Introduction

The following is an edited transcript of a roundtable conversation with director-producers Juanita Anderson, Zeinabu irene Davis, and Tracy H. Strain held over Zoom on October 17, 2022 at 2:00 pm EST. The roundtable was conceived as part of the broader questions and mission for this journal issue. It was to be hosted at one of the centers for Black Studies at the University of Pittsburgh and live-streamed for broad audiences of media-makers, and activists, as well as students and scholars of Black studies, film and media, and women and gender studies. A transcript from the roundtable recording would be edited for publication here to ensure voices of the Black women filmmakers themselves are the center of focus; and that their reflections on the scholarship, histories, and praxis being revisited and/or collected under the special issue title, “Black Film Feminisms” shape readers’ engagement.

I invited Juanita, Zeinabu, and Tracy to speak together because of their significant roles in Black women’s media-making history and their first-hand knowledge of key moments and institutions central to the development of Black and Black women’s television and film following the civil rights era. Though busy with teaching and creative projects, all three women agreed to speak and make what they felt would be needed contributions to a project on Black women’s work in film and media. However, due to the difficulty of gathering during the pandemic, and later with scheduling live-streaming, we met together in a closed Zoom room. This choice entailed forgoing live-promotion of these three, significant Black women media-makers’ work, along with audience engagement. The unanticipated change in setting reshaped the roundtable conversation, while illustrating all too starkly the generosity and sacrifice required – despite careful planning – to produce this critically needed document.

Extensive biographies for each roundtable participant are included at the end of this transcript. However, I’ve added partial bios here as well to stand in for the missing live introductions and highlight key points of connection and the overlapping histories that drove the conversation. All three women are media-makers, teachers, producers as well as directors, and here, to begin, are some notes on their profound impact on film and television.

Juanita Anderson (JA)’s career-long effect on the diversity of the work shown on television in the United States has changed television, independent filmmaking, and the opportunities available to people of color working in moving-image arts. She began her career at WGBH in Boston and has worked extensively in public broadcasting since – as board member, station producer, director, and executive producer, supporting and often producing work by directors from marginalized communities. As co-founder of Black Public Media and board member of American Documentary, JA has played an essential role in building an infrastructure that supports filmmaking and production by Black, Black women, and other underrepresented media-makers. She helped to produce early Black television content, for Say Brother and Detroit Black Journal among other series, and today is known for her own filmmaking projects, including as executive producer of the 1988 Academy Award-nominated feature film Who Killed Vincent Chin?, and a new documentary in production, Hastings Street Blues. ¹ JA’s efforts have provided a critical foundation for continued presence and visibility of Black women and Black women’s work in mass media, along with new and more accessible pathways for documentarians to reach national audiences – often a first step to receiving funding and gaining broader recognition.

Tracy H. Strain (THS) is an award-winning filmmaker who directs, produces, researches, and writes documentaries and has become widely known for her success developing features on influential Black women artist-activists. Like JA, her early career includes extensive work at WGBH in Boston, where she continues to develop regular programming. THS’s production company, The Film Posse, has produced numerous award-winning film, television, and online streaming projects, including her Peabody Award-winning documentary about Lorraine Hansberry, Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart, ² and her 2023 American Experience documentary, Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space. ³ THS’s research and retellings of Black feminist histories have themselves modeled an essential practice of Black film feminism, refusing to reproduce the standard narratives of the Black women film subjects that have long-circulated in the public imaginary – rather connecting the women and film work to a longer history.

Recognized internationally as one of the significant filmmakers of the L.A. Rebellion film movement, Zeinabu irene Davis (ZID) is also known for her focus on women of African descent and careful remaking of film perspective itself, producing a medium that centers minority stories as dominant visions. ZID researched and directed the award-winning first feature about the Black Deaf community, Compensation, which continues to screen widely, as do her art shorts. ⁴ Her identity as a third cinema and Black diaspora filmmaker has helped maintain critical connections between left Black politics that are central to this project and the work of so many Black women artists.

Documentation and the Reclamation of Black Women’s Media-Time and Historiographies

Each director-producer came to this project known for her success in different areas of film and media production, hailing from different parts of the United States, and from different circles of media-artists and -activists. Notable, yet, are the shared influences and commitments from the communities that nurtured them. Shared recognition of these communities played a significant role in the conversation transcribed below, from ZID acknowledging the influence of the Boston-based Combahee River Collective (“I think we all come from that river in some ways”); to THS’s and ZID’s shared appreciation for the Boston-based Black film production institution, Blackside; to JA’s important reminder that community-based work is not new (“Because as Black creators, we have been historically working within our communities … [where] our voices … often [make] that difference in shifting the narrative”). ⁵ Each of these director-producers has helped to build worlds in which the art she makes matters – and their decisions to work on behalf of a community, and collectively even when apart, here feels impossible to disarticulate from an account of the development of Black women’s film and television over the last five decades. As praxis, we might call it a Black film feminism.

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“Hopefully, what this article will do is make intervention so that more scholars write about our work, because I think there should be more documentation. And I find that sometimes for some reason some scholars will write about the films, but they don’t talk to the filmmakers, which I think is kind of a problem.”

- Zeinabu irene Davis

The transcript below performs a powerful example of the kind documentation ZID hopes its publication will continue to inspire. Most notably, it adds to this special issue a conversation about Black women filmmakers by and in the words of the filmmakers themselves. And it secures survival: for interested teachers, students, or media-makers, it provides guidance on how and what to include in a course on Black women filmmakers; strategies for working students; a guide to finding funding and institutional support; as well as a reminder to serve and build community, while continuing to keep a unique and personal voice.

