The New Negress Film Society

Last Friday, my wife and a couple of my students went to a New Negress Film Society event at the Made-In-New-York Media Center in Brooklyn, where we saw five short films and then participated in a conversation between the directors and artists and the audience about their work. The name “New Negress” alludes to Alain Locke’s seminal book The New Negro, published in 1925, that perhaps more than any other single book defined the Harlem Renaissance as it was happening. Locke’s purpose was to overturn the prejudicial paradigm assumed by politicians, social scientists, poets, and artists who understood the “negro” as an uneducated former slave or as a “social problem.” Against this assumption, Locke’s book instead reveals the rich culture of intellectual and artistic achievement. His dialectical argument draws attention to the historical forces that transform society, most especially the migration of black people from the rural south and Caribbean to cities where they could develop a community identity and support each other’s art. No longer was art and literature created with a white audience in mind, as if the purpose of art was merely to justify black’s humanity to the white hegemony. In the 1920s, in New York, Washington D.C., Chicago, and other cities, they were creating for each other, forging a dynamic artistic culture in order to engender a new, vibrant, community whose understanding of its blackness was diverse and innovative.

The New Negress Film Society creates a space where black women filmmakers can make movies for each other, rather than submit their artistic vision to the demands of a film industry dominated by the white, male gaze. As Nsenga Burton wrote in an article for TheRoot.com, and as Spike Lee suggests in his satirical movie Bamboozled, the Hollywood industry limits the potential of black actors and artists in the film industry either to absurd caricatures of black identity such as Tyler Perry’s Medea or to historical dramatizations of “social problems” usually set in the past (because the past is not so threatening to our present), such as Ava DuVernay’s recent movie Selma. Although Jacqueline Bobo has chronicled the long history of achievement in her book Black Women Film and Video Artists, I think what the New Negress Film Society does that is new is create a space where such artists can form a community that nurtures an aesthetic that truly speaks to the diversity of black women and is liberated from the burden of having to explain the black experience — as if there were only one — to the white men who dominate the industry. You can read an interview with two of the members of the New Negress Film Society and watch some of their movies [here].

One of the films that we saw, “savage” by Kumi James, is about a white teacher trying to make a difference in an urban, mostly black high school. I think everyone in America is familiar with the way that Hollywood has told this story over and over again, in which the troubled teenagers are rescued by the inspiring teacher, such as Michelle Pfiefer’s role in Dangerous Minds. Such movies pretend to be about black communities, but in actuality they repeat stereotypes of urban life as a background for affirming the heroic role of the white protagonist. The formula for such movies almost always includes a pivotal scene where the teacher shows up at the student’s house and has a transformative heart-to-heart conversation with the family. Of course, whenever I discuss such films with my students, the ridiculousness of such cinematic fantasy is quickly and easily revealed whenever I ask my students, “how would you feel if your teacher suddenly showed up at your doorstep?” The students always respond  to my question along the lines of, “ew, gross, weird, creepy.” What is brilliant about James’s movie is how it flips the script, by exposing the somewhat creepy desire behind that Hollywood fantasy. In an important scene, James reverses the standard movie plot line and has the student show up at the teacher’s house, which of course unsettles the teacher. You can watch the entire movie [on Vimeo], and below is a “teaser”:

But in addition to reversing the Hollywood gaze, films by black women filmmakers also focus inward on the complexities of daily life. The Haitian-American filmmaker and educator Stefani Saintonge focuses on the experience of teenage girls in her film “Seventh Grade,” which won an award from Essence magazine. As she remarked during the Q&A, her movie is intentionally wishful thinking — imagining how she wished she had responded to questions about sexuality and social stigma experienced she experienced as a teenager. In a way, it seems to me that the film first holds up a mirror to that experience, and then imagines a realistic response to that experience in order to provide an empowering paradigm for audiences. You can watch the whole film below:

The Ghanaian filmmaker Frances Bodomo showed her cinematically luscious film “Boneshaker” about an African family searching for a faith-healer in the wilderness of Louisiana in order to release their daughter from spiritual possession. When they get lost in the wilderness and encounter a group of white men wearing camouflage and carrying guns, one expects a moment of racist conflict, but there is none, and instead the men just give the family directions. After the family finds the church in the middle of the wilderness, the daughter stubbornly resists the faith-healer, and they leave. What the family ultimately finds instead is unexpectedly beautiful. Here is a trailer:

I’d seen Bodomo’s work before at New York’s African Film Festival in 2014 when she showed her short film “Afronauts,” which she is currently developing into a feature-length drama. Here is the trailer for “Afronauts”:

Other filmmakers created experimental films that worked through the symbolism of black identity. Ja’Tovia Gary pursued her interest in what she calls “Afrosurrealism” to explore the complexities of human psychology and black female subjectivity in her poetic film “The Ecstatic Experience.” I wasn’t able to find a clip of that film on the internet, but below I’ve included a documentary film that she did on “Cakes Da Killa” — this film a straightforward documentary, quite different than the more surrealist work she showed us at the event:

Likewise, making full use of her talents as a sound-artist, Dyani Douze collaborated with Zimbabwean graphic designer Nontsikelelo Mutiti to render a poetic sound-image “Pain Revisited” that layers recorded speech and music over a collage of artistic and journalistic imagery to meditate on black identity.

One thing I appreciated is the formal diversity in terms of their style, aesthetics, and vision as well as the diversity of what identities and backgrounds they bring: California, Texas, Louisiana, Ghana, Zimbabwe, New Jersey, and of course, my new home borough of Brooklyn. It reminded me of what I love about Brooklyn as a space where artists and writers from such different cultural locations come together to share the love and inspire each other. I look forward to future exhibitions of their work.