(#5) Daughters of the Dust: The Critically Acclaimed, Revolutionary Film Nobody Has Watched

[Julie Dash, behind the camera.] 

In 1992, with the release of Daughters of the Dust, Julie Dash became the first African American woman to direct a film released nationwide. The film captures a day in the life of a family who prepares for their move from St. Helena Island, of the Gullah Sea Islands, to the mainland. A photographer accompanies the family for the day to capture the memories of the women, as a representation of the notion that these three generation of Gullah women are now the focus of images.The narrator is the unborn granddaughter of the main character, Nana, the 88 year old matriarch who has decided to remain on the Island where she can be with her ancestors' spirits and retain the traditions of the Gullah people. The film is in Geechee, the dialect of the Gullahs, and only rarely provides English subtitles, encouraging the audience to focus on the imagery of intimate moments between the women who take center-stage.

Still from Daughters of the Dust (1992)

Through the content, context, and composition of the film, Dash is resisting and reinventing the ways that black women's experiences have been portrayed. The film formally breaks traditions by its resistance to be driven by a plot line and instead, is driven by its non-linear portrayal of the experiences of the women in this family. In a contemporary review of the film, Rita Kempley of the Washington Post describes the film as "visual poetry, a wedding of imagery and rhythm that connects oral tradition with the music video...an astonishing, vivid portrait not only of a time and place, but of an era's spirit".

Nana Peazant from Daughters of the Dust (1992)

In an interview with bell hooks, Dash explains how in her film, she wants to "bring a basic integrity to the historical events" by resisting stereotypes of black women, and educating the audience of the intimate and important experiences of African American women during the Great Migration North in the turn of the 20th century. As Melissa Harris Perry notes in "Crooked Room", black women are either seen as 'oversexed' or as 'fat mammies who aren't thinking about sex at all'" (Perry, 33). Dash offers a new vision of the African American woman, not only through the character of Nanawho is the tie to the Gullah tradition, but also through the unborn, female narrator. Her film “constructs for us an imaginative reality around the question of blackness and black identity" (hooks, 28). hooks notes how 
we have absolutely no cinematic traditions in which the darker-skinned black male or female body is seen as beautiful. and i thought that we were also seeing a different portrait of black men, or black male physicality there. There is none of that traditional focus on violence" (hooks, 54). 

In her interview with hooks, Dash continues to explain her intentions of her film of educating the audience about the Gullah people and their culture. She combines her historical research with her creative decisions to portray a powerful image. For example, the family work as indigo producers, and the hands of the characters are perpetually stained with the indigo dye. Though Dash had learned that indigo was very poisonous and this portrayal would be historically inaccurate, she wanted to use the image as "a symbol of slavery, to create a new icon around slavery rather than the traditional showing of the whip marks or the chains" (hooks, 31). She wants to "show something which however flawed we have no other example of” (hooks, 49).hooks notes how artistic decisions such as this has led white male critics to "impose on [Dash] a documentary mission that [she herself] did not take on" (hooks, 39). She notes a critique by David Carr who reviewed, "But for a work so heavily into its own ethnicity, one is left with any number of unanswered questions relating to Gullah history...Regardless of the extent of research, [the film] refuses to satisfy on a documentary level" (hooks, 39). Dash continues to speak on the criticism she has received from people "because they wanted to see this family toiling in the soil..they wanted to see them working" (hooks, 43). She believes the "audiences were not used to seeing black folks in their nice dress paying homage to their great-grandmother and not working, not being a beast of burden, they were unable to accept it" (hooks, 45).

Dash's goal was not to create a documentary, but instead to create a film "that requires we [the audience] be empathetic with a group in our society that even black women have been taught not to be empathetic with"(hooks, 41). Melissa Harris Perry, in "Crooked Rooms", supports hooks' argument of even black women having internalized the degradation of black women in the media by citing the African American Woman's Voices Project who interviewed hundreds of black women and found that "97 percent acknowledged that they are aware of negative stereotypes of African American women and 80 percent confirm that they have been personally affected by these persistent and sexist assumptions" (Perry, 95). As a way to empower women, in directing this film, she conceived her audience as "black women first, the black community second, white women third...that's who [she] was trying to privilege with this film" (hooks, 40). 

This female directed, female centered narrative is a crucial trailblazing response to Josephine Donovan's "call for a feminist aesthetic which directly addresses the experience of women", as cited by Margaret Humm in "Author/Auteur: Feminist Literary Theory and Feminist Film" (95). 

Works Cited

Harris-Perry, Melissa. "Crooked Room." Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and          Black America. Yale University Press, 2013.

hooks, bell. "Dialogue Between bell hooks and Julie Dash: April 26, 

       1992." Daughters of the Dust: The Making of an African American Woman's          Film. New York: New York Press, 1992.

Humm, Maggie. "Author/Auteur: Feminist Literary Theory and Feminist

Film." Feminism and Film. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997. Print.

Kempley, Rita. "Review of Review of Daughters of the Dust." Washington Post.28

February 1992.