It’s like Plato’s overused allegory of the cave – everything we knew about this world before was shadow and puppetry; now we’ve seen a glimpse of the real thing. ‘Moonlight’ deals with highly politicized content – race, class, sexuality, gender expression, drug use – in a disarmingly nuanced way. It parachutes into territories dominated by stories about hate and dares instead to tell us stories about love.
Moonlight is a serious, introspective, understated film from director Barry Jenkins that’s been an overwhelming hit with critics, winning numerous awards for acting, directing, writing, and Best Picture, including at the Academy Awards, Golden Globes, Independent Spirit Awards, and Screen Actors Guild Awards. It’s about a gay, Black drug dealer who lives in Miami — and it doesn’t think that any of those things are either funny or shameful.
The main selling point for Moonlight is that it’s different from other movies. Unfortunately, that also makes it hard to explain – the difference of Moonlight is something you feel while you’re watching it. It’s like Plato’s overused allegory of the cave – everything we knew about this world before was shadow and puppetry; now we’ve seen a glimpse of the real thing.
Moonlight deals with highly politicized content – race, class, sexuality, gender expression, drug use – in a disarmingly nuanced way. It parachutes into territories dominated by stories about hate and dares instead to tell us stories about love. The film checks in with its protagonist, Chiron (played by Alex R. Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, and Trevante Rhodes), at three different points in his life – as a child, growing up in a rough neighborhood; as a teen, struggling with his sexuality; and as an adult, seeking a sense of authenticity. Each chapter ends at a startling point and begins by defying any stereotypes we’ve come to expect.
Hilton Als’ gorgeous essay in The New Yorker unpacks the story in more detail, and offers more insight into what it means to see Black gay men depicted this way on film, but, like Als, I was struck by my own reaction to the film’s first chapter. In that story, the young Chiron makes friends with a neighborhood drug dealer (Mahershala Ali) who becomes a surrogate father to him. I spent the first two thirds of that chapter with my shoulders and stomach clenched, waiting for something awful to happen. I was waiting for the drug dealer to be a bad person. I was waiting for Chiron to be disappointed, or rejected, or hurt somehow by this relationship. I was surprised and moved when I realized I was actually seeing kindness. I was seeing a picture of men with do-rags and pistols who love.
A lot of stories about poor Black communities are stories about either pity or invulnerable hyper-masculinity. Love is a lot more humanizing than pity and a lot more vulnerable than a rap video. Love makes us real to each other – it lets us see each other as kin. There is a shocking tenderness to Moonlight that cuts across boundaries – there is a confident assertion that these are people whose stories matter; that their experiences are worth sharing; that we will feel connected to them and sit with them in their pain, and triumph, and struggle, and caring. It’s an assertion that Black lives are human lives, as rich, complex, meaningful, and worthy as any other lives we see on film. The characters aren’t offered to us as archetypes or clowns – they’re offered to us as our own.
Moonlight isn’t the first film to act like Black people are human, or like poor people are human, or like gay people are human – but it is a beautifully-made movie, with a rich emotional palette and an introspective style. One of its strengths is that, for a movie about love – that is, in many ways, essentially a romance, at its core – it doesn’t fall into the trap of being sentimental. While racism, homophobia, and poverty aren’t the topic of the film, they inform the setting and the characters’ worldview. There’s a powerful scene where Chiron’s mother (Naomie Harris), addicted to crack cocaine, screams at him, yelling words we can’t hear – words he later dreams or remembers as “Don’t look at me.” That sense of shame and self-hatred, manifested in the psychological violence she does to herself and her son, haunts every chapter of this story, but it’s allowed to exist alongside caring and hope, without either cancelling the other out.
The final two chapters of the film, in one way or another, concern Chiron’s relationship with his bisexual friend and primary love interest, Kevin (played by Jaden Piner, Jharrel Jerome, and André Holland), and the way that various pressures in his life converge to mold the way he presents himself to others. In some ways, Chiron comes full circle by growing up to be like the drug dealer who raised him – outwardly tough, physically strong, and kind.
Moonlight is about Black masculinity, and does an exquisite job of dramatizing gender performance, but it’s reductive to say it’s only about gender, sexuality, or identity. Moonlight is a movie that captures the zeitgeist of the early twenty-first century – of a generation that grew up in the 1980s and 90s; of a culture with a lot of bullshit things in it, that still has the courage to risk a vulnerability like love. It’s the kind of film that you want future generations to see, so they can understand what the world was like in the past – the kind of film you want future generations to be confused by, because so much has changed, and the kind of film you want them to connect to, because our humanity cuts across time.