Where the transcript gathers names accounts of Black women filmmakers, JA, THS, and ZID have begun to build records of a living past, and protection against further underrepresentation. But, as each inevitably notes, this knowledge is not meant to be final. The recording testifies to the three artists’ commitment to keep their collecting and historiography/ies open, ongoing, and provisional; and to guard against closure or possible foreclosures of others’ recollecting.

“I just want to make sure at the outset,” ZID said, before we began, “[…] if we’re going to talk about the history that we get it straight. I don’t want people left out or not acknowledged – because we don’t want them to be rendered invisible, either.” At the time, I had failed to note earlier collections that made possible our preservation efforts that day (this information is now below, where ZID provides it). Here, offering such notes is part of an editorial ethics: describing and positioning the transcript without “framing” its words; offering context and notes for the critical practice of documentation without finalization.

Among the handful of related works that inspire and support this journal issue is a recent volume, Yvonne Welbon’s and Alexandra Juhasz’s, Sisters in the Life: A History of Out African American Lesbian Media-Making. ⁶ For Sisters in the Life, “acts of reclamation” recover and explore Black lesbian film art, practice, and presence – as a counter-archive also always under construction. But Sisters’ contributions could not be formulated without a same/similarly critical relationship to problems in recovery and identification, and the imminent danger of finalizing exclusion that gets worried about across the transcript below. Even when the work is collaborative and ongoing, if it still requires roots and imagines futures, how can its history stay provisional?

In an often-cited essay, bell hooks’ filmmaking formula provides a non-responsive answer, aiming at film theorists’ failure to recognize the power of looking beyond the cinema, in a socio-political and juridical world in which the agency in looks, and those who have been by law and violence stripped of it, has produced filmmaking. hooks’ “Oppositional Gaze” ⁷ sees Black women at both ends of the camera. In hooks’ viewing process, Black women’s perspectives create change, undermining hegemonic forms of looking that center racist subjectivity, and dialectics of looking and point of view embedded in white supremacist representational practices. The “oppositional gaze” creates a Black women’s perspective, building a world after the unavoidable fact of structural oppression, – foreclosure, exclusion, and the violence of official records. In her world, Black women watch, make film and film history, and the alternative world of Black woman’s cinema.

Progress is being made. You’re doing okay and you’re gonna get better.

- Cycles (Zeinabu irene Davis, 1989)

Despite this drive toward documentation, still there are the unaccounted-for histories and evolving futures of counter-institutions like the Allied Media Project in Detroit, or Welbon’s nonprofit space and archive in Chicago, named, like the documentary, Sisters in Cinema. ⁸ And archives, such as Dyke TV’s or Third World Newsreel’s, have not been fully sorted. Can the records be read? And what conditions could produce the time – for the work, or for its transformative timeline?

Below is the transcript, lightly edited for length and clarity.

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October 17, 2022, 2:00 pm, via Zoom

LR:

What are you working on? What are your thoughts about Black women’s filmmaking and television history, and why so few of the stories or records have been collected somewhere?

JA:

I just finished a short film for Firelight Media American Masters Series in the Making Short Films series. The film’s called Sydney G. James: How We See Us, and it focuses on one of the few Black female muralists in the country. ⁹ Figure 1:

https://youtube.com/embed/IEciPKtmmzY

She’s also a fine arts painter who does large scale work on the invisibility of Black women and centers conversations in terms of how we address social mobility. So I’m really excited about that. I’m also in early production – still research and development – on a documentary feature film called Hasting Street Blues, which looks at mid-20th century African American life in Detroit and the issues of Black self-determination on the one hand, and on the other hand the policy that resulted in the displacement of a vital Black community. I’m starting post-production on a short film that I’m working on in collaboration with the Detroit Narrative Agency and the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network called Reclamation, which is looking at Black food sovereignty and the role of Black urban farmers.

ZID:

I just want to make sure at the outset we’re clear [about the history of collections of Black women’s film scholarship]. There are similar, earlier collections by Jackie Bobo and Gloria Gibson-Hudson that we need to make sure that you all acknowledge. ¹⁰ They were pioneer scholars, and I want to be sure that this information doesn’t get left out of the mix. I also hope that Juanita will also talk a little bit at some point about the foundational work that she did with media arts organizations, because her voice was so important and continues to be so important in establishing these organizations. I want to make sure that if we’re going to talk about the history that we get it straight. I don’t want people left out or not acknowledged – because we don’t want them to be indeed invisible, either.

Specifically what I’m working on right now is I have a short narrative called “Pandemic Bread,” which is a 20-minute film about COVID. Figure 2:

https://vimeo.com/810772885

It’s a Filipina interpreter taking the call from an African woman immigrant doctor, an end-of-life call with a Filipina elder who’s in the hospital with COVID in June 2020. I didn’t make this film because I wanted to make this film; I made this film because I had to make this film. It is a cathartic exercise – because my family lost my brother-in-law to COVID in July 2021. So the piece is a way to deal with that grief, and to ensure that people don’t forget all that we lost or continue to lose during this particular pandemic. Hopefully I’ll finish that film by the end of this year. We submitted to Sundance so we’re waiting to hear if we got in or not. The other piece that I’m working on is a hybrid documentary on Sojourner Truth and Phyllis Wheatley and a woman by the name of Marie Joseph Angelique who was from Montreal. What the three have in common is that they happen to be all enslaved Black women who were early abolitionists in the 1700s and 1800s. Marie Joseph is the woman who burned down Montreal and the only reason we know about her is because she supposedly burned down Montreal. My mother is from Montreal. And there’s a lot of Black history in Canada that doesn’t really get addressed. So this is a way to help deal with that part of the story. Phyllis Wheatley was very strategic [in publishing] and I don’t think she gets credit for that. Sojourner’s epic legal battle to regain her son in 1831 is the angle that I’m specifically looking at for her – and with all three of these women and their legal struggles, their legal traumas, to talk about their stories.

