No happy returns: aesthetics, labor, and affect in Julie Dash’s experimental short film,Four Women(1975)

Abstract

Shaped by Black feminist ideology, this essay examines how Black women, as informed by their embodied existence, manipulate film’s formal and narrative aesthetics to ask what does cinema do, and what can it do in its portrayal of Black expressive culture. I understand the cinematic (re)presentation of Blackness to be an ideological aesthetic battleground for filmmakers, and while there are a plethora of films and scholarship dedicated to “positive” (re)presentations of Blackness, this is not that study. My study examines how experimental cinema gets around, negates, and dismisses recursively predetermined film portrayals of The Black Experience through its refusal to provide answers. Black women’s experimental cinema demonstrates the expressive possibilities of cinema’s form through their use of Black expressive culture. In this way, Black women’s experimental cinema has always been representative of how cinema generates and conveys affect. To get at this, I will analyze the short experimental film, Four Women (1975) by Julie Dash. Additionally, I turn to Sylvia Wynter’s “Re-thinking ‘Aesthetics’: Notes Towards a Deciphering Practice” to draw out how Four Women’s experimental aesthetics counter dominant cinema’s relationship with affect through its disinterest in producing “positive” or “happy” affective returns for audience members.

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