Retelling History With Documentary?

            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.