THS:

I’m working on a couple of things. I’m working on a commissioned film right now on American Experience. It’s a 90-minute film about Zora Neale Hurston focused on her anthropology. It’s a biography in a way, but it’s really about Hurston’s relationship to anthropology and what she was trying to do to work around anthropology [as a field]. Sadly 90 minutes is not enough time to really do this story justice. Every time we make a cut… [The film] was originally supposed to be a 60-[minute production], and our assembly cut was 40 minutes too long for that; and then we just had a rough cut screening on Friday and it’s 20 minutes too long for a 90. Figure 3:

https://youtube.com/embed/IqLOKDxrdww

There’s a length that this film is trying to be but the constraints of television scheduling is not allowing it to go through. Remind me later: I want to come back to that as a frustration. Not so much specifically about this film, but how much time is allocated for different people on the schedule. I’m actually trying to shift my practice to focus more on independent projects. So that one was independent, it was just broadcast on American Masters. But I feel like I spent my whole life making films that had to conform to other people’s ideas of what needed to be. I’m grateful for all of the opportunities I did have.

But I’m working on that in developing a film called Survival Floating that’s about African descended people’s relationship to water and swimming. It’s an essay, it’s also a hybrid style film that’s personal and I’m really excited about it. My mom actually ran a swimming pool in a suburban Black neighborhood. I grew up in central Pennsylvania. And so there’s some of that story mixed in there as well. And because of the racism and restrictions, I couldn’t swim anywhere where I grew up. So it was necessary to have a Black pool in suburban neighborhoods because they had them in the city. And of course, the suburban kids couldn’t go to the city pool because their parents had already left the city. So it gets into a lot of different issues. I’ve also been developing a film that’s about John Henry. I think it’s not going to be a classic story structure, about the man, the myth, and the music. One of the questions I keep wondering is: How did this music of John Henry, the song, become a favorite of white folk singers? So it’s about my questions and it explores different topics. Actually the working title right now is John Henry: The First Real Black Superhero. And then I’m really desperate to do more with the Hansberry material – I did 30 some interviews; only this much are in the film. And there’s so many rich stories that people told me about themselves, about their relationship to Lorraine Hansberry, about American society, that aren’t in any books. Figure 4:

https://youtube.com/embed/tQ_J5aso5HU?feature=shared

LR:

I was struck by the use of the word “hybrid,” and the relationship to documentary and fiction and what you were saying – Tracy, I think you said it, but you all nodded, about the films you have to make versus the films you want to make. I would love if anyone wants to pick up on, “Why ‘hybrid’”? and if that feels new or if it’s always been in your work? It makes me think of both the personal and the political and the way in which these [hybrid] art pieces are also always engaged with history or historiography.

JA:

I didn’t use the word “hybrid,” but to respond: I really like to let the [work] inform the approach. And I think, as it is throughout the African world, we draw upon all of those things that inform our own cultural perspective. So, storytelling doesn’t have to fit into a neat box or a neat label. But I daresay even in my feature film, Hasting Street Blues, that there will be some narrative elements of it, as well as performance in addition to what one might consider traditional documentary. But we draw from our own historical, cultural, storytelling experiences, to craft stories in that cultural world of expression that we come from. I think [that] is probably the best way to frame it.

I have to go back to what Tracy said, because historically, and I guess this goes to your first question, there has always been: “How do we get our films made?” Public television so often has been a vehicle, but it’s also been a box that we have been expected to fit in, in some way. And when I hear you, Tracy, say that you’re constrained by this 90 minutes, I keep thinking back to another era of the American experience specifically. And it’s really not my story to tell, but I feel obliged to tell it.

When Louis Massiah was trying to launch W.E.B. DuBois: A Biography in Four Voices, and the executive producer at that time suggested that this 2-hour film that he had proposed was just too long, and W.E.B. Dubois – who lived 100 years – did not deserve more than an hour, and suggested that perhaps he should take one quarter of the story – the quarter that only dealt with Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois’s relationship – rather than this whole history of this man whose life spanned a whole globe – not just one continent, but a whole globe! I so credit Louis Massiah for having the fortitude to say, “Hell no!” and really being persistent and trying and working and spending that time to find those outside resources so that he would not be put in that box. Some of us have not had that luxury. Most of us have not had that luxury when it comes to financing – to not have to conform in some way; whether it’s to public television’s criteria or HBO’s criteria or whomever’s criteria to get our work – especially documentary – out into the world.

But yes, the historyis political. The fact that we are here presently today and have been here for a while is political within itself. Now that I’ve detoured us away from “hybrid”….

LR:

And how you do that, tell Histories – History with an “H” – as well as other histories, when the history is hard to find or expensive to find. You’re gonna have to cut a lot of it; but, also, where are the archives?

THS:

Well, I think that when I think of hybrid, I’m not just thinking about its usage as a way to make up for missing archives. I have done that, but if we think of the personal as political, what’s in our heads, our bodies, our memories – you know, there’s a lot of talk right now about embodied – I mean, these things were there before, but there’s language now that we can use if you think about epigeneticists… And so for me, like with Survival Floating, when I think about the history and the waves and the transatlantic slave trade and all these things, and stuff in my head about water, and just memories of that pool where my mom – where I saw all these Black people – it was an oasis in some ways, and I also saw a near drowning, and that’s part of the big story, it was a big part of my childhood. I had to do this, because this story about this near drowning has been in my head since I was almost 11 years old. And so it is mixed in with some Black suburban life in the late 60s, early 70s. So it’s hybrid because memory is part of it too. And feelings, which are hard to express sometimes. You can’t always express them with words. And so when you get the water in there and the segregation, the discrimination, and the feelings, hybrid becomes one way of representing that. Because it’s not documentary in the sense of, “Here is a document to prove this happened.” I need to craft with some film language a document of how I’m feeling to express myself.

