Water color: radical color aesthetics in Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust

Abstract

Color cinematography has ignited debates about how color should be used, and what color aesthetics can add to cinema. While Technicolor's aesthetics required painstakingly designed artificial lighting to achieve naturalist effects, Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, 1991) uses primarily natural lighting to produce a surreal colorscape I call water color. This radical aesthetics of color disrupts classical notions about color and cinema in several ways: it supports Dash's radical feminist narrative style, challenges the purity of whiteness and the notion that dark skin tones are difficult to film, and historicizes the power relations of color pigment production.

Keywords::

• color
• aesthetics
• feminism
• race
• cinema
• black
• women

Acknowledgements

Sincere thanks to Edward Branigan, who awakened my interest in cinematic color, nurtured my writing process, and gave me access to portions of his unpublished manuscript for use in this paper. Thanks also to my mentor, Anna Everett, who supported and inspired me throughout the time I was writing this paper.