Maya Deren

For my last post I chose to write about one of my favorite women in cinema and a revolutionary in the field, Maya Deren. Deren was a Ukrainian-born American filmmaker and one of the most important American experimental filmmakers and leader of the avant-garde movement of cinema in the 1940s and 1950s. She was at the forefront of surrealist films and utilized many different techniques such as jump cuts, multiple exposures, superimposing images and video, slow motion and multiple other camera techniques to create her perceptual films. Deren starred in the most influential of her films, named Meshes of the Afternoon made in 1943 in collaboration with her husband as the camera man. This film aimed to tap into the realms of the unconscious human mind and expose inner fears in the main character, which is struggling to compete and live in a male dominated society.

This piece explores a woman's subjectivity and her relation to the external world. In the film, Deren walks into her home and falls asleep in an armchair in the living room, and while in this trance or dream like state she is forced to confront her fears. There are key elements that repeat in this film, like objects such as a key, a knife, a telephone, mirrors, and a hooded figure. In one scene, Deren is outside and spots the hooded figure at the end of the driveway. Just like in a dream, she tries to chase the person down, but is unable catch up to them. Eventually she ends up seeing this hooded figure in her bedroom, placing a flower on her pillow.

When it turns around the figure is not a person but rather has a mirror as a face. Dreams symbolize our subconscious thoughts and anxieties, and this concept is prevalent in the film. After going through an array of bizarre occurrences Deren is awoken by her husband, who brings her back to reality in a sense and she is upset by this. I think that she chose this to display the normalized ideal in Hollywood that a man is the hero of a story, like it was his duty to save the woman character in the film. Likewise, it displays the typical role of women in film, to play the helpless female who needs a man to protect her. Her husband then leads her upstairs to their bedroom and places a flower on her pillow, just like the mirror faced figure did. In that moment the knife, an object that is repeated in the film, appears in her hand and she moves to stab her husband in the face. When doing so, he shatters into pieces like a mirror would.

This is displaying her need for freedom from the domesticated life she lives. Throughout the film Deren chooses to take different paths to try and find a solution to her problems with traditional views of relationships and women being confined to their homes. As Deren continues to choose different paths in her dream state, she gets closer and closer to the freedom which she seeks, but the dream keeps trying to keep her away from her goal.She need to be free, and the film displays that death is the only way to freedom from the tyranny of a male dominated world.

With Darren's experimental style of filming and her stance on feminism and women's rights in the 40s and 50s she is an inspiration to all filmmakers and especially to me. In the way that she reframed female issues through her films while infiltrating and  repurposing masculine art forms, Deren cemented herself as an important female artist, director and filmmaker. If you are interested in watching the short film, here is a link to the free vimeo version. Meshes of the Afternoon

“I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free,” as she once said. “Someone else’s vision will never be as good as your own vision of your self.” 

– Georgia O’Keeffe

     When one thinks of prominent female artists, Georgia O’Keeffe is undoubtedly in the top five of most people’s list. Despite entering a field dominated by male artists, curators, gallery owners, she was able to establish herself as one of the foremost female artists of the 20^th century, with a distinct artistic style all her own. Once O’Keeffe moved to New York she had several gallery exhibitions, but her first retrospective was in 1927 at the Brooklyn Museum, featuring her most famous artistic subject-her flower close-up paintings which she produced throughout the 1920’s. Her body of work spanned seven decades, participating in the beginning of the American Modernist movement, her paintings of flowers and desolate landscapes were portrayed through an abstract lens conveying the emotional power of the objects.

     Her most famous paintings were of course her magnified, large-scale exploration of flowers, which many at the time and still continue to argue is actually representative of female genitalia. O’Keeffe herself has vehemently denied this one-dimensional sexist assumption/interpretation of her paintings. In recent years, O’Keeffe’s work has had a large retrospective at the Tate Modern in London. The Tate Modern’s director of exhibitions said this of O’Keeffe’s work: 

“O’Keeffe has been very much reduced to one particular body of work, which tends to be read in one particular way…Many of the white male artists across the 20th century have the privilege of being read on multiple levels, while others – be they women or artists from other parts of the world – tend to be reduced to one conservative reading. It’s high time that galleries and museums challenge this.”

     Georgia O’Keeffe herself bucked against this sexist reading of her work, especially since most of the art critics of her day were white upper-class men. If her paintings were in fact an exploration of female sexuality, they greatly differed from the display of sexuality by male artists, as explored in “Ways of Seeing” by John Berger: “Her body is arranged in the way it is, to display it to the man looking at the picture. This picture is made to appeal to his sexuality. It has nothing to do with her sexuality.” (55) Of course male art critics of the day, used to females being painted in a way that only appealed to their lens of sexuality, would have a problem with O’Keeffe’s soft but emotionally powerful exploration of the female subject. Clearly this criticism didn’t effect Georgia’s work or popularity, as she recently set the record for the most expensive artwork sold by a female artist at auction (44.4 million).

