black human life

She has created cinematic worlds distinguished by deft character studies and nuanced subtexts. One of the only African-American female directors to helm a major Hollywood picture, DuVernay realized early in her career the importance of telling stories as yet untold. In Selma, she portrayed a King of stirring complexity. “We unencased him from marble,” she remarked when the film was released. “We really made him breathe and live as any man would, in his kitchen, telling his wife he’s about to go on a long trip.” (Black Lives, Silver Screen: Ava DuVernay and Bradford Young in Conversation, Aperture)

I want to get my flurry of thoughts down before I forget all of them as I often do nowadays due to “getting older” (and all the sleeping pills I used to take so I would be able to go to sleep earlier and get up early in the morning back when I worked at Starbucks.) This gets a bit personal. Allow me a bit. Excuse my writing because I’m the only person editing it.

I had my critique on my rushes (unedited film footage) and it went pretty well. At first I would repeatedly remark that I didn’t care about the feedback and then I retracted my statement. It’s not exactly a lie because I feel like people scramble for approval while they lie and say that they are not.

And approval is a funny thing. We’re in school to learn but professors are not god and their ways of teaching are not film and art canon (which I would argue are constantly changing whether they stick to the current ideals or not.) You have to develop what you want and decide if what the teacher has said to you is something that you want to keep in mind or scrap altogether and that is a tough decision. Many times the approval and constructive critiques that come with it are helpful. This is something I search for because that means that it was worthy of being looked at in the first place.

But, and maybe this is my own hastiness in my writing, worthiness is its own problem. I don’t care about how much I drive this point home. No one knows until they have been in this position; which many (in my everyday life at least. But ask yourself as well) haven’t been in. There are black girls in MFA programs struggling to be looked at while simultaneously being gawked at and shirking that gaze away.

The idea is creating something of worth. Worthiness of having a body of work actually be looked at for longer, inspected like the work of your peers and given honest and constructive feedback is intensely helpful. Teachers do not know everything but it would be nice to feel like I am learning with a clear head. It’s hard to trust in your vision while subtly being told you cannot. I am telling you now that walking into a place everyday and not feeling worth it (because your work is tied into your very being) while being told so in little ways that you are not can kill your spirit. So there’s this way you learn that you have to kind of teach yourself.

However, this is my second term. I have a slightly tougher skin. I’m still me, still sensitive. If you know me personally I’m trying to keep a sense of self without having to compromise. The point of this blog, as I stated, was a forum of sharing. Posts, experiences, thoughts on work, other work, Discourse (that dreaded word) from other black girls and non-binary people in the field. It’s been a bit neglected due to time constraints and how I feel (sorry about that) but this is still here.

Anyway, I digress. My short film is about a girl transitioning to natural hair by chopping it off (The Big Chop.) No there is no actual hair cutting. Don’t bother me about it. One thing is obvious: I am clearly a black girl. Another thing is that no one else in my term is black and there are about two other black girls in the school. So. I didn’t want to explain the nuances of this story to others for various reasons and no one else is my target audience but black girls. People can watch, consume, and like and that’s great. In fact I would be over the moon for that to happen. Human beings enjoy approval but– and I’m not being difficult when I say this–this was made for a reason. And it wasn’t for people with no hair pattern.

Both my editing and cinematography teachers noticed a thread between the films I had already done which is always affirming to hear. However, something my editing teacher said struck a chord with me. I’m developing a “style” if you will. My editing teacher had said that it’s interesting that I’m exploring identity but maybe if I had her cut the hair in my story it would have been better and more about blackness (and perhaps other people would agree although this isn’t the point of the post), if I recall correctly.

It didn’t shake or upset me but I remember talking to my mom that night. I start off with that conversation between Ava DuVernay and Bradford Young in this post because I read it last night and it truly moved me and it made me cry. It encompassed pretty much how I felt when hearing that particular feedback. Selma is about Martin Luther King Jr. How black can we get, basically.

The film was a major feature film constructed in Hollywood, no less. But what DuVernay was saying was that MLK was like any other man in this universe at that point in time. He was saying goodbye to his wife. Yet at the same time he was still a black man saying goodbye to his wife. He was also a man going to fight something huge, a black man going to fight something huge, and she was a part of that fight too.

The two of them also had a marriage on the rocks due to his job because of their blackness and also his infidelity something that people, men in particular, struggle with. There are intensely layered scenes played out on the screen in this film done by the actors, DuVernay, and Young. It’s not solely about MLK’s activism it’s also about his personal life that was encased and encapsulated in blackness.

There’s always this fight between Filmmakers who are Black/Black FIlmmakers or Black FIlms/Films with Black People. There’s a distinction, an understandable one, because people stop wanting to go see your movies for that exact reason. However, the reason we become frustrated at the distinction is because there is nothing wrong with blackness. If people don’t want to see it because of that then that’s their issue.

There is currently no one at this point in time that knows what it’s like to be a black woman and it’s pains (and joys, trials and tribulations) than us. So encapsulating that is what I/you/we set out to do. In the interview then Bradford Young (the cinematographer that Ava DuVernay often works with) says, “I’m just one cell in a mass of what we need to do to feel human in our experience of being black in the world.” Here he’s referring to being the 7th black men accepted into the ASC (a society of cinematographers) out of 300 in relation to his art and it rings true for me and for Ava as well.

I hesitate to use the word universality. I am specific in what I say. I am a black woman and many non-white women can relate to much of what I go through. Many women can relate to the misogyny I face on a base level. But I make sure to stay specific for a reason. The problem I run into is when people see blackness and push us into one narrative while denying us the breadth of having a range of emotions, of having a full story, a huge narrative and arc like their white or non-white peers (if they were ever so inclined to cast them.)

So yes, the two black girls in my short film were cutting their hair and yes the one girl was going natural. But it was also about the intimacy and friendship. It was funny. It was fun. It was kind of sad because she felt as if she was losing a part of herself. It was about blackness because she was black and that colors (pun intended) your life whether one notices or not. It was about liberation. It was–it is about art.

YOUNG: It’s not like jazz or hip-hop—art forms that started as expressions of dissonance and resistance. Filmmaking isn’t part of our organic narrative as black people in America. We’re asking people who were very much interested in making sure film communicated white supremacist values, like the founding fathers of the film experience—D. W. Griffith, Thomas Edison, these people who were very interested in white supremacy—we’re asking the sort of grandchildren of those people to allow us into the filmmaking experience with a whole counterpoint to why they started it. You know what I mean? It didn’t start off as an art form of resistance. Actually what you said earlier is the real purpose of why we do this. It’s like trying to etch in real time our mind’s camera, our mind’s image-making capacity. It generates images so that we can deal with life. So the way I navigate it, I think, is that I’ve just got to stay focused on the possibility that one day it could be completely turned over on its head and transformed. (Black Lives, Silver Screen: Ava DuVernay and Bradford Young in Conversation)