomb—as if practicing for the film production to come. She then reports that upon waking, she reflected that in “real life,” “if my story is stolen from me I’ll just present myself. I’ll share my fears and experience with my audience and trust them to help me/us out.”¹¹² The Same River Twice effectively enables her to do just that: to present her foray into filmmaking with life writing’s aura of candor.

In her book, Walker shares much about the production process. Despite the lengthy shoot, the production felt rushed to her, especially given the chasms of cultural literacy at play. When Spielberg and Walker had first met, he had impressed her with his analysis of her novel, but while she always defended her choice of him as director, the filming process showed how uninformed he and other white production team members were about Black life. At one point, Spielberg unselfconsciously described Gone with the Wind (1939) as the “greatest movie ever made,” prompting Walker to spend several sleepless nights considering “all I would have to relay to him, busy as he was directing our film, to make him understand what a nightmare Gone with the Wind was to me.”¹¹³ In contrast to Spielberg, whom she describes as darting around set in a blur of activity, Walker occupied herself by offering informal speech lessons and tarot card readings. “As I watched each scene unfold,” she writes in The Same River Twice, “I felt more like a spirit than a person.”¹¹⁴ Her peripheral position was partially due to her debilitating illness and partially because she was not officially on crew. But it was also representative of her own—and, more broadly, Black women’s—exclusion from most Hollywood decision-making.

During the production process, Walker readily admitted her technical naïveté about the practicalities of filmmaking, jotting in her journal at one point, “I don’t understand the ways of film.”¹¹⁵ Yet journal entries also show that she became conversant in alternatives to Hollywood’s production practices. After a visit from the Cuban poet Nancy Morejón, for example, Walker discusses the Cuban film system at length in her journal, describing how she wished the Purple production could have used that model and revolved around “long sessions of study and debate by everyone involved.”¹¹⁶ In greenlighting the adaptation, Walker focused on Spielberg’s and Jones’s individual personalities, but her later journal entries suggest her growing awareness of the complexity of film authorship and the kinds of systemic changes necessary to empower voices like her own in the production process. And her selection of such journal entries for publication in The Same River Twice further suggests an ambition, whether conscious or not, for the volume to function as speculative film criticism: to gesture at what could have been or, perhaps with a remake in mind even as early as the 1990s, to what might still be.

Throughout The Same River Twice, Walker consistently filters The Color Purple film through personal relationships. A decade after the fact, she explains that whenever she thinks of Spielberg’s “version” of her book, her “first thought is of Steven himself. His love of and enthusiasm for my characters.”¹¹⁷ Even during filming, her connections to the people involved tempered her critical misgivings. Her daughter Rebecca, then 15, was the film’s youngest production assistant, and Walker was deeply moved to see her daughter “striding in her yellow Reeboks, dreadlocks flying, with [a] bullhorn.”¹¹⁸ Rebecca’s presence on set, and Walker’s inclusion of that reminiscence in her book, also speaks to new horizons of possibility for an industry long dominated by white men. Through once private, now public diary entries, Walker shares a dream for a new Black cinema.

***

I conclude with bell hooks, arguably the best-known Black feminist film critic of her generation, and I read one of her earliest statements about film to emphasize the generic flexibility and speculative energies of African American women writers’ engagement with film. In 1988, hooks spoke at a conference in New York City hosted by the Collective for Living Cinema. Framing her remarks as “the first time for me to talk publicly about film,” hooks delivered an address that previews the argument of her later, highly influential essay, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Women Spectators.”¹¹⁹ hooks notably chose to present her ideas about film through a poem, which was itself inspired by a novel: The Bluest Eye.

hooks’ poem was published in the conference proceedings, but nowhere else, and it seems to have been forgotten. Yet “The Oppositional Gaze” includes a portion of the poem, converted into prose, and elaborates on the themes that hooks first expressed in lyric form. In her poem, hooks writes about Claudia from The Bluest Eye: “she could not join the adoration / of shirley temple. she could not / celebrate her absence.”¹²⁰ Like Morrison’s deconstruction of the Dick and Jane nursery rhyme in her novel, hooks’ verse breaks apart Hollywood mythologies.

But hooks, like many other Black women writers, is unwilling simply to critique or to turn away from film. Instead, she sketches an alternative future for moving images, starting with what she wants to see at the movies, “an uncolonized black / female / image.”¹²¹ The screen, hooks attests:

is also a place for re-
membering, for making, some frag-
ment
 of who we are, can become,
might never be, something fantastic
 imagined, joined there – remem-
bered.122

The fragmented line breaks—especially for “remembered”—do not suggest a shattered image, as earlier in her poem, but instead steadily build momentum toward wholeness. Creating new screen images seems increasingly possible by the end when hooks celebrates the work of emerging Black female filmmakers who can provide “black female stares”:

 we can see what has not been
seen before. we can be seen – mak-
ing –
 looking – becoming.123

For hooks, creating films that have never been seen before requires a new kind of looking and a new kind of film writing. She shared that project with many Black women, who similarly had “film reels for eyes.”¹²⁴