ZID:

I will make this generalization. I think when we, as Black women filmmakers, approach a topic or subject matter or story that we have to tell, we do what Juanita says: We figure out what’s the storytelling mechanism, or what’s the way that we can tell it so that we can best reach whatever audience it is? Figure 5:

https://vimeo.com/265692438/bc39f1f2a2

Films. I would say, from my experience and study of Black women’s filmmaking practice, that we are often innovators, or we do stuff differently. I mean, even when you look at the work of early Black women documentary filmmakers, like Madeline Anderson ¹⁵ , the way that she told her stories was not the same way everybody else did their documentary work. Yes, we’re constrained by certain conventions, especially the time frame, which Tracy so eloquently just spoke about, that we don’t get allocated those hours or that frame to let our subjects breathe the way that sometimes white filmmakers, especially the white male filmmakers, get. So I think that’s just something to consider.

I embrace the idea of “hybrid” because I don’t just make documentary film, I make narrative film, and I make experimental film. So I’m bringing in all my exposure to different types of aesthetics when I’m approaching a subject. So that depends, but I do think that if you look at the younger Black women filmmakers who are coming up, their expressions in this form is like, “Woah.” It’s very different than what I do. But I’m happy to see what they’re doing. And they’re doing more “installation” pieces, or things that are still considered more experimental. But they’re making ways of storytelling or having us experience different ways of being in really interesting ways. And I want to make sure that we acknowledge and honor that, because it comes from a tradition of us from the time that a sister sitting down in the Combahee River Collective talking about, “What are we going to do to change our lives and make things better for all of us?” I think we all come from that river, so to speak, in some ways. We might have different little tributaries that go along that river, but the essential one of us wanting to tell stories and represent our experiences and erase some of this invisibility is real clear.

I didn’t know, Tracy and Juanita, if you all know about this conference that’s going to be in Chicago in March next year celebrating the Sojourner Truth festival ¹⁶ . It was the first Black women’s film festival. I think it happened in 1976 in Chicago. So if that happened in ‘76, then we’ve been here. We’ve been making it work for a really long time. So it’s like, okay, how come that’s not in the cinema history books? And how come that’s not written about as much as it should be? So I think that’s a place to kind of start.

Hopefully, what this article will do is make intervention so that more scholars write about our work, because I think there should be more documentation. And I find that sometimes for some reason some scholars will write about the films, but they don’t talk to the filmmakers, which I think is kind of a problem.

THS:

It is hysterically a problem! I tell my students all the time that when I read the few things that have been written about Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart, I’m like, “Why didn’t they just ask me? That’s not true at all!”…I think that they think that they can see everything on the screen and have decided that they’re going to come up with their own ideas about what we– what different filmmakers are doing. I’m sure there’s plenty– I’m sure almost every filmmaker you could ask has something to say about this, not just Black women. But sometimes we’re just so excited to see some writing about us that we’re like, “Okay!” I think that people should just ask us and not make assumptions, because I think we’d rather have ourselves and our films accurately represented than misrepresented.

JA:

So one of the things I want to do – because Zeinabu talked about Madeline Anderson – and Madeline Anderson certainly is tremendously important as we look at the history of Black women filmmakers – but I also want to put another name out there who I consider one of my mentors, who is Carol Munday Lawrence. She was probably the first Black woman that I was aware of, and I grew up inside Public Television: before I became an independent, I had 17 years inside Public Television. Which is kind of scary now that I think about it. But that’s a whole different, other, story.

Carol Munday Lawrence was the first Black woman independent filmmaker that I knew of who actually got money from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to do a documentary series. It was a mini series called “Were You There?” And what she had to endure to make that happen sort of paved the way for me to say that much of my work would be centered on paving the way to make things happen within the industry.

I feel like my accomplishments are probably more so in the barriers I think I’ve broken for helping other people, just facilitating other people’s work than my own work. I think about the organization of the National Black Programming Consortium which today is Black Public Media. I was one of eight co-founders. ¹⁷

Interestingly enough – and I hadn’t really thought about it at that time – but only two of us were women of the eight Black producers that founded the organization. But our first executive director, Mable Haddock, who actually ran that organization for 25 years, did so much to center Black independent – NBPC was the first organization to center Black independent filmmakers while supporting Black public television producers inside the system too. And I think all credit is due her. She passed earlier this year.

But we’ve really got to look at that legacy and the ways in which both formal and informal networks sort of converged to support each other’s work at a time when the industry itself was not supporting us directly or overtly. And that all those efforts, even though change is still not [laughs] great, and we can link to examples of inequity all across the board, that it has taken these multiple decades, since the ‘70s, each step of the way. I mean, the fact that Zeinabu and Tracy and I know each other and talk to each other, and even though we don’t see each other that often, I feel like there’s just this always collective nurturing, that we know that each other is out there in the world doing this work. It becomes sort of like these silk threads, if you will, that keep us together and that bind us and allow us to continue to move forward.

ZID:

I do think it’s important. You can talk about our work as filmmakers – with the product, the documentary, the piece, the media piece, whatever – but I really feel like there’s so many people, and especially Black women – like Mable Haddock, and Carol Munday Lawrence, and Gloria Hudson, and Jessie Maple – and all these people that helped to build infrastructure so that we could keep moving forward, but their contributions are often not well recognized, because they don’t have a documentary or a film that you can look to. But I think that they pushed us forward, you know?