O'Keeffe's record setting work sold at auction for $44.4 million

     Paul Rosenfeld, a more enlightened male critic, spoke of O’Keeffe’s work as such: “No man could feel as Georgia O’Keeffe and utter himself precisely in such curves and colors; for in those curves and spots and prismatic color there is a woman referring the universe to her own frame… rendering in her picture of things her body’s subconscious knowledge of itself… What men have always wanted to know and women to hide, this girl sets forth.” The power of her paintings stem from her mastery of line, composition, and color. Her paintings seem to have a vibrant glow that capture the emotion of commonplace subjects.  What made her such a gift to feminism and the art world was the fact that she didn’t let her status of being a female artist define her work. Much as Judith Butler affirmed in her piece ‘Gender Trouble’; “If one ‘is’ a woman, that is surely not all one is; the term fails to be exhaustive” (5). O’Keeffe wanted her work to transcend her gender, a principle she brought to every aspect of her life. 

O'Keeffe's signature androgynous style  

     She rebelled against her label as a strictly female artist with her stark, androgynous and almost masculine everyday style documented throughout her life. Since there was such a gender divide in the art world at the time, she seemed to buck against that by removing gender from her work and personal style, a true original in every sense of the word. The concept of Feminist Masculinity seems to be in line with O’Keeffe’s views : “Feminist masculinity does not come at the cost of femininity, it is a contextually specific enactment of self that embraces the complexity of gender expression, a way to conceptualize performances of masculinity in tandem with performances of femininity.” (47)

Works Cited

-Butler, Judith. “Gender Trouble: Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire” Routledge, 1990.

-Nydia Pabon-Colon, Jessica. “Performing Feminism in the Hip Hop Diaspora” NYU Press, 2018.

-Berger, John. “Ways of Seeing” Penguin Press, 1972.

Post 5

            
For my 5th blog post, I chose Judy Chicago. She is an artist and is known for her feminist artworks. Judy Chicago started her artistic movement for women in contemporary art. She directed the women-only feminist art program in California Institute. She inspired many people by supporting the women’s movement in art society. She saw the problems of male-dominated art scenes or works and was really successful in those movements.

    Moving on to her works, her artworks she great meanings in feminism and the two famous works are through the flower, and the dinner party. First, the Through the Flower is a painting that represents her struggle as women in a male-dominated art community. Back in the art community, it was really hard to be successful when the artist publishes their artwork with a female’s name. People would have prejudice first and would judge the artwork based on their gender. When looking at the painting, it has abstract shapes and those shapes represent women’s sexual organs. This represented that the women’s genital was too concealed in art society, for example when showing the nudes of women in arts. As showing the women’s genital openly with abstract shapes, this breaks the rule in male-dominated art society.

Judy Chicago's Through the Flower

    Second, The Dinner Party is an installation artwork by Judy Chicago and this artwork celebrates the female history that may have been forgotten. This artwork is installed as a perfect triangle and the perfect triangle represents the seats for women. The triangle is set up with tables and on the tables, there are plates filled with butterfly or flowers. When sitting at the table, the men usually take the main seat and the women take the seat left over. Other than this, this artwork criticizes the male-dominated art society, and also the male-dominated world. This artwork shows that every woman is given equal seats and equal treats. The Dinner Party by Chicago was the most significant and recognized piece of feminist art ever made. It is still really famous until now. This installation is now available at the Brooklyn Museum if you are interested. Link is here

Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party

-Haelee Lee

Dr.Vandana Shiva; Ecofeminist; EcoHeroine.

Dr.Vandana Shiva in rural India

Dr.Vandana Shiva is a philosopher, author, ecofeminism activist, and an Alternative Nobel Peace prize recipient. Much of her work is centered in law, politics and research, and fight for biological and biodiverse intellectual property.  Through this medium of activism and awareness, Dr.Vandana Shiva has contributed to the feminist movement through an intersectionality of ecology. Dr.Vandana Shiva has contributed immensely to the ecofeminist movement through her activism for biological political change. Her belief in the ecofeminist movement is based on her philosophy that  to be a human and a feminist, one must know that the earth is living, that it is special, and it keeps us alive. She also basis her philosophy on the principle that nature has been replaced by the patriarchy, and that women ,since they are part of nature, find themselves subordinate to man.

