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Love is at the Center: In Praise of Black Feminist Film Criticism

Author: Samantha Sheppard

  • Love is at the Center: In Praise of Black Feminist Film Criticism

    Love is at the Center: In Praise of Black Feminist Film Criticism

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Abstract

In 2022, New Negress Film Society’s Third Annual Conference highlighted the collective’s commitment to Black women and non-binary film cultures and community. The New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture served as gathering space for Black feminist film culture, consciousness-raising, and shared purpose and conviviality. During the conference, Melissa Lyde, founder of Alfreda’s Cinema, moderated the conversation, “Love is at the Center: Remedying Cinema Linguistics,” which included scholars and critics Terri Francis, Samantha N. Sheppard, and Salamishah Tillet. Over the course of an hour, the panelists offered a rich and expansive discussion of Black feminist film criticism. This is an edited transcript of that conversation.

How to Cite:

Sheppard, S., (2024) “Love is at the Center: In Praise of Black Feminist Film Criticism”, Film Criticism 48(2): 9. doi: https://doi.org/10.3998/fc.6868

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2024-12-12

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Fig. 1
Fig. 1

Moderator Melissa Lyde introduces “Love is at the Center.” Photo credit Maike Schulz

Founded in 2013, New Negress Film Society “is a collective of Black women and non-binary filmmakers who create community, spaces, and films that reimagine cultural productions that have traditionally exploited our communities.”1 Their commitment to working cooperatively defines their sociality and structure as a collective. Gathering, sharing resources, and coordinating screenings of their own films and those of others for the public, the New Negress Film Society showcases and elevates the work of Black women and non-binary filmmakers who often find themselves invisibilized, exploited, or abused by industry structures and commercial systems.

On March 17, 2019, the collective organized their first Black Women’s Film Conference at MoMA PS1. The inaugural conference attracted over four hundred people to see films in MoMA PS1’s geodesic VW Dome and engage with filmmakers Shirley Bruno, Gessica Généus, Nikyatu Jusu, Adepero Oduye, Tchaiko Omawale, Cauleen Smith, and Keisha Rae Witherspoon. As the Negresses (as they call themselves) explain:

The concept for the conference was born out of our collective, New Negress Film Society, where six of us—Nuotama, Dyani, Ja’Tovia, Chanelle, Stefani, and Yvonne—purposely intertwine our lives out of a need for protection. It’s space for redirection. We meet and drink and commiserate by text, swapping strategies and reminding each other that, despite how it feels, we see you. We constructed a community amongst ourselves, and the conference was an attempt to expose it. We created a space where this conversation can inspire other conversations, so that perhaps the notion of creating autonomously—that is, without the intentions or concerns of the other—is not radical, but necessary.2

Since 2019’s historic event at MoMA PS1, New Negress Film Society has convened two more conferences—one virtual (due to the pandemic, which cancelled their 2020 conference plans) in 2021 and the other in 2022 at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

New Negress Film Society’s Third Annual Conference on October 1, 2022 cemented their commitment to Black women and non-binary film cultures and community. The New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture served as gathering space for Black feminist film culture, consciousness-raising, and shared purpose and conviviality. During the conference, Melissa Lyde, founder of Alfreda’s Cinema, moderated the conversation, “Love is at the Center: Remedying Cinema Linguistics,” which included scholars and critics Terri Francis, Samantha N. Sheppard, and Salamishah Tillet. Over the course of an hour, the panelists offered a rich and expansive discussion of Black feminist film criticism to a responsive crowd of (not exclusively) Black women and non-binary and kindred spirits. Moderated by Lyde, Francis, Sheppard, and Tillet talked about personal journeys encountering Black feminism and Black feminist film criticism, their relationships to public scholarship, writing as healing, and Black women writers and texts. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Fig. 2.
Fig. 2.

Moderator Melissa Lyde greets the audience. Photo credit Maike Schulz

MELISSA LYDE (ML):

I think it’s always special to be in a room full of Black women. Personally, I could never take that feeling for granted. And it’s such a pleasure for me to read from Black women authors about Black women’s films which I believe is often identified as Black feminist or womanist film criticism. I ask you to please define this [term] for us and the identifying aspects. Also [please] reflect on your own definition and personal journeys of encountering [Black feminist or womanist film criticism].

