Daughters of the Dust

Thoughts on the film by Julie Dash

In the trailer for the film's 25^th 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.

Actions Written on Water

Reflections on a film: Once Upon a Time in China II (1992)

When people talk about "poetic cinema", or films that have the quality of verse, they usually have a very specific type of film in mind. Slow, languorous films about serious subjects, like war, alienation, grief, historical atrocity, or cultural and emotional displacement. Films peppered with beautifully shot natural landscapes, or scenes of urban decay, where the atmosphere of a particular place, its ghosts and memories, is evoked by the filmmaker through a series of drifting, carefully choreographed tracking shots. On the soundtrack, classical music plays as solemn voices intone their deepest and most solipsistic feelings as an aural counterpoint to the images on screen.

Plainly speaking, the term "poetic cinema" no doubt conjures up the impression of works by filmmakers like Andrei Tarkovsky, Terrence Malick, Abbas Kiarostami, João César Monteiro, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Wong Kar-Wai, Alice Rohrwacher, Sergei Parajanov, Derek Jarman, Maya Deren, Theo Angelopoulos, or the later films of Jean-Luc Godard, to name a few. While the work of these filmmakers is poetic, and sometimes even contains actual poetry spoken as part of the dialog, poetry itself is a form, like literature and painting, and within that form there are several different genres, schools and styles.

Dante Alighieri was a poet, but so is John Cooper Clarke, Dr. Seuss and Pam Ayres. Leonard Cohen was a poet, while Bob Dylan became one; likewise, Tupac Shakur. I'd even argue that there's a poetry in certain pop songs, which stir the soul as deeply as the poetry of the landscape, nature and the cosmos.

THE POETIC CINEMA?

The Color of Pomegranates [Sergei Paradjanov, 1969]:

The Mirror [Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975]:

The Tree of Life [Terrence Malick, 2011]:

As a result of both snobbery and inverse-snobbery, few would ever think to call an action film "poetic." However, many of the great action films of the past forty years do have a sense of poetry to them. I suspect this is because action cinema, at its core, is essentially operating on a similar level to that of the musical. These are both genres defined by the physicality of their performers, their grace and agility, as well as the presentation of the human body as a vessel for drama and spectacle. Action cinema is frequently called "balletic", not because it's an adjective that convinces the reader of the author's tremendously rich vocabulary, but because the line between ballet, as an art form, and mainstream action cinema, as a phenomenon, is incredibly faint.

Once Upon a Time in China II (1992), co-written, co-produced and directed by the legendary Tsui Hark, is a film that I wouldn't hesitate to call poetic. Melding themes of historical oppression, violence and xenophobia, alongside moments of slapstick comedy, melodrama and martial arts, it's an unashamedly mainstream film. However, in its stylization, its use of light and shadow, the movement of the camera and the way that it records bodies engaged in the most graceful and intensely choreographed movement, as well as in the generally heightened emotions of the film and its protagonists, it achieves something poetic, or something lyrical or rhythmical in nature.

Once Upon a Time in China II [Tsui Hark, 1991]:

Once Upon a Time in China II reacts both to and against the more conservative political leanings of the first installment, resulting in a work that's richer, both politically and aesthetically. Hark's cinema is liberated from convention here; the camera in perpetual motion, in step with his performers. It moves gracefully, like a flighted bird skimming the surface of a still winter lake. Like poetry written on water, the film becomes a dance between the elements, expressive and emotional.

Screenshots don't do the film justice, as the real thrill of Hark's work comes from the action, the cutting between shots and the way the actors and stunt performers express their tremendous physical abilities. Such demonstrations remind us throughout that the greatest special effect a film can contain isn't something that's been created and rendered on a computer, but the unique talent of the performers on screen.

What Hark does with Once Upon a Time in China II is take a style similar to that of Terrence Malick and apply it to the already vivid and comic-book-like stylizations of the martial arts film. So, the defining factors of the 'Malickian' aesthetic – the drifting camera, the wide angle lenses, the associative cutting between shots (which here emphasizes the minutia of the violent world in close-up against the confident wide-shots that give spatial and physical context to the giddy action) – provide a counter-point to the scenes of heroism, the knockabout comedy and the more conventional blockbuster flourishes. Hark's subsequent films, Green Snake (1993) and The Blade (1995), would push this poetic and delirious aesthetic even further, but the experience of Once Upon a Time in China II is no less brilliant.