JA:

I want to add Pearl Bowser to that list too.

ZID:

Yes!

THS:

Oh, yeah, yeah! I was about to say that.

And they were on the periphery of the other filmmakers, though; the white filmmakers, and the white distributors, and all these other people knew these people, these women, the broadcasters. But just like regular society, the things that we do are rarely ever centered, or deemed as important. It’s always positioned as somehow second tier if even that, and therefore not worthy of acknowledging when there’s opportunities to acknowledge or even to give credit. Like if someone actually is the real innovator that’s an African American woman, it’s kind of rare even today for that person to get the credit for their innovation or that support that they provide, unless it’s somebody who has been sort of “let in.” You know, we pick a few people to serve as the one. And if you’re not that person, then it’s very difficult to get attention, resources, support, acknowledgement. You’re just– “Oh yeah, over there.” These are these people that are working very hard to craft careers, support other people, and actually may have influenced as many if not more people, than the people that are on this side, that are in the news regularly. And I think that it’s very hard to learn the history, it’s hard to teach the history because you can’t, it’s hard to find it. And there are certainly separate articles and different things out there.

But first of all, if we’re going to just talk about documentaries, there’s no really excellent documentary history book that covers the gamut. And not that it would be easy to cover all the things happening, even just in the United States, not even the world, but if you look at those books – which I have looked at – except for the book by the late Jonathan Kahana, there’s hardly anything at all about Black women. I think there’s a chapter in his big book about history and theory. Do you know what book I’m talking about, you guys?

So, it’s hard. We forget. I mean, people also are forgetting about Henry Hampton too. I remember at one time, they asked some question and I said, “Oh, well, Eyes on the Prize, that was nominated for an Oscar back in 1988.” And they were like, “Oh, that was a TV series, that didn’t get–.” I said, “It was nominated for an Oscar!” “Oh, that was a television series.” Well, it was nominated for an Oscar! And this guy ran this production company that lasted for at least 30 years, and it wasn’t until two years ago that Cinema Eye, I believe, did something and featured Eyes on the Prize and Henry Hampton. But when you think of just a place like that, and all the people that were in and out of there – take Jackie Shearer, for example, right?

ZID:

You know, it breaks my heart. This again goes to the dichotomy in terms of who gets to tell what stories. Jackie Shearer – who probably was best known for working at Blackside, which is the company that Henry ran – was just a brilliant filmmaker and independent producer. And I remember sitting on an NEH [National Endowment for the Humanities] panel in which her proposal for a narrative story about Black domestic workers had come to the table. It was beautifully written. The script was complete, it was just glorious. The proposal was impeccable, with all of the standards of research and scholarship that NEH demanded. Her project was not funded, however, because with perhaps one other exception besides myself, the panel – including the filmmakers that were on the panel – said, “But she has not done this before.” And that is not the criteria that so many white producers and directors have had! They have an idea, they’ve met all the criteria, they know somebody, it gets made. You know? Nobody is asking them, “Have you been inside this community? Do you know this community? What gaze are you bringing to this community?” I mean even Henry Hampton when, after Eyes on the Prize, he wanted to do a series on South African apartheid! The response was no funding because you have not done work in South Africa previously!

Come on, you just did a major series on the Civil Rights Movement!

THS:

Right, and mortgaged his house to do it, right?

LR:

So a quick summing up of connections so far: Organic language, like the silk, the water, the river; especially in terms of what you were saying, Zeinabu, about stories being told differently. And now you’re talking about infrastructure and the ways in which some people get access, how much access, how much to devote yourself to building infrastructure, and it’s such different language, right?

But you’re also all talking about histories and how hard it is to produce the information, to produce the stories. Especially because I’m hearing that a lot of the stories are stories of what doesn’t get to happen. Is there something that you all would want to say– I mean, you’re saying it, but about Black women specifically? Like, Hampton: that’s such a rich example. And you’ve also listed so many women. But the silk, the river that you’re talking about, it sounds like it’s Black women, not the Black community of filmmakers?

JA:

That’s an interesting thought, Liz, and I’m not sure that that’s entirely true. I don’t think that – at least for me, as a Black woman – I cannot divorce myself from the Black filmmaking experience in its entirety. We are all facing some of the same challenges in many ways. But I would say that what I don’t think enough emphasis has been on and I think that we’ve been trying to address it today is the role of Black women in terms of infrastructure building. And the nurturing that we have done in paving ways for others, perhaps putting more than our own self-interests at heart. I mean, just speaking for myself, it took me many, many years before I felt – and am really only coming into this recently – that I had the right to call myself a filmmaker. Because when I looked at my body of work, a lot of it has been in support of other filmmakers, in guiding the work of other filmmakers. So it’s like, “Okay, so where am I in this space? How do I fit?” is something that I’ve had to struggle with for a while. And it’s like, this is just really in recent years that I feel comfortable in saying, “I am a filmmaker!”

But yes, we can look at experiences that are specific to Black women and the challenges that, as Black women, we face. Someone said, and I can’t remember who it was, but: We don’t have the luxury of only focusing on our careers. Whether it is dealing with children, dealing with parents, and especially as we age (or acquire years I should say), the responsibilities to family sort of enlarge in ways, vertically, horizontally, that perhaps we had not imagined.

We have responsibilities to community that often take precedence over our own work. So how do we support ourselves – are supported – in all of the main things that we do? And, okay, I have to say this, because I’m showing my age now: it really took me off guard – although I have come greatly to appreciate it – when people I guess who are the Millennial generations that are talking about self-care? I’m like, “What the hell is that?” You know? And really there are now, in some proposal guidelines, room for budgets for self-care? I’m like “Wow, this is new! This is novel.”