Like many other festival films, Moonlight is a slow burn that requires some patience to watch. I promise you, though, that your patience will be rewarded. This movie stayed with me for weeks after I saw it, persistently tugging at my attention, making me want to watch it again. It’s different in a way you truly have to see to understand.
Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies, TV, and video games on her blog.
In her ethnographic films, Hurston, by contrast, strikingly resists fictions of objectivity and pointedly draws attention to herself as observer. A woman and a dancing child smile directly into her lens in extreme close-up, with shy pride or beaming pleasure at her clearly encouraging attention. Instead of merely observing their games, we join the circle of clapping children and they interact with the camera as it pans over their faces.
Part ofVintage Viewing, exploring the work of female filmmaking pioneers.
Zora Neale Hurston: Frame-Changer
“Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to ‘jump at the sun.’ We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground. ” – Zora Neale Hurston
The seven principles of Kwanzaa (Nguzo Saba), designed to foster community empowerment in the face of racial stigma, include Kujichagulia, the right to “define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves and speak for ourselves.” Though we often debate choice of imagery on Bitch Flicks, it is impossible to create an image that represents another group’s equality, because their right to define their own image is fundamental to that equality. Caribbean-American comedian Bert Williams became the first Black artist to write, produce, direct and star in a film, with 1916’sA Natural Born Gambler, having already broken boundaries as writer-star of In Dahomey (1902), the first Black musical on Broadway. Williams’ performances exploited the blackface conventions of his age to be acceptable to a wider audience, while illuminating them with humanity and subversive subtext, as he continually fought for greater creative control. At the climax of A Natural Born Gambler, his character plays an imaginary poker game in prison. By losing, even in his own fantasy, Williams makes virtuoso mime into poignant commentary on internalized stigma, also the theme of his hit song, “Nobody,” from the 1906 musical Abyssinia. The same year, Williams’Fish cast himself, then in his 40s, as a young boy who escapes his chores to catch fish and is punished for his entrepreneurship. In a society where even Black children were often viewed as prematurely adult, Williams’ demand that audiences recognize the child in the man was challenging, and audiences reacted unfavorably. Neither of Williams’ surviving films feature significant roles for women.
Bert Williams masked biting commentary under comic delivery
In 1920, Oscar Micheaux wrote and directed Within Our Gates, the oldest surviving feature film by a Black director. The film argues for education and against the unquestioned domination of the church, while breaking many taboos, including depicting a lynching and the attempted rape of a Black woman by a white man. However, its heroines remain stilted and rigidly defined by Madonna/Whore framing. Micheaux’s 1925 film,Body and Soul, features a powerful performance by Mercedes Gilbert as a rape victim, opposite a menacing debut by Paul Robeson. Yet, the heroine must demonstrate her virtue by dying of shame, harnessing the martyrdom of the female body to score Micheaux’ points about oppressive religious hypocrisy. 1910’s White Fawn’s Devotion by James Young Deer (the Nanticoke director of 34 Westerns, whose role in shaping the genre is rarely acknowledged), uses the martyred suicide of White Fawn to prove to her Euro-American husband that she is attached to homeland and kin, once more scoring its racial points through female martyrdom (even if the heroine recovers for a happy end).
Once tipped for an Oscar, Louise Beavers remained typecast as “Maid”
“As long as the plays are being written and produced by whites for whites, there will be the same chance for criticism. The only remedy is for such plays as would meet popular favor to be produced by us.”– Louise Beavers
Mabel Normand‘s star vehicle, Mickey, featured sympathetic scenes of bonding between Mickey and her foster mother, played by Cheyenne comedienne Minnie Devereaux, while Mae West’s films showed extensive, sympathetic banter with maids played by Louise Beavers (whose performance in Imitation of Life was acclaimed as Oscar-worthy, without promoting Beavers from supporting roles) and Soo Yong (cast as aunt to a yellowface protagonist in The Good Earth). Though these displays of interracial female solidarity by Normand and West would be considered progressive for their time, they limit women of color to supporting roles, reinforcing their heroines’ white supremacy. The fact that white female filmmakers tended to reinforce white supremacy with their representations, while male directors of other races utilized disempowering sexist tropes, surely illustrates why they cannot collectively represent women of color.
