Clearly the
history of documentary is subjective, and though the stories of white men
dominate our understanding of the discipline, women and people of color have
been telling stories and creating documentary discourse since the
beginning. It is clear that a certain
level of access has been required to achieve the notoriety that people like
Walter Benjamin have accomplished, though I am interested in how documentary
has existed on the fringes of the mainstream.
How have stories been told without access to cutting edge
technologies? There is plenty of
information out there about the discrepancies between white men and the rest of
the us, based on who has access to resources and mobility, though I haven’t
seen a lot how that has translated to who holds the key to telling our stories.
I would like to argue that the discourse
of documentary is as alive as the stories that have been passed down from
generation-to-generation at quilting bees and around fires and ritual rites of
passage, by slaves, by women, by people living their lives behind bars, etc. I have been thinking a lot in this class, as
brought up in on the first day, why there is such a patriarchal documentation
of documentary as a discipline, and how to flip the camera to rise up different
histories, highlighting the stories that women and specifically women of color have
kept alive as acts of healing and resistance, even though they might not take
the form of traditional documentary. In
this class I am beginning an interrogation of two concepts: the history of
documentary itself, and how it is disseminated, and also how history itself is
revisited with current documentary. I
know these are very different ideas, but both centralize women and people of
color as documentarians and also the subjects of storytelling/
documentary.
Reading
Harriet Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in a class that
highlights the history of documentary is a critical break from the ubiquity of
white men on the syllabus, and also is an acknowledgement that first person
tellings of history are a powerful form of documentary. I read her book in a very different context
many years ago, but gleaned new insights while reengaging with the text in the
context of documentary history. This
work certainly calls into question what documentary is, which is an especially
powerful question and conversation in an MFA program that is explicitly
experimental. Her work is the most
widely read female antebellum slave narrative, and in it’s life as a highly
acclaimed and widely read piece, there has been much dispute and speculation
about whether or not she actually wrote it.
It is a curious phenomenon the way in which her authorship has been so
seriously called into question in autobiography form. I have read many accounts of why people
believe it was someone else who told this story, and it is clear that as a
black woman coming out of slavery it is hard for the mainstream to hold her
truth, and not assume that someone else was responsible for her words. I find that critique/ discourse of her work
to be highly problematic, that it has been under such scrutiny, as it is clear
that her demographic is a key ingredient to the attempts to invalidate her
work. Unfortunately, there is still a
sincere disregard for the work generated by black women that is not unlike the
backlash that Harriet Jacobs received, and it shows by who is receiving funding
to make work and ultimately has access to the discipline in a time of advanced
technology.
I would like
to highlight the work of film maker Cheryl Dunye in the conversation about
representation and re-tellings of history.
I think about her bridge of documentary/ narrative film a lot with a
piece she made in 1996 called Watermelon Woman. This feature speaks a lot to access as it is
such a low budget work, that the quality takes away from the content, though
the ideas she is working with are incredibly powerful. The piece is about a character played by
herself with her name that is on a quest to find out who plays the role of “the
watermelon woman,” in a movie from the 40’s.
The character is a black slave, and the only one without a proper name,
listed as “the watermelon woman” in the credits. Dunye develops the story from there on the
quest to find out who the actress was in the film, explicitly calling into
question the representations of black women and specifically black lesbians’
stories. The ideas behind this piece are
incredibly provocative, and speak to the issues that arise as a black lesbian
storyteller trying to make work in the world.
On a
similar topic, I really appreciated the work that Aaron Canipe brought into
class the other day by Carrie Mae Weems, on the note of retellings of
history. Her body of work that features
old photographs with writing in her words is an incredibly useful way reclaim
oppressive images, while putting truth to power in the reflective
retellings. Her work is incredibly
influential to me, as I am in early stages of seeking new ways to retell
history that reclaims the power of oppressed people in conversation
anti-oppression social movements. Weems’
work is a critical contribution to culture, because it strikes such an
emotional cord as it revisits history, and specifically the history of black
women.
I am excited
to ask big questions about recalculations of history, retellings, and honoring the
stories that have gotten lost or mis-told in mainstream discourse. The works of Carrie Mae Weems and Cheryl
Dunye are such inspirations to on this quest for new ways of working and new
visual epistemologies of history.
