DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST: I Am the Silence That You Cannot Understand

March is Women's History Month, where we highlight voices that can get lost in the shuffle--sometimes deliberately. Such is the case with this film, one of the great indie successes of all time, whose creator was subsequently suppressed out of the filmmaking arena.

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Director: Julie Dash

Writer: Julie Dash

Cast: Cora Lee Day, Alva Rogers, Barbarao

Runtime: 112 mins.

1991

"I was the only one who came off of that stage not having another motion-picture movie."

The speaker of this quote is Julie Dash, the stage is Sundance, and the film featured there is Daughters of the Dust, the first film directed by a black woman to be theatrically distributed in the United States. The film saw widespread critical acclaim, yet Dash was shut out of Hollywood, relegated to decades of TV movies, music videos, and books reflecting on Daughters. It is next to impossible for a black woman to make and distribute a film. The barrier is racial and gendered (maybe we'll consider a woman, and maybe we'll consider a black man, but a black woman?? not a chance). That obstacle is only now being slowly eroded by the likes of Ava DuVernay and Dee Rees, thanks in large part due to the pioneering work of Julie Dash. But for Dash herself the barricade was made even more insurmountable by the content of her work.

Daughters of the Dust is the story of the Gullah, a community of African Americans residing in the low country Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia. Living isolated from the mainland has allowed the Gullah to survive without their African heritage being entirely eradicated. The film is set in 1902 as a contingent of the Gullah prepare to leave their home to travel North in search of more modern opportunity.

Most of what we have come to expect from a movie is radically upended by Daughters. As Roger Ebert put it in his review, the film plays like a tone-poem. It is not beholden to plot, or character, or chronology, but to mood, texture, and rhythm. I struggled to follow Daughters for the first half hour. This is not a deficiency, but an education. Dash is teaching you how to engage with her world culturally, aurally, verbally, rhythmically, temporally.

One of Daughters' projects is to decolonize time itself. The entire edifice of our Western dramatic structure is built on the notion of linear time. This happens, therefore this happens, but this happens, therefore this happens. Daughters suggests that time is more circular. Rather than following an individual protagonist forging his way forward through decision and circumstance, it follows a community who are making choices about their collective identity in open organic relationship with their past, present, future. Their ancestors and their progeny stand alongside the Gullah, all affected by the choices being made in any given moment.

This commentary is so successful because Dash portrays it cinematically rather than through forced exposition. Moments slip gently into other moments with editing following rules of intuition rather than continuity, as if time is a pool of water that we walk atop, dipping our head in here and there to catch glimpses of incarnate beings. This dreamy orientation is further fleshed out by the focus of the cinematography. Arthur Jafa, a close collaborator throughout the germination of this project, lingers on close-ups of objects, food, ritual practices, and gestures, as well as sweeping wide shots of the gorgeous environment. These are the anchor points around which time is made immutable. Then there is the narrator, the seldom glimpsed "Unborn Child," who has deep wisdom and perspective on the goings on despite not being alive quite yet.

It's no wonder Beyoncé cribbed so heavily from Daughters of the Dust for her seminal Lemonade. The visuals here are flat out iconic, and so deeply laden with meaning. Women in white lounge in the crags of enormous trees as if they are an extension of the branches. Characters walk across the shallow water, ripples issuing outward like a meditation on causality. Omnipresent in the visual landscape is the ocean stretching out deep into the horizon, reminding us of the boundaries of Home, the vast frightening opportunity beyond, and the natural cycle that has given generations of these people life.

Twenty-eight years later and Julie Dash has finally found another big screen opportunity. She is set to make a biopic about Angela Davis, one that I imagine will twist that tired formula. The world wasn't ready for the splash she made in 1991, but time is a circle, and some of those ripples are finally returning to the rock that displaced them.

5 / 5  BLOBS