LR:

Audre Lorde! Her essay, “Self-Care as Political Warfare” – that’s where the term came from? It’s wild how it’s gotten deployed of late, but I think it’s exactly what you’re talking about.

JA:

Think about how important that is! Because there really has not been, historically, that kind of support for Black women.

ZID:

Juanita, do you know Rahdi Taylor? Rahdi Taylor used to work at Sundance [as the Head of the Sundance Documentary Fund]. Rahdi is Clyde Taylor’s, the film critic’s, daughter.

JA:

Oh my goodness, okay.

ZID:

I’m bringing her up because she’s one of the people that started this Documentary Core application. ¹⁸ And one of the things that she was real adamant about was putting the line into the Core application, like, “Yes, you can put things in your budget for taking care of yourself” or doing whatever it was. So here’s another, you know, somewhat hidden Black woman who is pushing the agenda forward, helping all of us, not just Black women, but all of us as media makers to be a part of their process.

THS:

Yes, that’s interesting. One of the things that I think is important to talk about at some point, not necessarily today, is that there’s this whole different world of trying to make an independent film versus working on a commission project. And even though, let’s say, I might have some issues on whatever film I’ve worked on that’s been maybe independent or within the system that was funded, but when I got onto it, I could get that salary. Right? And when you worked at Blackside, for example, you not only got salary: Henry was so concerned about health issues that everyone got health insurance at Blackside. Even though you were only working on a project basis. Then my experience working on Hansberry, which took 14 years to make, and I had to do it between these other projects – so it will be interesting to see if people that are used to doing independent work try to put some things like that on these other budgets? Because it’s such a different animal, like the stress of [raising] your own money, and juggling all the things you’re juggling plus the things that Juanita laid out about –if you’re a woman – that we often have to deal with.

You know, I don’t have kids, but family, my parents are old – or relatives, somebody needs help. You know, there’s research that shows that many African Americans who get to a certain point in sort of financial stability, so to speak, are never stable because of family concerns and other things that one has to do. And want to do and feel obligated to do! But it’s very difficult for people, even with college degrees and what would be perceived as a decent income, to actually stop living paycheck to paycheck. And I think that the only way to really do the work that many of us want to do is to be independent.

I just looked at the recent update of the Common Proposal [of the Documentary Core Application] and there’s many more sections now about accessibility, about, of course, access relationship to community, and a lot of different areas that people should have been thinking about all along but now are being forced to if they want money from these organizations. And the thing that always is amazing to me is how much resentment there is that people are no longer – they’re being asked to just not walk into communities and extract. And they’re resentful of that. And I find that frustrating and offensive, that there is a kind of arrogance that people feel that they should be able to do whatever they want in any community at any given time. Because they just want to be at the front.

JA:

Tracy, you were one of the first people that spoke at the Collective Wisdom conference at MIT– called CoCreate. This idea that working within community was such a novel thing, that many of the panelists at that time were expressing, just really made me so very angry.

Because as Black creators, we have been historically working within our communities. But I’m coming to realize it becomes our voices, in whatever spaces we’re finding ourselves in, that often makes that difference in shifting the narrative, and we’ve just got to keep speaking up and speaking up and speaking up.

LR:

So, a provocation here. Zeinabu, I think it was you who mentioned Phyllis Wheatley at the very beginning, right? And I was so excited to hear you talking about her in terms of strategy. Tactic, maybe, was the word you used. How do you see Black women media makers as strategic? How are people getting it done? Like, you all are getting it done.

ZID:

I think that when we get it done it’s by any means necessary. That’s the only way that I can say that. I mean, that’s the industry. If it gets done, it’s because we willed it. We put in the blood, sweat, and tears to make it happen.

THS:

Yeah, I agree. I think we’re all nodding. That’s the only thing you can do. You know, it’s kind of like— I remember when I’d finally gotten an NEH grant for Hansberry and I remember going to this one executive who seemed interested. I’d already done a $100,000 Kickstarter campaign, and that might have put me over a million already. So I don’t know why this person didn’t know that, but it was almost like this person was trying not to say– even if they wanted to say “Yes,” it was like they were trying to put more on me. “Well, did you do this? Did you do that?” And everything that person said I had done. I did this, I did the Kickstarter campaign, I did this, I got that $500,000 NEH – you know what I mean? I’d [done the usual] donations, I’d applied to grants! And the thing is, the Hansberry documentary, it was a two-hour film. It should have been four hours, but – my partner and I had already made films for American Experience that cost as much, we’d done them successfully, always on budget, on schedule– under budget! We actually ended up writing – it’s painful to write checksback to WGBH, right? And so why does it take a superhuman, 14-year effort to get money for Lorraine Hansberry? And meanwhile, in addition to what I just said, people kept saying, oh, you should make it an hour and you should just focus on Raisin [in the Sun]. The whole point of the film was to not focus on Raisin! Because that’s what anybody thought they knew about her, that she just did Raisin and that was her complete significance. And so I had to keep fighting that. And it’s interesting, going back to your story, Juanita. Robert Nemiroff was told by the former head of American Masters, back when he wanted to do a film, that Lorraine didn’t deserve more than an hour back then. So he was even told that! But it’s a Black woman! Of course, right? So, it took so much out of me. Financially, psychologically, emotionally. I literally just worked around the clock. When I had teaching I would teach, I’d run home and work, you know? Speaking of self-care! There was no self-care. Every now and then I would try to play some tennis or something to get some exercise. Tennis was great to, like, hit something. But that’s what it took. And I know you don’t have to do that to do a film, because I’ve done this commission work, right? We know it doesn’t have to be that hard.

