Viewing in the Dark: Toward a Black Feminist Approach to Film

Abstract

In the spring semester of 2000, when I taught my first Introduction to Women's Studies course, I introduced Laura Mulvey's Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema during a unit on images of women in popular culture. To illustrate Mulvey's analysis of the scopophilic instinct, in which she defines looking... [as] a source of pleasure, I showed my class a clip from Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, since she had examined in her essay how the male voyeuristic gaze was used in this film.1 In a of view shot, the camera's gaze frames a close-up of Grace Kelley as she bends down to kiss James Stewart, the character we assume to hold the point of view. My students at least understood how the look-as it entailed the power dynamic of woman as image, man as of the look-was constructed in cinema once we established this gender paradigm. However, when I assigned Julie Dash's groundbreaking black feminist film Daughters of the Dust for a screening, my students were unable to comprehend how Dash altered not only the essential gender paradigm but also the racial paradigms of relations.2 Somehow, they could not interpret Dash's techniques of African aesthetics: her use of visuals and sounds, her focus on images of black people-specially close-ups of African American women-and her revolutionary form of narrative and cinematography that displaced the white male gaze as bearer of the look. It was not just that Dash removed this prix ileged gaze from her frame of reference; she also challenged the we expect to gain from watching a film. In short, my students, who were primarily white, middle class, and female (give or take three male students) were visually challenged by the shift from Hollywood filmmaking models. The three African American female students in this class were an exception; while confused by the narrative, they were nonetheless appreciative of the beautiful appearances of the black women in this film. Although I realize that a viewing of Daughters of the Dust would have been difficult for any student unused to such projects as Dash's in restructuring the racial and gender hegemonic practices of filmmaking, I did not prepare them well for Dash's radical departure, even with a feminist film critique such as Mulvey's. While Mulvey's essay provides a convincing feminist analysis of film that moves away from a simple examination of visual images of women and focuses instead on the male-identified gaze of the camera, it falls short of any analysis of racial factors and how they might shape the looking relations in cinema. However, therein lies the problem-in looking. Whereas the construction of the white female body in film can be viewed, studied, and deconstructed, often in Hollywood cinema there is no black female body that we can analyze.3 Or so we think. In her essay Mulvey describes the sexual imbalance that structures the cinematic frame and, hence, the world as we know it. She suggests: [Pleasure] in has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Women displayed as sexual object is the leit-motif of spectacle: from pin-ups to strip-tease, from Ziegfield to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire. (750) While we may argue that, when black women are included in film, they certainly inhabit this function in the same way as their white female counterparts, the to-be-looked-at-ness embodied in pleasure functions differently with regard to the racial dynamics of the gaze. For the black female body may incorporate the erotic of the white/nonwhite male gaze through the image of a Jezebel or tragic mulatto, but there is also displeasure in such cases as grotesque mammies and Sapphires, who functioned in early Hollywood films-and to some extent, in contemporary cinema-as the antierotic and the antithesis to the white female body and, hence, as the signifier for a blackness that shapes a more palatable representation of whiteness. …

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