As Deborah Riley Draper points out in her Bitch Flicks post, “#EarlyCinemaSoBlack,” many Black women were striving to bring their perspectives to the screen at this time. Tressie Souders became probably the first Black woman to write and direct a film withA Woman’s Errorin 1922, but her film is now lost. However, considering how Chinese-American writer-director Marion Wong’s 1916 feature,The Curse of the Quon Gwon: When the Far East Mingles With The West, turned up unexpectedly in a basement in 2005, Souders’ film might yet be similarly rediscovered. Wong showcased traditional Chinese ceremonies to satisfy Western curiosity about the exotic Orient, but she also explored Chinese-American cultural tensions with the nuance of an insider. The Curse of the Quon Gwon uses superimpositions and dissolves in a short fantasy sequence to represent the heroine’s own imagination, predating similar effects by Germaine Dulac. It’s worth remembering that Dulac made a series of conventional films before developing the impressionist and surrealist styles that she is celebrated for, while The Curse of Quon Gwon was Marion Wong’s only film (denied financing, distribution or promotion, despite her striving to secure them). With the same support as Dulac, how far could Wong have developed, described by the Oakland Tribune as “energy personified”?
Where they did not face the stigma of a racial minority, women of color found more filmmaking success. In India, Fatma Begum directed the first of eight fantasy epics in 1926. The following decade, Sakane Tazuko became the first female director in Japan, while Elena Sánchez Valenzuela directed a feature documentary in her native Mexico, acclaimed by journalists for “hundreds of the most beautiful, evocative scenes” but now lost. Esther Eng began writing and directing in Hong Kong in 1937 (documentary clip). Still, the ethnographic films of Zora Neale Hurston remain a rarity: vintage footage directed by a woman of color, available online. Better known as the playwright of 1925’s prize-winning Color Struck, as a leading light of the Harlem Renaissance, and as the author of novels including Their Eyes Were Watching God (see Bitch Flicks‘ review of Darnell Martin’s adaptation), Hurston also studied anthropology under Dr. Franz Boaz, who dedicated his life to challenging assumptions of Western cultural superiority. Believed to be part of Hurston’s wider research into African-American folklore, these ethnographic films were made in the Southern United States between 1928 and 1929. The footage is scored in the embedded video with Hurston’s own performance of folk songs that she collected. At first glance, her films seem like simple anthropological records. However, they are equally revealing when read as explorations of our ways of seeing, framing and interpreting others.
Logging (1928) – Children’s Games (1928) – Baptism (1929)
“She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes!” – Zora Neale Hurston
The Palestinian-American founder of postcolonialism, Edward Said’s Orientalism explored how the psychological needs of the observer shape their observations, as much as the nature of the thing observed. Criticizing the constant framing of “things Oriental in class, court, prison or manual for scrutiny, study, judgment, discipline or governing,” Said noted that imperial observers tended to interpret the Orient through “synchronic essentialism,” as something fixed and unchanging. Essentialist interpretations deny responsibility: if something is unchanging, it is impossible for oppression to impact it. If women are essentially and eternally nags, you aren’t responsible for your wife’s annoyance. If colonized people are hotheaded savages, they need no reason for rebellion. If dispossessed peoples are permanently lazy, it isn’t a symptom of their demoralizing dispossession. Oppressors become invisible to themselves through their interpretative framework.
Fictions of objective and invisible observers (oppressors?) are the traditional framing of anthropology. A “native” may be scowling because the photographer is intrusive, but their image will be frozen as an “objective” record of the “hostile native”, with viewers instinctively imagining themselves in the photographer’s place. Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North charmed audiences with its warm intimacy, popularizing the art of the documentary feature. But by claiming objectivity and obscuring his sexual relationship with his subjects, however, Flaherty distorted their shared banter and flirtation into essentialized features of the “happy-go-lucky Eskimo” and his “smiling one” wife, fueling a popular image of Inuit naivete and availability.
In her ethnographic films, Hurston, by contrast, strikingly resists fictions of objectivity and pointedly draws attention to herself as observer. A woman and a dancing child smile directly into her lens in extreme close-up, with shy pride or beaming pleasure at her clearly encouraging attention. Instead of merely observing their games, we join the circle of clapping children and they interact with the camera as it pans over their faces. Hurston’s camera is dynamic, tracking up a logging railway and lingering on tapping feet. We instinctively warm to her subjects, as we share Hurston’s sense of belonging through her camera’s gaze. She contrasts the work of an elderly lumberjack with the machinery of professional logging, showing a world of changing realities, and lingers on sawmill workers’ leisure rather than fetishizing their labor, casually noticing a woman among them. Is their mechanized modernity an improvement on the old man’s axe?