If people, women, Black women had the resources to tell the stories that they’ve worked on and want to tell and are passionate about, they’re gonna work hard and do the best job because most of us know, you might not get this chance again! And I know filmmaking is hard for everybody. Right? I’m not dismissing that. I’m talking about this extra layer [of labor and obstacles].

LR:

Each one of you has spoken about how hard it is to learn, to teach, to tell the history of Black women media makers. Concerns like: How does one begin? What would you want in that history? What can I put down? You’ve mentioned names, infrastructure, care. No one has used the word activism, but that seems ubiquitous too. Even further: Histories that are hard to find. Histories that are right there, even recorded, but there isn’t enough time to tell, there aren’t enough resources, you don’t get the broadcast…

ZID:

In terms of teaching: what I most want to say is, Don’t go for the easy stuff all the time. You don’t have to show only feature narrative films, or the most accessible films. Pay attention to the documentaries and to the short and experimental works. Of course, grab the students, the new people who don’t know anything. But once you get them in, please expose them to other people that they might not know about.

And then also, I think it’s really imperative that we make sure that students know that the people who wield the power might not necessarily be the director or even the producer. And we need more of those powerful people, these folks, in the rooms. We need the programmers, we need the foundation heads, we need the people that are sitting on these boards or crafting policy at nonprofits. Students need to know that there’s a whole world of other people determining what we are seeing and what we’re not seeing. And then wherever they are, just probably someone local that’s doing work, we need to make sure that at the very least they invite those people to come and speak to their classes. The invitations and a little bit of money to pay people can go a long way to make sure that the work is sustainable, and that it keeps going. That’s my two cents.

THS:

I agree with that, totally. And I would add that I think it’s important to teach the historical context and the histories that will surprise them – Third Cinema, and what was going on in society at the time of a film’s production – because otherwise they only see the film through the present day.

‘And they have a critique, of course. Like, they were mad that the term “third world” was used – that’s like, okay, look, Third World Newsreel in New York historically wants to keep this name and I’m gonna tell you why. But that history of independent filmmaking coming out of activism – if you think of the legacy of the Third Cinema movement; of the newsreels; of Women Make Movies. They were coming out of this next major historical wave of using filmmaking for change.

And then looking across history, you see how everyone’s connected. And even when you mentioned Pearl Bowser – Pearl Bowser worked with Ricky Leacock! We [as Black women] can’t be just pushed over to the side, we’re a part of the main thread! Juanita was talking about, we’re there, but we keep being pushed over here as if we’re different. And yet we often train and work with some of the same people. We might have different ultimate subject matter goals or different techniques, but, you know, we’re connected.

I think that’s really important for students to understand. And so what I would want is, I would like to see a book that kind of gets into these connections. I remember when Sonya Childress did the presentation introducing Color of Change, and she started making a grid of even more contemporary people and how they were connected. And I just thought it was almost like you’d need an interactive website!

THS:

Or something that just really shows how everyone is connected and who was influenced by Bill Greaves; there’s a book finally out about him after all this time. Look at all these New York filmmakers. There’s the Blackside people —

LR:

Or none of you mentioned Judy [Richardson], but I know you through Judy–

THS:

Right! And so I feel – because of Judy, I feel like I learned all this stuff about the SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] folks. And then you get connected to scholars, other kinds of scholars – not just filmmakers.

LR:

Or, like, adrienne maree brown, who – Juanita, you know her probably. She’s Detroit-based. Activist, artist. And she actually always includes – you know, she’ll fundraise for her sabbatical, for her self-care time. And she wrote a book– I think the most recent one is Pleasure Activism. She and Ingrid LaFleur were the two people in Detroit who I–

JA:

I love Ingrid.

LR:

Yeah. And adrienne’s first book was Octavia’s Brood. Which is exactly what you’re talking about, Tracy, in terms of making those connections, making them live, asking these activists to write speculative stories.

LR:

It’s really interesting because what you all just gave me is a teaching plan, a book plan. But you also all did it! You did it in this conversation! I was thinking, wow, you circled around so many people in 4-D and built these webs! I could go over this footage and be drawing or using toothpicks to make the connections and a little history. Otherwise, I’d be lost to so many names. So much richness. Zeinabu, I love what you said about – I never would have thought of it – “don’t take the easy way.” Because I like teaching Praise House more than Daughters of the Dust; or the historical context of Third Cinema movement(s). But when I think about it, it took me a long time to have anything to teach about Praise House – I didn’t want to just give it and not have a way to guide students through or alongside it. It doesn’t teach you how to watch it.

ZID:

I get it. Because we don’t have the same kind of film culture that we used to have. I mean, yeah, we have this proliferation of streaming content, but you don’t have the tradition of people going to the theater and talking about a film afterwards, let alone seeing a film from another country! That’s like, “What?” So yeah, you do have to contextualize a lot more. But I would just encourage you, Liz, to make sure that you let the students do some of this damn work, because, you know, they can find these films and watch them!

There’s this wonderful documentary that these indigenous students did, Standing in Two Worlds. This young woman, Nevaeh Nez, I played a section of her podcast in the class. And by the time the students listened to it and paid attention, they were crying. Because they could feel what she was talking about. So I think the thing for me is to connect with what they already know or what they’re connecting with, and then put that historical past in context, and make them do the damn work! They can find the stuff, it’s not like they can’t find it. They just need to be told that they have to make the contextualizations and build stuff.

LR:

Do you guys ever teach Zora Neale Hurston as a filmmaker?

ZID:

Yes. Yes.

