Angles: Women Working in Film and Video (2000)

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Zeinabu irene Davis’ Mother of the River is the story of a young slave girl who is inspired by a mysterious woman. What are the points of divergence from the European or Hollywood traditions? What signifies the work as developing a black esthetic? I see a parallel with the development of blues and jazz. We are involved with a process of artistic evolution. We can take this medium and make it our own as we did with these musical genres. This is part of the impetus for black filmmaking. I’ve had conversations with A.J. Fielder about how we could shoot people in order to have it reflect their normal, everyday experiences, and how life doesn’t really happen in 24 frames a second. Is there some other film speed that we should be using that would better reflect the ways we move as a people? All of these kinds of questions need to be asked. How do you feel about the different visual languages of men and women, regardless of shared racial or ethnic culture? Cycles, my film previous to A Powerful Thang, touches women. It doesn’t matter what color they are. There’s something about the way that I was able to construct the film in terms of pacing, and the actions, and what happens psychologically to the character in the course of the film. The whole notion of time and having to wait for something to happen, it’s very important to the female experience. It doesn’t matter what country you're from. All women all over the world are waiting for children, waiting for boyfriends, husbands, wives, whatever—waiting for telephones to ring. They’re waiting for things to happen, waiting for menstruation to happen. There was something going on in that film that really cut the nerve. They might not understand the whole thing. Cycles is a very dense film, but I think for the most part there was something that I hit upon that I would like to further explore in terms of delineating a language, a visual language, that specifically reflects the lives of women. Even within your experimental format, you are concerned about realism. You want the characters to represent real people, not just ideas or points of view? Yeah, it’s not the character as idea, although I think I may do that at some point, and that would follow Third World cinema theory. In this work, I am trying to be much more realistic. Most people would probably term Powerful Thang Afro-centric. 6 @ ANGLES Are you comfortable with that? How do you define Afro-centric? First of all, I don’t really like the term Afro-centric because there isn’t really a clear definition or agreement about what you mean when you say Afro-centric. When I say it, what I mean is embracing my culture as someone from the African Diaspora. I use my experiences of being in Africa, being in the Caribbean and being in this country to make up what I put in my films. To me, it is about really trying to understand and respect black culture, wherever it is, and to use it in my own life however it fits. In that sense, this film is Afro-centric because not only do I have black funk music from the ’70s, but also traditional jazz music, and then there’s West African and Afro-Cuban rhythms and Yoruba chants. Now how in the hell does all this fit in one film? Well, I think it does. I am not necessarily trying to tell a story in strict narrative style, but trying to take some chances, take some risks in telling the story to get across the everyday experiences of black women’s lives. I noticed that Yasmine is underlined by the djembe drum and Craig is echoed by the sax and the funk music. Yasmine tends her altar of seashells and candles, and Craig carries his sax like a movable altar. You’ve used music to define them as separate, and yet to connect them. I'm glad you got that. It works! For me, music is the bridge that has gotten us over or has gotten us through. It connects us to ourselves. The saxophone represents the magic and the memory of where we have been in Africa. Even though it is not the drum, it is the uniquely American contribution to the musical language of our culture. The other thing that is really important to me is the women composers and instrumentalists who created the original soundtrack for this film. The three best female African drummers in the country are in this film. I didn’t necessarily start out with that intention, but it happened. And I know it’s gonna blow some people away because they have never seen a woman play the djembe drum, and these women can play! The instruments are also a visual element. In the film, I pixillate the saxophone to animate it, to give it life. When Craig wakes up, the saxophone wakes up. It shimmies up onto the bed and is ready for Craig to play. He takes no notice as if this is normal. For Yasmine, the magic is her bed. The scene where I pixillate— that’s a long, tedious process of moving an object and shooting one