Or: Sex, Lies and Videotape
There's a quote, often attributed to Orson Welles,
that states: "Cinema is a lie, but a lie to tell the truth." I
thought about this recently in the context of the film in question. In The
Watermelon Woman (1996), filmmaker Cheryl Dunye blurs
the dividing line between fiction and reality; creating in the process a film
that blends elements of documentary, video diary, film essay and scripted
relationship drama.
In the film, Dunye plays a version of herself. Her
character, an aspiring filmmaker who supports herself financially by working at
a local video store, attempts to make a documentary on the actor Fae Richards; a black performer working in the early
Hollywood cinema, often credited vaguely as "the watermelon woman."
As Cheryl the character documents the making of her own film – creating in the
process a clever, self-reflexive mirroring between the work being made and the
work we're currently seeing – she begins a sexual relationship with one of the
customers that frequents the store.
The Watermelon Woman [Cheryl Dunye, 1996]:
Already we get into several questions regarding this
blurring of fact and fiction. Firstly, how close is the character "Cheryl Dunye" to the filmmaker
appearing on-screen? Are her dialogues and discussions about the project –
delivered straight to camera, in a proto-"vlog" style – her own
reflections on the making of The Watermelon Woman, both the film and the film-within-the-film,
or are they scripted in order to provide moments of drama or narrative
commentary? Secondly, are the attempts to document the life of Richards real or
fake; and if so, how authentic is the relationship that provides both a sub-plot
and a further mirroring of the relationship between Dunye and her subject?
A title card at the end of the film will answer at
least one of these questions and will bring us back to that Welles-ian
hypothesis: "...a lie to tell the truth."
This is why a more appropriate title for the film
could've been Sex, Lies and Videotape, with full deference to the 1989 film by
Steven Soderbergh. More so than "The Watermelon Woman", this title
unites the three distinct (but complimentary) proponents of Dunye's film. Sex,
in the sense of the relationship between Cheryl and her customer Diana, and its
self-reflexive parallels with the romantic relationship between Fae Richards
and her own director Martha Page. Lies, in relation to the inherent manipulation
of the cinematic form and the obscuring of fact and fiction. And Videotape, as
both a means of cinematic discovery and rediscovery, as well as a once modern motion-picture format that allowed Dunye to pursue her own work,
independently.
The Watermelon Woman [Cheryl Dunye, 1996]:
Unlike the film by Soderbergh, the real difference
here is that the "lie" Dunye tells is not an act of deceit perpetuated
between characters, but a provocation from the filmmaker to their audience. For
Dunye, the personal is political, and the two strands of the narrative – the
focus on Richards and her role as "The Watermelon Woman" in early
Hollywood cinema, and Cheryl's relationship with the customer Diana, played by Guinevere
Turner – speak both to the representation of black women in cinema, both old
and new, her own role and responsibilities as a filmmaker and the stories she chooses
to tell, and the everyday minutiae of her life as both a lesbian and a black
woman in then-contemporary 90s America.
The contrivances constructed here are done so as a way
to bring attention to the way race and racism were weaponized by early
filmmakers, and how portrayals of strong black women, or depictions of love and
desire between two women, were erased or censored by history. The film, in this
sense, becomes an attempt to right the wrongs of previous generations and to
suggest that these stories existed. As Dunye herself says, in character,
towards the end of the film, "Sometimes you have to create your own
history"; another lie to tell the truth.