SALAMISHAH TILLET (ST):

I am really curious about our autobiographies as film critics, or how we even ended writing about movies at all. I tend to write about film, theater, television, visual art, music, and literature, so I am more of a generalist as a critic. Mainly, I was an English and African American studies major in undergrad, and then I went to graduate school to study American Studies which is also very interdisciplinary. I’m really just excited to be in this conversation with you [Terri and Samantha] because you really specialize in moving images.

In college, I took a class at the University of Pennsylvania with Donald Bogle based on his book Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Film.3 I remember just sitting in that class my sophomore year, and watching my whole world open up. He contextualized the long history of African Americans in film and television – from racist stereotypes to Black independent cinema – and his teaching changed how I understand Black life on the big and small screen. It also gave me permission to write about film in a particular way. I did my final paper on Spike Lee.

During that time, I wrote for the Black newspaper on campus, called The Vision, and I had a film column (this is a bad title) called “Mo’ Better Reviews.” So, I spent a lot of time applying what I learned in Bogle’s class to my film reviews. Years later, when I became a professor at Penn, I taught a freshman seminar, and it was about 20th Century Black women writers and filmmakers. At that time, in 2007, Kasi Lemmons was the only African American woman filmmaker to have had more than one feature narrative film. I decided to compare what we now consider to be the renaissance of Black women’s literature in the 1980s and 1990s with how in 2007, it was still virtually impossible for Black women filmmakers to make more than one feature-length narrative film. We’ve come a long way from that moment, just over a decade and a half ago.

TERRI FRANCIS (TF):

I was an English major, and it was the study of literature, specifically Black women’s writing, that taught me to value creativity and that writing about it was central to how we care for it. I first learned to love words and love literature. Dr. Annye [Refoe], my professor at the University of Central Florida, taught courses on Black women writers, early African American women writers, and the African American novel. Dr. Refoe guided my senior honors thesis on Zora Neale Hurston. In graduate school at the University of Chicago, Dr. Elizabeth Alexander taught me that poetry is theory, and literature is theory, and so I always return to that practice for conceptualizing my film criticism. I am a specialist in film, but my specialization comes from what I learned as a reader. I write about things that I love. If I don’t like it, I just let it go, just let it pass. It’ll go away. Not to worry. My criticism [is] really an act of devotion – devotion and documentation. As I’ve advanced in my career, documentation, making sure we have the papers, making sure we know where this came from, are able to place where it belongs, and can (re)construct lineage have all become very important actions to me, and they can be almost a ritualistic part of my writing. I like to write about what I love and writing is how I love.

Fig 3.
Fig 3.

Samantha Sheppard discusses Black feminist creativity. Photo credit Maike Schulz.

SAMANTHA N. SHEPPARD (SS):

I think that being an academic who specializes in cinema and media studies made me quite aware of Black film criticism. However, I had to learn on my own the nuances of Black feminist and Black womanist criticism. The process of learning included taking undergraduate classes dedicated to Black women’s representation in cinema, which exposed me to not only a variety of films and filmmakers but also to Black women writers on film. I would say that Black feminist film criticism has become one of my major theoretical tools in my writing. For example, when I was working on my book Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen, I included a chapter dedicated to Black women’s representation in sports films.4 When I was working on that chapter, I was reading Michele Wallace’s Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory and thinking about how her theories of Black feminist creativity describe Black women’s absent-present history in sports films.5 Wallace’s ideas not only made it into my sports film book, but also inspired my new book project A Black W/hole: Phantom Cinemas and the Reimagining of Black Women’s Media Histories. I was just so moved by thinking about Black feminist creativity that I told myself: “You have to start working on projects that you both enjoy, can do well, and [that] are also needed,” which led me to writing more on Black women’s cultural production. I also was reading a lot of Black feminist film criticism, and I had the opportunity to write for a special issue of Film Quarterly edited by Michael Gillespie and Raquel Gates, and they encouraged me to write the thing I do not have time to write.6 And I said to myself, “Well, I want to write about Leslie Harris, but I don’t want to write about Leslie Harris’s phenomenal film, [Just Another Girl on the I.R.T., 1992] which has a lot of great scholarship and criticism written on it. I want to write about the film she couldn’t get made, I Love Cinema.”7 I think it’s still really important to talk about this unproduced film in terms of Black film ideas, which is why I think Black feminist film criticism is vital, recuperative, and necessary work.

