“I Am the First and the Last”: Julie Dash’s DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST
Bryn Mawr Film Institute is excited to welcome actress Alva Rogers, who will join us at our January 17 screening of Daughters of the Dust for an in-theater conversation with Dr. Amy Corbin of Muhlenberg University before the film.
In April 2016, Beyoncé unveiled the “visual album” Lemonade, a song cycle intimately chronicling her troubled relationship, released in tandem with a sixty-five minute music video. The project’s commercial success was matched by a torrent of critical appreciation, inspiring think pieces, college courses, museum programs, and more. Lemonade was lauded not just for its craft, but the scope and audacity of its vision, weaving Beyoncé’s personal story into a continuum of collective experience, engaging with themes of self-discovery, female leadership, black artistry, tradition, and family. Laden with song samples, snippets of poetry, and recorded interviews, the full extent of Lemonade’s dense web of allusions becomes clear when experienced in its full audiovisual form.
In some of Lemonade’s most memorable visual passages, Beyoncé and her cohort are seen in long white gowns, walking into the water on an empty beach, perched on tree branches draped with Spanish moss, posed in tableau on cabin porches. With this imagery, Beyoncé invoked Julie Dash’s extraordinary — yet underappreciated — 1991 feature Daughters of the Dust, a work which presages Lemonade not just in its visual symbolism, but in its encompassing, kaleidoscopic vision.
Daughters of the Dust follows the Peazant family, who live on St. Helena Island, off the coast of South Carolina. They are of the people known as Gullah (or Geechee), descendants of the slaves who once worked the island’s plantations. In their geographic isolation, they have maintained the spiritual and cultural traditions of their West African ancestors. In 1902, as a contingent of the family prepares the leave the island and journey north in search of opportunity, the Peazants gather for a celebratory picnic at a patch of beach known as Igbo Landing, the site of a mythic act of slave resistance.
Nana (Cora Lee Day), the family matriarch, is determined to remain on the island as a custodian of the Gullah traditions, announcing, “It’s up to the living to watch over the dead.” Her granddaughter Viola (Cheryl Lynn Bruce) has broken from family tradition and become a Christian, declaring (in a paraphrase of The Tempest), “What’s past is prologue.” Eula Peazant (Alva Rogers) has been assaulted by a white man during a trip to the mainland and has subsequently become pregnant; her husband, Eli (Adisa Anderson), is tormented by the question of the child’s paternity. These are only a few of the stories woven through Daughters of the Dust. The Peazant family tree is sprawling, and each member stands at a crossroads between their roots and the promises of the future.
“I am the first and the last,” Nana says at the beginning of the film. “The ancestor and the womb are one and the same.” This non-linear conception of time — the powerful connection to the past, the enduring ramifications of history into the present, the dreams of the future — is reflected in the film’s narrative structure. Its magical realist story slips in and out of chronology, folding in memories, myths, visions, the voices of those departed and those not yet born, including Eula’s unborn child, who narrates portions of the film.
Early on, there’s an extraordinary sequence that exemplifies the film’s ability to straddle multiple registers of time and experience. Nana sits in a ramshackle chair close to the beach, hand-weaving a wicker basket, wearing a brilliant purple dress. As her thoughts drift to plantation times, the camera cuts to a shot of slaves drawing fabrics through cauldrons of purple liquid. In voice-over, Nana explains that the indigo dyes stained the skin of the enslaved workers, and the camera cuts to another shot islanders past, now playing a board game, their hands tinted purple. We return to present time, as Nana watches one of the picnickers stroll in silhouette by waves, cast purple in the light. Finally the camera returns to Nana’s own hands, bearing their own stains, as she folds an indigo charm, which she will give to her granddaughters to carry onto the mainland. A linkage is expressed through visual language — past and present, person and place, the individual and the collective, all occurring together as one.
“In the culture, we’re not binary. We speak in rhythms and sensibilities, we’re circular. We do improvisation and movement and dance and speech and art and design, and it’s possible to communicate in these ways through cinema too,” Dash said of the film’s structure. In a separate interview, she remarked, “It’s a meditation — it’s a cinema of ideas and what-ifs and how-sos. It’s a conversation.”
Dash emerged from a wave of black independent filmmakers trained at the UCLA film school between the late 1960s and the 1980s, known collectively as The L.A. Rebellion. Situated near the epicenter of the film industry — “the belly of the beast,” Dash called it — the films of the L.A. Rebellion spurned the conventions of Hollywood filmmaking in both content and style. Drawing from the American Black Liberation movement, Italian neorealist films, and various Third World cinemas, the movement yielded many imaginative, poetic, and provocative visions of black life, including Haile Gerima’s Bush Mama, Larry Clark’s Passing Through, and Charles Burnett’s acclaimed Killer of Sheep. “We weren’t making films to be paid, or to satisfy someone else’s needs. We were making films because they were an expression of ourselves: what we were challenged by, what we wanted to change or redefine, or just dive into and explore,” Dash said.
Inspired by her own childhood visits to Southern Gullah-Geechee relatives, Dash had been planning Daughters of the Dust since 1975, but was unable to secure the necessary funding until 1988. Following an enthusiastic reception at the 1991 Sundance Festival, Daughters of the Dust became the first film directed by an African American woman to receive a national release, and was met with admiration from critics and audiences. The New York Times called it “a film of spellbinding visual beauty.” Sight and Sound called it “balletic, operatic…elemental.” Said Roger Ebert, “at certain moments we are not sure exactly what is being said or signified, but by the end we understand everything that happened — not in an intellectual way, but an emotional way.”
Yet despite this acclaim, the stylistic and thematic qualities which made Daughters of the Dust so unique gave many producers pause, and a Hollywood path did not materialize for Dash. “I can have lunch with anyone and visit with executives, but they have not hired me. Some were put off by Daughters of the Dust because they didn’t understand it,” Dash told Black Camera in 2007. “In fact, they rarely want to talk about Daughters.” Dash went on to a prolific career in television and independent film, and Daughters of the Dust fell into relative obscurity.
It’s taken twenty-five years, a 2K restoration, and a major shout-out by one of the biggest pop stars in the world, but Daughters of the Dust is finally getting rightful recognition as a mesmerizing and visionary work by a major American filmmaker. Time has not diminished its spell. There’s still nothing like it.
Daughters of the Dust plays at Bryn Mawr Film Institute on January 17, presented alongside a Cinema Classics Seminar. The screening is part of our series Celebrate Black Film, which continues with a seminar and screening of Killer of Sheep on January 24, a seminar and screening of Do The Right Thing on January 31, and concludes with Fruitvale Station on February 7. The series is presented in conjunction with the Free Library’s 2019 One Book One Philadelphia selection, Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward.
See you at the movies!
— Jacob Mazer, Special Programming Manager, BMFI