THS:

Yeah. If you’re looking for things written about it, there’s not a lot. And it’s funny – when called me about the project, one of the things I had just finished doing last summer was getting ready to present the unit that goes back to talk about early Black documentary history, and so I put Zora Neale Hurston in that continuum. She’s doing something really rare at the time, right? She has a film camera! She’s a Black woman with a film camera, in a car, driving around the United South by herself. And she’s not capturing the so-called fabulous people, right? She’s capturing everyday people! And trying to bring them to mainstream– that this is America, right? That’s what she’s saying. And it’s been a privilege to be able to see this material and work with it and feel like I’m part of a continuum in a certain way.

LR:

I’m trying to make sure I don’t leave out something you all wanted me to ask! There’s so much that came up. “Hybrid.” I’m still there because of the ways in which each of your works is always addressing histories. And telling a history. Silk river. Animating all those connections that you’re wishing we could trace. But you do it! All of you do it. So “hybrid” feels like a cheap word, but in a way, for me, it just feels very alive in all of your work and everything you’ve said.

JA:

This is going back to what Tracy said about who’s sitting at the table. And I keep going back because you mentioned the former executive producer of America Masters and I remember sitting on a panel with her, actually, at CPB. And this was back in the late 70s, early 80s. And it was when the CPB had just reorganized so that there was now this Division of Cultural Affairs and a Division of Public Affairs. Must have been early ‘80s. And I was on the Cultural Affairs programming panel, the token Black person. And all these big public television gatekeepers were there. And when it became a question of anybody’s work who was a person of color, the common response was, “But I don’t know who this person is” or, “I’m not familiar with them,” as in, “I don’t know them so they don’t matter!” And the work that we consistently do is bring forth those stories that people who have only viewed the world through a very narrow lens have not had the need to take an interest in. And I think to a large degree, because of our own experience as Black people – and we can say Black women specifically if we choose, but I would broaden it to say the Black world – is we have had to walk in multiple circles and live multiple lives and engage with different cultures. I mean, that’s sort of our history.

We have not had the luxury of being able to have tunnel vision and survive. We just haven’t. So when we bring stories to the table, they are going to address aspects of life that many people have not seen before. I mean, I don’t know how else to say that. But it also goes back to, again, why it’s so important that Black, Brown and Indigenous people be centered at the table.

THS:

When I think about going in to present my “Survival Floating” story – and I realize there’ll be a lot of people from outside the US context there and I’ve already been warned that I will have to explain why the issues around swimming aren’t about class, but it’s race, I’ve already been warned that non-Americans will need to have that context for that – Because there’s just so many dimensions to just swimming, water, bodies, you know? And I’m really curious to see how it’s gonna go. Because we’ve all had that experience with the people with the tunnel vision! I think what you just said is part of the problem I had with getting money for Hansberry. I was living in Boston and no one had ever heard of me! Even though I had a Peabody Award, this, that, you know; all these things that are supposed to count, to show that I can handle this project.

JA:

[It’s this whole] culture: “If I don’t know about it, it must not be important.”

THS:

Or – “It might be too inside, you just might be too inside. It might not be broad enough or universal enough.”

JA:

Speaking of people I didn’t name before who I will name now – Judy Crichton, the former executive producer of American Experience, who told Carol Munday Lawrence that the way that she made decisions about programming was she would always have a conversation with her partner who was a World War II veteran, and if it was of interest to him, then it would be of interest to the public television viewing audience.

THS:

Wow. That explains a lot of the shows that were on the air early on.

JA:

Yes. And there used to be a time when it became problematic if you were pitching something that did not have a narrator, or something that David McCullough could not narrate, that it was very difficult for it to become an American Experience project.

LR:

One thought before we end – because I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit actually – is I could try to make a map with some names and send it to you all, and maybe there’s stuff – you know, anything’s going to be incomplete, but I mean, it’d be a diagram that was made collectively. And there’s no responsibility, in particular, but it would be one version of a history right there. One partial history, but I could try to map some of it out. Otherwise – what do we do about what isn’t in here and what does get included?

THS:

It’s kind of to Zeinabu’s point. Like everything else, people are left out. And I don’t know how to quite address that.

JA:

I think that that sort of goes to Tracy’s point, though. Because the map will be really incomplete at this point. But there may be a way. I just know, I don’t have a lot of time at this moment to make a list of people over a certain period of time – but I also hate lists because we always exclude somebody.

I mean I think the names that we called today are so very often unsung, and if we don’t try to make it an all-inclusive list, but to note these are just some of the people that, you know–

LR:

And they’re also centers and moments – like Blackside.

THS:

Do you guys think Jacquie Jones should be on that list? Because she had Black Film Review–

LR:

Yes.

THS:

As well as then took the helm at NTPC – did it change names while she was there or after?

JA:

After.

THS:

After. She passed away of cancer several years ago. But she was a filmmaker. She had gone to Howard. And she was a theorist as well. She wasn’t just a filmmaker.

JA:

I knew her initially through Black Film Review before I even knew that she was a filmmaker.

THS:

Me too. I didn’t even know her, but when I first decided I wanted to be a filmmaker I read that religiously. And I would try to figure out how to see the films because it wasn’t easy. I hardly could see any of those films, because it’s not like now when you can almost see a lot of films.

LR:

I worry that so much of this history is really held – collectively or individually – but not in any documented or accessible format or experience. That this is mostly lived – and it can’t easily be found –

THS:

Yeah, and she’s connected with a British filmmaker as well. So I think she [the British filmmaker] is important to include too…

LR:

There are so many more questions I would love to ask. And I hope to be able to hear you all in conversation again…

ZID:

Thank you.

THS:

Thank you. Thank you. Take care you guys, and I’ll see you around.

LR:

Thank you all so, so much for this. It has been a real privilege.