ML:

Terri explained in one of our email exchanges the balance in public writing and writing for academia. Can you explain the criteria? Please expand on where you measure the importance and focus through these varying paths when writing for an academic audience versus a public audience?

Fig. 4
Fig. 4

Terri Francis discusses writing for multiple audiences. Photo credit Maike Schulz.

TF:

I took a class on how to write for the public called the Op-Ed Project. It was a year of six-hour classes on Saturday. I don’t remember anymore why exactly I went into it, but I remember the experience of it being difficult but thrilling because I was able to focus on a specific writing technique and to think about a reader. In the academic space, I write primarily for other academics who are related [to] my areas of knowledge. But to be in the newspaper or a magazine means that you are writing for a variety of audiences, and that’s exciting. I don’t think we think anyone’s reading our work outside of those in academic spaces. There was something a little scary and a little thrilling that someone [outside of the academy] was going to read it, but also that you had to be relevant. There needs to be a hook. There has to be an immediate point, and an immediately recognizable point. I remember being really moved to realize that public writing is the public record of the contemporary moment, and that there are very few Black women who are holding that pen and who are part of that construction, and so it added urgency and weight to doing that for me.

ST:

My transition was when I decided to write the book on Nina Simone during my final year of graduate school. I had this naive idea and said to myself, “Oh, I want it to be a trade book, and so I have to become a different kind of writer.” I had no idea how difficult that process would be — meaning, I had to unlearn many writing strategies and techniques that we are trained to over-value in the academy. In my case, I still think like an academic, but I try to tell the story like a creative writer. It is an interesting artistic marriage that I am trying to have within myself and it is still a struggle.

I was also thinking of your [looks at Samantha] answer regarding writers such as Michele Wallace or bell hooks. We were reading their criticism at such a formative moment in our lives when we were in college and as graduate students. And when I read them, I felt that they were writing for a very public audience, right? So, even if they are theorizing in ways that are familiar to us as scholars, they were aiming to reach a more general reader. I was also always drawn to their very personalized style of writing and was intrigued by how they used themselves as part of both their analysis and storytelling.

Fig. 5
Fig. 5

Salamishah Tillet shares her early influences. Photo credit Maike Schulz.

I’ll never forget reading hooks’s “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” and her thesis that Black people in general, and Black women in particular, are often oppositional viewers because we are often so underrepresented in Hollywood movies.8 And yet, despite that, we can still find a way to identify [with] what’s on the screen. That’s a remarkable move – to be at once outside the frame, to have to oppose what you see, and then also be able to have a level of empathy that you can still watch it. I also love Jacqueline Bobo’s Black Women as Cultural Readers, especially her essays on The Color Purple [Steven Spielberg, 1985].9 She’s so interested in Black women as readers, how they receive films, and how they might see a movie that many people are critiquing [such as] The Color Purple. It was, at the time of its release, such a controversial film. However, Bobo takes the Black woman quite seriously as a viewer. This empowered me to take them seriously too, because I know I am writing for the Black woman reader, but it helped me value the Black woman viewer as someone who I’m also writing for, and hope that they will be able to see themselves or what they are watching on the screen differently because of the history that I’m providing, or the conversation that I’m having.