The Chipko Movement in India

An example of just some, of her many accomplishments is her organization and execution of the Green Social Movement in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Ireland, and Austria against genetic engineering in science and agriculture. Regarding intellectual property and biodiversity, Dr. Shiva along with her team at Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology have successfully fought against the biopiracy of Neem, Basmati,  and Wheat. Through this Dr.Shiva has continued her success into the realms of feminism where she helped redefine the perception of third world women through the publishing of her book titled "Staying Alive."As well as her direction and creation of The Chipko Movement which resisted industrial forestry and logging in rural India. It consisted of local women physically putting their bodies between the machinery and the forest that provided their livelihood. The largest success of the Chipko movement was convincing Indira Gandhi, India’s prime minister in 1981, to declare a fifteen-year moratorium on logging in the Himalayan forests in Uttar Pradesh. Dr.Shiva has also written reports for the Food and Agriculture organization of the United Nations titled "The Majority of Farmers in India are Women." She has also helped create The International Center for Integrated Mountain Development, and is a founding member of the Women's Environment & Development Organization.  Last but not least, Dr.Vindana Shiva has been recognized by Times Magazine as an Environmental hero in 2003, and Asia week has recognized her as one of five most powerful communicators in Asia.

Dr.Vindana Shiva is a very influential woman who is fighting for noble causes. I have had the privilege of discovering the work of Dr.Shiva in my sophomore year of high school through one of my amazing English teachers. We analyzed her influence in the field of biodiversity and Eco activism, along with her work in feminist theory. I was blown away to learn her success fighting battles against Monsanto, an agricultural genetic engineering company. I also really do appreciate her more spiritually conscious take on activism and feminism, it’s like a fresh new lens.

Dr.Vindana Shiva receiving the 2010 SYDNEY PEACE PRIZE 

Dr. Estés: Women Who Run with the Wolves

Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés is an American “Mestiza Latina (Native American/Mexica Spanish)” poet, author, psychoanalyst, post-trauma recovery specialist and spoken word performer. Estés was born to Mestiza parents and was given up for adoption as a small child to two Hungarian immigrants. Both cultural experiences aided her passion for oral traditions.

I was recommended her book, “Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype” (WWRWTW), by my acting coach and just with the introduction, I instantly became aware of my tendencies, conscious and subconscious, that were impeding an authentic lifestyle and growth as a woman and spiritual being. In her book, Dr. Estés dissects the folktales she grew up hearing; stories passed down through the generations of both of her immigrant families. Dr. Estés theorizes that these fictional stories, specifically the woman characters in them, teach us how to get back to being “wild women”. In other words, the women in these stories guide the women heading them in relieving themselves of a suppressed way of being and into their natural, instinctual selves. Personally, this is a feminist work because it encourages women to reacquire who they were as spiritual beings before they were limited by a patriarchal society. “...although she understood that "none of us can entirely escape our history," she also understood that stories were a way to move toward healing” (encyclopedia.com).

The foundation of WWRWTW is that women have been conditioned to forget their innate instincts. They’re conditioned to keep themselves small, quiet, tamed, “they are silent when they are in fact on fire” (Estés, 8). This foundation, I believe, is also the foundation of feminsim. The feminist movement is our “way to move toward healing”. When I look back to the Kilbourne reading, Cutting Girls Down to Size, I can make an interesting correlation between Kilbourne’s argument that women are expected to fulfill contradicting paradigms, “innocent and seductive, virginal and experienced” (Kilbourne, 145) and Estés’ argument that there is a “duality” to women, one part practical, one part spiritual, that they must learn to nurture equally otherwise they will feel an imbalance. Although these arguments discuss completely different issues, I think it’s interesting to note that Estes encourages the complexity of being a woman, and even more so human, that often has negative correlations and seem to be contradicting on the surface. Perhaps even that one women can carry an array qualities that are perceived as contradicting because of their connotations, but are just the qualities of a complex human when they are isolated from culture-based labels. That one human can and should possess “masculine” qualities (based on hetero-normative, male dominated Western definitions) like logical thinking and “feminine” qualities like-emotion based action, and that a balance of both is ideal for every human.

Published in 1992, WWRWTW faced criticism by some feminists at the time because Estés refused to acknowledge a matriarchy in place of the patriarchy as the solution to women’s struggle. Instead, Estés encourages “a culture of decency that has regard for humans, regardless of gender and regardless of ethnic-ity—that is more the idea to move toward. Rather than an idea of gender” (Andrews, The Vancouver Sun).



https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/estes-clarissa-pinkola-1943-writer-psychologist
“Cutting Girls Down to Size” by Jean Kilbourne

Post #5: Julie Dash

Julie Dash is an American film director, writer and producer. She is known her film 1991 Daughters of the Dust which she wrote, directed and produced herself. It was the first full length film by an African-American woman to gain a general theatrical release. The story is about three generations of Gullah Geechee women as they prepare to migrate to the North on the mainland. It was selected for the 1991 Sundance dramatic competition. Dash wrote two books about Daughters of the Dust. The first book is co-authored along with Toni Cade Bambara and bell hooks, about the details in making the film and the other book is a novel that is set 20 years after the film’s story. The film was selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being, “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. Her work with Daughters of the Dust is significant because she avoided the European way of storytelling and created a new structure called the “Grio” structure influenced by the African Grio people who have the special ability to recall an entire family’s history in a number of days. The storytelling is completely different from the traditional European style, which most people are familiar with “Once Upon A Time”.