Faith Ringgold: “Picasso’s Studio”
“She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.” – Zora Neale Hurston
Of most interest for questions of self-representation, Hurston briefly portrays woman’s life in the community. Opening with the woman framed against her home environment, a wooden cabin, in the pose of a typical anthropological subject, Hurston’s woman then holds our gaze purposefully and walks up close. Hurston instructs her to smile, turn and present her profiles; she is reframed as a model, or an actress on a casting call. Compare Faith Ringgold‘s “Picasso’s Studio”: her nude heroine models against a backdrop of African “primitivism” that has been reframed by Picasso as “modernism,” while Ringgold playfully reframes Picasso himself in the African-American, feminine “folk art” of quilting, challenging the gendered and racialized ways art is interpreted and (de)valued, just as Zora Neale Hurston challenges the devaluing subtext of the anthropological frame through glamor modeling. As Hurston cuts to her woman sitting with another woman on the porch, laughing in each other’s company, this is surely the silent film equivalent of a Bechdel pass. Bouncing to a wide angle on the cabin environment, the next shot reframes the woman again, draping her over her porch railing in the “Venus reclining” pose. Hurston’s use of this classical pose recalls the 19th century African-American/Ojibwa sculptor Edmonia Lewis‘ use of Classical Grecian styles to visually code her African and Indigenous subjects as noble. From this static pose, Hurston cuts to the woman’s feet tapping as she rocks, adding musical sensibility. Hurston has thus reframed her subject five times: 1) as a product of her environment, 2) as a glamorous beauty, 3) within a community of female friendship, 4) as an iconic goddess and 5) as an appreciator of music. In total silence, in under a minute and with a mediocre camera, Hurston achieves a multi-faceted portrait. Imagine what she could have done with a budget and a distributor.
The world’s first animated feature film, 1926’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed, was a celebration of Middle-Eastern folklore, animated by Lotte Reiniger. Reiniger’s concept, for creating feature-length animations based on classic folklore, would become box office gold for Walt Disney, winning him a special Oscar for innovation, while he also patented a design for a multi-plane camera almost identical to Reiniger’s. Despite his debt to Lotte Reiniger, Disney would exclude women from creative work in his company. Next month’s Vintage Viewing: Lotte Reiniger, Animating Innovator. Stay tuned!
But they did not do it for fame or hardware, they saw a new industry that they could use to instill pride and confidence in their community and propel the race forward. So for this Black History Month, we can proudly say #EarlyCinemaSoBlack.
This is a guest post by Deborah Riley Draper.
Fortunately I have the honor and privilege of preserving and elevating the historical contributions of people of color everyday. But, since it is Black History Month, I would be remised if I didn’t take this opportunity to highlight some of the original baddass chicks of cinema. Contrary to the misconceptions and blatant neglect of historical fact, Black women have enjoyed success and failure in the movie-making business since the industry began practically. And not too unlike today, these trailblazers of the Silent Movie Era operated fully and completely outside of the Hollywood or the burgeoning Hollywood system.
Of course, most people are familiar with Zora Neale Hurston and her books because Halle Berry starred in the 2005 TV movie adaptation of Their Eyes Were WatchingGod produced by Oprah Winfrey. The Harlem Renaissance bad girl was not only a celebrated novelist and playwright but a noted anthropologist as well.She produced ethnographic films in 1928 capturing the lives, customs, and beliefs of Southern people.If you are ever in the Library of Congress, be sure to check Hurston’s filmography.
Seven years before Hurston’s films and exactly 100 years before #OscarsSoWhite was trending, the legendary Black newspaper TheChicago Defender mentioned the “three-reel drama” Shadowed by the Devil, penned and produced by Mrs. Miles Webb, in their section “Among the Movies.” Around the same time, photographer Jane Louise VanDerZee Toussaint Welcome, personal photographer of Booker T. Washington and sister of famed Harlem photographer James VanDerZee, and her husband Ernest Toussaint Welcome opened The Toussaint Motion Picture Exchange.Jennie directed Doing their Bit, a short detailing the efforts of Blacks in the military during WWI. Another film pioneer, Maria P. Williams, produced, distributed, and acted in her own film, The Flames of Wrath (1923) and the Norfolk Journal and Guide printed, “Kansas City is claiming the honor of having the first colored woman film producer in the United States.” And Williams’ best friend, Tressie Souders was lauded by the Black press as the first African American woman director for her film, A Woman’s Error (1922), which was distributed by the Afro-American Film Exhibitors’ Company based in Kansas City, Mo.These woman ignored stereotypes, Jim Crow laws, and the lack of women’s rights to get behind camera to capture and document important stories.They used a pen and a camera to create important pathways and springboards to fuel the march to equality.