TF:

If I could just say really quickly, a number of the pieces in bell hooks’ Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies] first appeared in The Village Voice, or another periodical.10 Although we encounter black women’s film criticism in [Black feminist film writers’] books, [their writings, but particularly hooks’,] were perhaps first meant to be read by everybody, exactly as you said Salamishah. I too am struck by the social framing of hooks’ writing. For example her examination of black women’s representations in popular culture begins “Friday night in a small midwestern town–I go with a group of artists and professors to a small dessert place.”11 In the beginning of “Who’s Pussy Is This?” hooks grounds her impetus for seeing Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It (1986) in letters and phone calls she received from black women friends. She writes, “… I make my way to the movies. I don’t go alone. I go with black women friends Beverly, Yvette, and Maria so we can talk about it together.”12 I think it’s important to see the kind of connection to readers and a viewing community that hooks is articulating here, and that what we encounter in the books was connected to her account of lived experience. Black women’s film criticism, at its core, in one of its key formations was meant to be read by the public, for everyone.

SS:

I think with my situation, I did not seek out public writing, though I think it’s extremely important. As Salamishah noted, being trained as an academic, public writing is a completely different style and form that took a process of unlearning and patience from editors. I have written, for example, for The Atlantic on a few occasions. And I think part of the impact of that writing, as you all have pointed out, comes from the fact that we know that those articles will be read by a lot of people. The work is digestible in terms of its length and language. And writing public scholarship has allowed for me to bring Black feminist film and media perspectives to broad and diverse audiences. It is also super important to bring this kind of writing into the academy and the classes that we teach to show students what really good film and media criticism looks like and how Black women critics are at the forefront of this kind of collective knowledge production, including Salamishah. It shows students that they can write with their own voice and still be well-researched and provide context and historical framing. We need to be able to teach the short form and the long form. We need the deep dive, and we need the conversation-opener in popular Black feminist film criticism.

ML:

I would love for you all to expand on the concept of remedying, [as in]“remedying cinema linguistics.” I want to reposition cinema and linguistics, unlike what we’ve read historically as far as writings about cinema that has been constructed by the dominant white presence in publications. My concern is that there is a lack of cultural understanding for Black films. Case in point: Ganja and Hess [Bill Gunn, 1973]. Bill Gunn had the experience in Cannes where he did not receive a single review, for whatever reason. I mean, we know why [racism]. The work that you all are doing now has recuperated the experiences of many forgotten or underappreciated filmmakers, and has given us language to feel seen and validated by their work. Would you agree that you’re a part of contributing to a sort of healing through your writing that you’re giving your audience a remedy?

TF:

That’s a tall order to bring healing.

ML:

I feel healed at the fact that there is a book about Josephine Baker by a Black woman [Terri Francis] because when you read of the memories of her life and trajectory, you get to apply her methods of perseverance.13

TF:

I love her.

SS:

I think there’s an affective dimension to the work on Black women that I have done. I wrote a small piece on Kaycee Moore for the DVD for Bless Their Little Hearts (1984). I never realized how grateful I would be for the experience. Moore passed this past year [2021], and it was so momentous to see so many obituaries about her. She was this actress whose three main roles were in three L.A. Rebellion films: Bless Their Little Hearts [1984, Billy Woodberry], Daughters of the Dust [1991, Julie Dash], and Killer of Sheep [1978, Charles Burnett].14 And her whole thing was like, you know, “I didn’t like to audition, so I took the roles that I was given.” But she had just a magnificent presence and face. To see her life accounted for in so many news outlets was amazing, but it was also really moving to me because those accounts are dependent, in many ways, on the writing I did on her performance in Bless Their Little Hearts, which was drawn from an interview I conducted with her for Milestone’s long-awaited DVD release. I also learned a really important lesson about Black women’s media histories through my experience interviewing and writing about Moore. I told myself, “Oh, I have some other things I want to ask her, and I’ll ask her some other time when I’m focusing on my book on Black women.” But of course, there was not enough time, and she passed before I could ask those questions. And the lesson that I learned is that we must attend to our [Black women’s] histories with urgency. Also, I am just really happy that there is more written on her than just obituaries. There’s more than just her death being recognized, but her career. She is a force of nature on screen. In that sense, I think that’s part of what I was trying to do in my own work – put love into the writing and analysis of a character and an actress I deeply admire.

Fig.6
Fig.6

Salamishah Tillet reflects on the recuperative work of interviews and other writing. Photo credit Maike Schulz.

TF:

Salamishah, I’m curious to know what decisions you’re making as you approach your project about Nina Simone.

