Thoughts on the film by Julie Dash
In the trailer for the film's 25th
anniversary re-release, a quote attributed to the international movie magazine
and website 'Little White Lies' calls Daughters of the Dust:
"Extraordinary… America's answer to Terence Davies or Derek Jarman." While
the comparison seems fair, the beach scenes specifically recalling Jarman's The
Garden (1990) from the same period, a much closer point of comparison for me would
be the fellow American filmmaker Terrence Malick.
Like Malick at his very best, Julie Dash's film is
lyrical and poetic. Dispensing with plot in the conventional sense, the film is
structured more like a song or verse. The story, rich and important, illustrates
an actual period of African American history and culture that may be obscure to
many audiences, but the presentation of the story is often non-linear, suggested
both by images and the associations created by the juxtaposition of images. As
such, the story is both enriched and clouded by a myriad of other narratives
that surround it, refracting it, like the glass fragments of the kaleidoscope
seen earlier in the film.
Here, the past, present and future collide, as stories,
both personal and political, natural and supernatural, unfurl and entwine in a
vivid, hallucinatory approach that anticipates subsequent films, such as The
Thin Red Line (1998) and The Tree of Life (2011).
Daughters of the Dust [Julie Dash, 1991]:
Set in 1902, Daughters of the Dust tells the story of
three generations of Gullah women, either existing on or returning to Saint
Helena Island in
Beaufort County, South Carolina, as they prepare to migrate North on the
mainland. The themes of home and homecoming are palpable here as the filmmaker
uses the scenario to comment on the displacement of African Americans, both in
their initial displacement when kidnapped from the countries of their birth and
sold into captivity and servitude, and in the subsequent displacement felt as
they attempt to reconcile their own rich cultures and traditions with a world
that is foreign and ever-changing.
Refusing to pander to conventional modes of narrative
storytelling, Dash uses the parameters of her story to instead create a montage
of bold, iconographic images, which stress movement, community and the
relationship between the characters and their environment. The natural world
becomes as much a character as the individuals on-screen, while the imagery
speaks to a figurative expression of certain key themes. Themes such as the
contrasting and conflicting perspectives of freedom and imprisonment defined by
the movement of bodies against the sea, the clash between tradition and
modernity reflected in the juxtaposition of early twentieth-century fashions
against a landscape unchanged by time, the symbol of the family, defined as it is
by an actual tree – its roots and branches emblematic of something like
"home" – and the notion of the past and present as specters forever
hunting these characters as figures within the frame.
Brought to life so skillfully by writer and director
Dash and her cinematographer Arthur Jafa, the images of the film are designed
to express these themes, not merely pictorially, as illustrations of the text,
but as multi-layered visual narratives that communicate a great deal about the
relationships between characters, their world, and their relationship to actual
historical events. To suggest that Daughters of the Dust is one of the most
beautiful and intelligently directed works of American cinema from the past
fifty years, in this context, would not be an understatement.
Daughters of the Dust [Julie Dash, 1991]:
Taking influence from the writings of authors like
Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, Daughters of the Dust is a poetic, dreamlike
film that seems to exist without cinematic precedence. Naturally, there are
brief similarities to other filmmakers, however, these similarities exist
within the wider influences of literature and history.
If we were to narrow our eyes and squint at the film, then
we could perhaps find similarities to Theo Angelopoulos,
particularly in some of the longer held moments on the beach, or in the
presentation of a band of roaming characters seemingly occupying different
periods of history, like in The Travelling Players (1975)
or The Hunters (1977). We could perhaps even see elements of Andrei Tarkovsky
in the more personal or elliptical works, such as Mirror (1975) and Nostalghia
(1983), or Days of Heaven (1978), by the aforementioned Terrence Malick, which
have a similar sense of poetics and a focus on the elemental forces, the earth,
wind, fire and water, that define the natural world.
The Travelling Players [Theo Angelopoulos, 1975]:
Days of Heaven [Terrence Malick, 1978]:
Daughters of the Dust [Julie Dash, 1991]:
Regardless of any similarities to other works, Dash's
film has its own mythology, and perspective on a period of history that feels authentic
and deeply felt. Its story, imagery and the motivations behind events, are not
the result of some post-modern appropriation, but are born out of a genuine
engagement with a culture and its history. In short, the images speak! In
montage, they become like a chant delivered in unison; the voices calling from
history, from gravestones, from the landscape itself. The voice of the trees,
the insects, the ocean; each a witness to human history, and the histories of
these characters that define their place in the narrative.
Their presence, like ghosts or memories conjured up
from the distant past, made real by our own engagement with remembrance, gives
the film an eerie, often dreamlike quality, suggestive of the influence of the
"southern gothic." The collision between history and magical realism,
and the oft jarring juxtapositions between old fashioned language, costumes,
customs and ideas, with more modern filmmaking attitudes and techniques, become
expressive of the film's central ideology of "the past as prologue."
Its depiction of this period, its characters and events, is only the beginning
of a story that is still being lived.
Finding a tone that is sensitive but authoritarian,
channeling the different voices of individual characters in order to present
different moods, feelings, colours and intentions, Daughters of the Dust is a
singular and remarkable work by a filmmaker never able to develop the kind of
"auturist" body of work that other American filmmakers have been
privileged to. Elliptical and fragmentary, it is a film that develops out of a
series of still life observations that are as beautiful in their quality of
light and composition as any of the great masters of pictorial art.