It is important to mention, since we are talking about woman who used film to impact the social consciousness of a very racially oppressive society, the writer Drusilla Dunjee Houston.She wrote the screenplay, “Spirit of the South: The Maddened Mob,” one of earliest African-American responses to Thomas Dixon and D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915).She was unable to get it financed and produced.
Black women have been involved in every aspect of film from the beginning.While Oscar Micheaux is regarded as the father of Black independent cinema, we must also applaud the women who stepped out prior to men and women of all races to create jobs, opportunities and provide authentic depictions of them on the screen.These woman found their own spark and seed money to create a lane, a voice and compelling narratives that would accurately depict African American life and inspire the next generation. They pioneered cinematic techniques and introduced ways to flourish outside of Hollywood.They were entrepreneurs with start-up film companies.Maybe one day, they will trend on twitter or receive posthumous recognition for their contributions. But they did not do it for fame or hardware, they saw a new industry that they could use to instill pride and confidence in their community and propel the race forward. So for this Black History Month, we can proudly say #EarlyCinemaSoBlack.
Though not cinematic pioneers, two historically significant women will be featured in the upcoming documentary Olympic Pride, American Prejudice.The film captures the heroic turn of 18 African American athletes who defied racism on both sides of the Atlantic to complete in the 1936 Olympics.And, Louise Stokes and Tydie Pickett, the first Black women ever selected to an American Olympic team, bravely and proudly stepped onto the U.S.S. Manhattan to represent the U.S. almost 30 years prior to the Civil Rights Bill.This film is currently funding on Seed&Spark.Please support the telling of this significant chapter in American history and a precursor in the modern Civil Rights movement.Click here to contribute or log on to www.1936olympicsmovie.com to learn more.
Filmmaker Deborah Riley Draper has a proven track record for creating compelling brand stories as an advertising agency executive. Draperʼs first documentary, Versailles ʼ73: American Runway Revolution, brought to life the legendary 1973 fashion battle between five French and five American designers. Versailles ʼ73 has screened all over the world and received acclaim from critics and fans alike, including the New York Times, LA Times and Harperʼs Bazaar. The film was selected to the St. Louis International Film Festival, NY Winter Film Awards, John Hopkins Film Festival, Marthaʼs Vineyards African American Film Festival, Denver Film Society Winter DocNights, and Gateway Documentary Festival as well as selected to screen at fashion and design festivals in Canada, Saudi Arabia, Croatia, Estonia and Australia. Versailles ʼ73 is distributed through Cinetic/Filmbuff on VOD in North America, Europe and Australia. The documentary has also been optioned for development into a feature film.
Draper is currently completing production on Olympic Pride, American Prejudice, the story of the 18 African American athletes of the 1936 Summer Olympic Games. She is also completing two feature film scripts. Draper recently contributed to several museum projects, including The Groninger Museum in The Netherlands exhibition on Marga Weiman, Museum of the City of New Yorkʼs Stephen Burrows: When Fashion Danced and the Andre Leon Tallyʼs An American Master of Inventive Design at SCAD. Draper will be a contributing writer to the Fall 2015 NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art Fashion Edition.
Draper has been making long format content and commercials for more than 15 years for clients such as Coca-Cola Classic, Sprite, The Georgia Lottery Corporation, Blue Cross-Blue Shield, ExxonMobil, Fedex, Bayer CropScience and HP. She is currently the Client Service Director at Iris Worldwide. Prior to iris, Draper spent eight years at BBDO and three years at the Publicis network agency Burrell Communications Group. Her advertising work has won two Regional Emmy Awards, Gold Effie, and numerous Addys.
The avid Florida State University Seminole is frequent lecturer for the AAAA Advertising Institute and a 2014 Distinquished Visiting Professor at Johnson & Wales University, Florida Campus.