ST:

Oh, that’s a good question. I was thinking of this question of healing. I mean, it relates to Nina, but sometimes, you know, what may seem like not a light piece, but I would say like an interview or a profile, actually does a lot of recuperative work because Black women actors or filmmakers are so invisible, right? Our work, in a way, is about respecting their past and going back to their archive, while also engaging contemporary artists and audiences today.

Here is a good example. Last year was the 25th anniversary of the film Boomerang [Reginald Hudlin, 1992] so I wanted to write about it for The New York Times. The movie came out right before I went to college so I had so much nostalgia for the movie, and of course, that soundtrack. But, when I watched the film again, I found it to be so challenging regarding gender and sexuality. Returning to that film also allowed me to write about Robin Givens, who I liked on Head of the Class [1986 - 1991, ABC], and then for whom I had so much sympathy after she talked about her husband Mike Tyson’s abuse of her during that infamous Barbara Walter interview in 1998. So, what started as a lighter film retrospective ended up being a potent piece that recuperated Robin Givens and how her character in that movie, Jacqueline Broyer, who was super smart, confident, sexy, and ambitious, was a type of Black woman who stood out in Hollywood.

I think telling the stories of Black women as artists, and insisting on valuing them and their creativity, their lives, and their contributions can be cathartic for me as a critic, us as viewers, and even the artists themselves. Robin Givens reached out and thanked me for writing that piece because for her, it was being seen and understood in a healing moment from 25+ years ago. So, I think the work that we do really can, in small and big ways, have impact because we’re talking about women, Black women, who often are just misunderstood, put aside, and do not have their talent appreciated or recognized as being created by auteurs or geniuses. And so I think this is a big part of why I do the work is to just show their brilliance, which is already so obvious to us because we have a Black feminist lens.

TF:

Some of the criticism I had read about Josephine Baker didn’t make sense to me since I already saw her as brilliant, as luminous, and as a risk-taker. “Wow, she went to Paris by herself!” She was with other performers but to me it’s still an adventure to stay beyond the run of that show and make her career and her life there. She didn’t speak the language, and she’s in this show, and then she becomes this – becomes, you know, she becomes The Josephine Baker. How do you do that? That’s an extraordinary woman. Her success came partly from how she catered to and benefitted from a white, racist, colonialist fascination with her. But let’s look at what she brought to Paris. Baker has many witness and critics, but my views of her as a Black woman film critic are important as well.

Over time and with research, I grew in my appreciation of what Baker brought to the table. It fascinates me that although her career happens in a context she neither initiated nor controlled, she was really something very special and very unique. The way that I was able to center Baker was to think about her in terms of African American cinema, and to think about her being seen by the Black journalists of the Chicago Defender or the Baltimore Afro-American or the New York Amsterdam News, where they were able to see her genius, and what was unique about her. And that decision, which came fairly late in my research, transformed my view of her. I could see her as an author. I could appreciate her genius.

Generally, the American part of Josephine Baker’s career was the “nothing” against which the Parisian stardom was measured, right? The story is that she couldn’t become who she was if she had stayed in the U.S. And maybe she couldn’t have, but she was not nothing in the U.S. Being able to look at her through the Black press, the mighty Black press, was critical to being able to appreciate her genius, and to see what she brought to the situation that she met in Paris, and I think conquered, and then went beyond. Her career of international nonstop live performances, films, recordings, and public appearances endured for 50 years, with a pause during World War II when her stardom was instrumental during the Resistance. And I think my work is a work of restoration to the record. I think the history of Black film needs her story. By this I mean both the triumphant part, but also the risk part: Baker’s vulnerability to the script, to the camera, to the opinions of others. We need to understand what performers are up against, and their vision. How you have a vision, but you don’t always have control over the execution of that vision. I talk about her disappointment in her own films but not as failure, rather her disappointment is as a mark of her discernment. Baker is someone who could evaluate her own work, who knew what she thought was beautiful, and had her own ambitions. And that’s something that I think Black women in particular are not always [afforded], that and the sense of authorship. In the documentary Through the Night [2020, Loira Limbal], there’s a moment where Patrick [Hogan] says, “Well, she’s a woman with a vision.” Very different contexts but sometimes we’re doing stuff that people don’t get. Trust she has a vision.

