No happy returns: aesthetics, labor, and affect in Julie Dash’s experimental short film, Four Women (1975)

Abstract

Shaped by Black feminist ideology, this essay examines how Black women, as informed by their embodied existence, manipulate film’s formal and narrative aesthetics to ask what does cinema do, and what can it do in its portrayal of Black expressive culture. I understand the cinematic (re)presentation of Blackness to be an ideological aesthetic battleground for filmmakers, and while there are a plethora of films and scholarship dedicated to “positive” (re)presentations of Blackness, this is not that study. My study examines how experimental cinema gets around, negates, and dismisses recursively predetermined film portrayals of The Black Experience through its refusal to provide answers. Black women’s experimental cinema demonstrates the expressive possibilities of cinema’s form through their use of Black expressive culture. In this way, Black women’s experimental cinema has always been representative of how cinema generates and conveys affect. To get at this, I will analyze the short experimental film, Four Women (1975) by Julie Dash. Additionally, I turn to Sylvia Wynter’s “Re-thinking ‘Aesthetics’: Notes Towards a Deciphering Practice” to draw out how Four Women’s experimental aesthetics counter dominant cinema’s relationship with affect through its disinterest in producing “positive” or “happy” affective returns for audience members.

Keywords:

• Experimental film
• Black film criticism
• affect theory
• Black feminism
• film aesthetics

Notes

1. Angela Davis translates Karl Marx’s definition of labor as the following, “Labor is the living, shaping fire; it represents the impermanence of things, their temporality” (Angela Y. Davis 1983, 11; Karl Marx 1953, 266).

2. In a way, I am engaging with cinema that could be defined as “killjoy cinema” to use Sara Ahmed’s term. However, such an argument exceeds the demands of this paper and would need different film to draw out the intentional killjoy aesthetics that Black women have historically always worked with. For a previous study on difficult aesthetics in Black women’s cinema, see Ayanna Dozier (2015).

3. Project One films, as noted by film scholar and L.A. Rebellion scholar and archivist Allyson Nadia Field (2016) in her essay “Rebellious Unlearnings: UCLA Project One Films (1967–78),” were short film assignments for first year MFA students that were meant to push the boundaries of film’s form.

4. Field also notes that “Each student wrote, produced, directed, and edited his or her own Project One film, which was then screened and critiqued by faculty and fellow students” (2016, 86).

5. Fanon defines the sociogenic principle in his thesis for the disalienation of the Black man in Black Skin, White Masks, which asserts it is “not an individual question,” for “society does not escape human influence” (2008, xv). He further demonstrates this principle in effect through his recollection of his experience riding a subway when “Look! Ma, A Negro!” was shouted at him. This social experience flooded his body with shame and thus constituted his body in not just that moment but for other encounters to follow (2008, 91–94).

6. Sylvia Wynter argues that the understanding of existence is filtered through society’s centering of Man, i.e., the Western bourgeois subject, who also occupies our perception of human life, that is, which bodies bear the markings of humanity in “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” She writes (in full): “The argument proposes that the struggle of our new millennium will be one between the ongoing imperative of securing the well-being of our present ethnoclass conception of the human, Man, which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself, and that of securing the well-being, and therefore full cognitive and behavioral autonomy of the human species itself/ourselves. Because of this overrepresentation … any attempt to unsettle the coloniality of power will call for the unsettling of this overrepresentation as the second and now purely secular form of what Aníbal Quijano identifies as the ‘Racism/Ethnicism complex,’ on whose basis the world of modernity was brought into existence from the fifteenth/sixteenth centuries onwards” (2003, 260).

7. Cinema is chalked full of examples meant to signify positive affects around the identity or identification to white characters onscreen (or structures of whiteness), even in films that center non-white individuals. A recent example can be found in the film, Hidden Figures (2016) which is about the Black women engineers at NASA in the 1960s. The filmic representation of these women’s lived experiences would call for negative representations of white individuals, but the director insisted there be an example, even if fictional, of a “white person doing the right thing,” every body needs to film examples of “white people doing the right thing” (Dexter Thomas 2017).

8. While this study does not engage with the subtitle of Wynter’s argument, that is the “Notes Towards a Deciphering Practice,” I feel is useful to illustrate, here, how Wynter describes her deciphering practice. A “deciphering practice” has four levels of analysis to it that enables viewers to look for the following; what the films signifies—that is looking at the film’s formal and narrative aesthetics—what the film’s socio-cultural background is, deciphering meaning based on the film’s signification and socio-cultural background, and finally addressing the collective relationship the film, as a text, has with an audience—that is, to decipher meaning based on the cinematic encounter. To execute such an analysis does not mean a “four-step process,” but rather a way of weaving these concepts and responses together in the analysis (1992, 261–268).

9. Wynter’s critique of “radical” film criticism is in reference to—what film scholar David Bordwell refers to as SLAB theory—theory that relies on “critical theory” and deconstruction in the vein of philosophers Saussure, Lacan, Althusser, and Barthes. For Wynter, such scholarship limits our awareness and interpretation of Black film as their philosophical thought omits and, at times, overlooks Black life, what James Baldwin writes as the “captive population” (Wynter 1992, 241, 257–259).

10. Du Bois writes that, “The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others” (1994, 2).

11. See Aisha Durham’s 2012 article “Check On It: Beyoncé, Southern Booty, and Black Femininities in Music Video.”

12. When experimental aesthetics in the realm of Black film is discussed, Dash is often addressed as the sole occupier of Black women’s experimental cinema even when mentioned in the context of the collaborative framework of the L.A. Rebellion. A large reason for this could be the lack of accessibility to the films of other Black women experimental filmmakers as most of their contributions exist in archives of some sort. Thus, in the realm of experimental aesthetics, few Black women have been able to achieve Dash’s recognition. But even for Dash, the success and critical acclaim of Daughters of the Dust was not enough to sustain a profitable career as a filmmaker. Although she still makes films, Dash has publicly stated the difficulties that she and the first generation of L.A. Rebellion filmmakers encountered with the film industry following their graduation (Cara Buckley 2016). Such constraints make the task of cataloguing, let alone writing about this work, immensely difficult for many scholars writing on this topic.