Fig. 7
Fig. 7

Terri Francis and Samantha Sheppard take a selfie backstage. Photo credit: Terri Francis

SS:

Terri you just said something that I want to pick up on, which is the idea of the restoration of the record. And I think that one of the – and this is to your earlier question, Melissa, about language and collection and collectivities. I mean, one of the major things I’m thinking about in terms of both my writing but also in terms of my participation as a scholar is the idea of restoring records is a job that is about looking back, looking at, and looking towards the future. For example, Hayley O’Malley’s research on the 1976 Sojourner Truth Festival is a great recuperative and speculative history.15 I am also thinking about Jacqueline Bobo’s book Black Women Film and Video Artists, which provides a model study dedicated to critical perspectives, critical practices, and filmmakers discussing their craft in their own terms.16 I think we need to look at the future – how will the New Negresses [Film Society] be discussed? How is the record being addressed, maintained, recorded, mythologized, and institutionalized? I think we have to be responsive to the moment, and to the gift of what Black women filmmakers and what Black women creatives have done.

[Audience question]: I want to pinpoint on something about the unmade film, especially talking about writing about Leslie Harris’s unmade film, the one that there’s no restoration to be made, because there’s no footage there. And I think about the ghost film, I think about the film that was not made. That there’s no footage. There’s nothing to restore. But I think, as a filmmaker, the knowledge that those films were even in the thoughts, in the heads, of Black women filmmakers, going back to the dawn of cinema …. It haunts me.

SS:

That’s really a great question and a topic I discuss in my article on Leslie Harris.17 That is the topic of the article I wrote on Harris. I think the first thing I learned about Black film history is that it is fragmented and incomplete. But just because there is a void does not mean there are no contents. I suggest that we talk about those pieces and fragments. Part of thinking about Black film ideas as ghosts is really important. You are haunted, so it’s a ghost story. Tell the story of the ghost; talk about the fragments. I Love Cinema is not a film but there is something there. It’s a Kickstarter campaign, [it’s] the promotional videos. So, I think you first deal with the ideas, and you also have to do recuperative work. Maybe not a restoration, but a recuperative work of Black film ideas: the spec script, the screenplay, the treatments. Those things are things you can discuss, you can talk about, you can imagine, and you can riff off [of] and engage in your own work. You don’t have something that does not exist. Ghosts are real. I don’t watch horror for that exact reason. So, let them haunt you. Let them sit beside you, and then work your way through them. But the fragment is film history, and it’s definitely Black film history, and that’s why we have to work with the pieces, so that we can talk about them. That’s why my next book is called A Black W/hole, because it’s whole [a collection] and hole [a vacuum]. When you go into a black hole, it’s not the absence of everything, it’s the presence of all too much.

TF:

Oh, I really am enjoying listening to you all talk. That was just really important theorization. I’ve written about work that is non-extant. I wrote an article about the 1950s Jamaica Film Unit, which was an educational film unit that was directed by Martin Rennalls, who used it for more than what it was supposed to be, in that he saw it as a chance to create Jamaican independent film. He made over 40 films – or the unit made over 40 films but I think less than a dozen of them can be viewed today. So, I set about looking, in the Jamaica Gleaner, to see if I could find traces of these films. I sought out people who had previously been in the unit to learn from them. what do they remember, what do they think they kind of remember a piece of… Because one of the exciting things about our field is the mystery, all the unknown. I think of our archive as one of the future, that it is for the 20-year-old and for the 10-year-old. It’s for younger people to discover. But it’s also about not knowing what we’re about to find, what’s about to come back. The film Something Good Negro Kiss [1898, William Nicholas Selig] is a film from 1898, but it’s also a film of 2018, because when it returned in 2018, people really embraced it and made a new film out of it by adding Nicholas Britell’s score for If Beale Street Could Talk [2018, Barry Jenkins] called “Agape” to the film, and it circulated, you know, like fire – like a hit movie.18 This hit 34-second movie from the 19th century remixed in 2018! We didn’t know we were missing it, until it was found. And then, there it was and it has been remade. I am not sure we fully understand all there is to know about Something Good Negro Kiss, but there is more to come and more to learn and research.

ST:

So, I guess another way for me to answer your question is to go back to that syllabus from the course that I taught in 2007. In that class, we studied Daughters of the Dust [1992, Julie Dash], Watermelon Woman [1996, Cheryl Dunye], and I Like It Like That [1994, Darnell Martin], and compared them to these early 20th century novels, like Passing [1929, Nella Larsen]. We tried to understand what it took to make a sophomore film or why do these ghost films or ghost scripts exist. Obviously, there are a number of conditions — racism, sexism, economics, censorship, all of this – working at the same time, making it so difficult. It doesn’t make sense that Julie Dash didn’t have a second feature length narrative film.

But, this also leads to another question. Where are Black women primarily creating work? Yvonne Shirley [director and producer of narrative and documentary films and New Negress Film Society member] has encouraged me to think a lot about the short film as a Black woman’s medium. There are a lot of reasons why it is easier to make shorts. It’s obviously economically easier, too. It requires a different set of circumstances than a full length feature or documentary. So, that’s been one of my ways, as a critic at The Times, to really highlight shorts because if I didn’t I miss a large group or maybe even an entire generation of Black women filmmakers.

ML:

I would love for our panelists to help us along our journey and give us some advice as far as continuing to build on. I believe in the journey forward, and I was just gonna ask if you all can guide us along in building on our scope towards Black feminist film criticism, film theorizing, film philosophy, and film scholarship. What should we be reading?

Fig. 8
Fig. 8

The Love is at the Center panel praises Black women’s criticism. Photo credit: Maike Schulz.

TF:

That is a good question. Well, I love Zora Neale Hurston’s cultural criticism. I think of bell hooks, Michele Wallace, Kara Keeling, Jacqueline Stewart, Tina Campt, and Jacqueline Bobo, editor of the essential Black Feminist Cultural Criticism. There is new writing to consider by Sarah-Tai Black, Yasmina Price, Jessica Lynne, Hannah Giorgis, Ruun Nuur, Jasmin Weber, Ayana Dozier, Jourdain, Rebecca Carroll, Grace Barber-Plentie, Miriam Bale, Chrystel, Fanta Sylla, Dessane Lopez Casell, Ina Archer, and more. Also there’s social media criticism as well and nonwritten forms to explore.

SS:

Of course, I want to draw attention to Jacqueline Bobo’s edited collection Black Women Film and Video Artists. But also I want to highlight the Black women film and media studies scholars shaping the field: Jacqueline Stewart, Miriam Petty, Racquel Gates, Kristen Warner, Brandy Monk-Payton, Christina Baker, Courtney Baker, Ellen Scott, Mia Mask, Charlene Regester, Beretta E. Smith Shomade, Bambi Haggins, TreaAndrea Russworm, A.E. Stevenson, Philana Payton, Elizabeth Patton, and Kara Keeling.

ST:

I would just say an essay to which I always return — and you brought up Elizabeth Alexander earlier — that I find useful is “Can You Be BLACK and Look at This?”’19

Notes

  1. The founding members of the collective were Kumi James, Nevline Nnaji, Nuotama Bodomo, and Ja’Tovia Gary. Additional members include Dyani Douze, Stefani Saintonge, Chanelle Aponte Pearson, and Yvonne Michelle Shirley. For more about the New Negress Film Society, see Samantha N. Sheppard, “A Profound Edge: Collectivism and the New Negress Film Society,” Film Quarterly 77, no. 1 (Fall 2023): 25-37.
  2. Nuotama Bodomo, Tchaiko Omawale, Chanelle Aponte Pearson, Kamilah Badiane, Gessica Généus, Ja’Tovia Gary, Adepero Oduye, Cauleen Smith, and Nikyatu, “Another Table: Black Women’s Cinema and the Production of Community,” World Records 4 (2020), 215.
  3. Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Film, First Edition (London: Continuum ), 1973.
  4. Samantha N. Sheppard, Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen (Oakland, CA: University of California Press), 2020.
  5. Michele Wallace, Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory (New York, NY: Verso), 1990.
  6. See Film Quarterly Dossier: “Perspectives on Black Cinema” 71, no. 2 (Winter 2017): 9-60.
  7. See Samantha N. Sheppard, “I Love Cinema: Black Film and Speculative Practice in the Era of Online Crowdfunding,” Film Quarterly 71, no. 2 (Winter 2017): 26-33.
  8. bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992), 115-31.
  9. Jacqueline Bobo, Black Women as Cultural Readers (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1995).
  10. bell hooks, Reel to Reel: Race, Class, and Sex at the Movies (New York, NY: Routledge, 1996).
  11. bell hooks, “Selling Hot Pussy: Representations of Black Female Sexuality in the Cultural Marketplace” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992): 61-78.
  12. bell hooks, “Whose Pussy is This?: A Feminist Comment,” in Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1989), 134.
  13. See Terri Francis, Josephine Baker’s Cinematic Prism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2021).
  14. Clyde Taylor coined the term “L.A. Rebellion.” Taylor writes: “By the turn of the next century, film historians will recognize that a decisive turning point in the development of Black cinema took place at UCLA in the early 1970s. By then, persuasive definitions of Black cinema will revolve around images encoded not by Hollywood, but within the self-understanding of the African American population.” Clyde Taylor, “The L.A. Rebellion: A Turning Point in Black Cinema,” in Whitney Museum of American Art: The New American Filmmakers Series 26 (New York: Whitney Museum of Art, 1986), 1–2. LA Rebellion filmmakers included, among others, Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, Billy Woodberry, Larry Clark, Jamaa Fanaka, Barbara McCollough, Bernard Nichols, Ben Caldwell, Alile Sharon Larkin, Don Amis, S. Torriano Berry, Melvonna Ballenger, and Zeinabu Irene Davis. For more on the LA Rebellion. See Allyson Nadia Field, Jan-Christopher Horak, and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, eds. L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema (Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 2015).
  15. Hayley O’Malley, “The 1976 Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts: A Speculative History of the First Black Women’s Film Festival,” Feminist Media Histories 8, no. 3 (2022): 127–54.
  16. Jacqueline Bobo, ed., Black Women Film and Video Artists (New York: Routledge, 1998).
  17. Samantha N. Sheppard, “I Love Cinema: Black Film and Speculative Practice in the Era of Online Crowdfunding,” Film Quarterly 71, no. 2 (Winter 2017): 25-31
  18. The footage from Something Good, Negro Kiss was discovered by USC archivist Dino Everett and identified by film historian Allyson Nadia Field. See Allyson Nadia Field, “Archival Rediscovery and the Production of History: Solving the Mystery of Something Good-Negro Kiss (1898),” Film History 33, no. 2 (Summer 2021): 1-33.
  19. Elizabeth Alexander, “Can You be BLACK and Look at This?”: Reading the Rodney King Video(s).” Public Culture 7 (1994): 77-94.

Terri Francis is the author of Josephine Baker’s Cinematic Prism, and she teaches film studies courses at the University of Miami. She received a 2022 Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant and her work on experimental filmmaking and Afrosurrealism has been published in Film Quarterly, Black Camera, and Another Gaze.

Samantha N. Sheppard is an associate professor in the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University. She is the author of Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen (UC Press, 2020). She was named a 2021 Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Salamishah Tillet is the Henry Rutgers Professor of Africana Studies and Creative Writing at Rutgers University and the 2022 Pulitzer Prize-winning contributing critic-at-large at the New York Times. She is the director of Express Newark, a center for socially engaged art and design art at Rutgers, and the author of “Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination” and “In Search of the Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece.” Tillet is completing a book on the Civil Rights musician, Nina Simone.

Melissa Lyde is Founder and Curator of Alfreda’s Cinema. In addition to partnering with the Metrograph, Film Forum, Light Industry, Weeksville, the Museum of the City of New York, and in residency at BAM and the Brownsville Heritage Center, Alfreda’s Cinema is working towards opening its own space in Brooklyn.