Dash’s work is important because it combats the single story and focuses on informing people about history and stories about women that are not normally highlighted or given attention. As mentioned in The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectatorship reading, Dash said, “I make films because I was such a spectator!” (bell hooks, 126) Black Female Spectatorship has to do with not seeing yourself accurately represented in media and instead having to resort to viewing without engagement which is why Dash watched mainstream movies repeatedly for the pleasure of deconstructing them and with the goal of shifting the dynamic. Thankfully, her pleasure of deconstructing these films led to her creation of films that allowed black women to no longer have to feel excluded from film. According to hooks, she creates “a filmic narrative wherein the black female protagonist subversively claims that space. Inverting the “real-life” power structure, she offers the black female spectator representations that challenge stereotypical notions that place us outside the realm of filmic discursive practices.” (129) Dash’s catalog also includes The Rosa Parks Story which she directed, starring Angela Bassett, Diary of an African Nun, and she currently serves as one of the directors of Queen Sugar. Her dedication to representing the multidimensional of women is due to growing up and seeing the danger of the single story. Her feminist work seeks to dismantle that. Without Julie Dash we wouldn’t have Beyonce’s Lemonade visuals which were inspired by Daughters of the Dust.

The Rosa Parks Story - directed by Julie Dash

Audre Lorde’s discussion of transforming silence into language is one that Dash would agree with as she stands her ground on male dominated sets because she understands that remaining silent takes away the ability to tell your story and become a subject of the male gaze. “Where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives. (Lorde, 42)” Julie Dash makes sure to encourage women to become more involved in media and to tell our stories: “We have a lifetime of stories of to tell… We need more people telling our stories and telling them the way they ought to be told.”

Julie Dash is truly a pioneer as she’s broke down barriers for women to be included in film. Her work is critically acclaimed and has inspired women like Ava DuVernay and Beyonce. When I was younger I saw the Rosa Parks Story and had no idea that she was behind it. It’s even more cool to know that such an important story was able to be told by a fellow black woman.

Works Cited
Bastien, Angelica Jade. We Have A Lifetime of Stories to Tell: Julie Dash On “Daughters of the Dust”. https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/we-have-a-lifetime-of-stories-to-tell-julie-dash-on-daughters-of-the-dust
Bell hooks “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectatorship”
Julie Dash Biography http://juliedash.tv/biography/
Lorde, Audre. The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action

Zanele Muholi

In looking at Zanele Muholi's photographs from Faces and Phases, black and white portraits of black queer women and transmen from various townships in South Africa (2006-), I am reminded of bell hooks' The Oppositional Gaze. Hooks states, "The extent to which black women feel devalued, objectified, dehumanized in this society determines the scope and texture of their looking relations. Those black women whose identities were constructed in resistance, by practices that oppose the dominant order, were most inclined to develop an oppositional gaze.” (page 127) Muholi began the project as a response to the discrimination and violence faced by the lesbian community in South Africa. She defines herself as a South African visual activist and says her work, “…Is a space for people to be visible, respected and recognized… and remembered most of all." (The Guardian).

From Faces and Phases

From Faces and Phases

From Faces and Phases

Muholi turns on its head what Berger characterized as the identity of a woman, “And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman,” (p.46) with the frank gaze of the surveyed onto the viewer. That gaze is open, vulnerable but also challenging. It demands the viewer look at the subject not as an object but as a person that is a whole human being that will not be denied. Berger says, “How a woman appears to a man determines how they will be treated.” (p.46) These portraits of strength in the face of brutality demand respect. South African lesbians are still being raped as a "corrective" measure. Some of the women Muholi photographed were subsequently killed for being lesbian or trans.

Zanele Muholi was born in Umlazi, a township in South Africa. She co-founded the Forum for Empowerment of Women (FEW) in 2002, and in 2009 founded Inkanyiso, a forum for queer and visual (activist) media. She is dedicated to representing black LGBTQI issues and holds photography workshops for young women in various townships. Muholi studied Photography in Johannesburg, and in 2009, completed an MFA at Ryerson University, Toronto. She has won many prestigious awards for her work. 

One of 365 portraits

Muholi’s book of monographs has just been published. Entitled, Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, it features over ninety self-portraits. Each image uses material from Muholi’s everyday environment and is highly symbolic. Some are overtly political and many are a response to real life atrocities. Muholi says, "I'm reclaiming my blackness, which I feel is continuously performed by the privileged other." So many images of black African women were taken by Western white photographers and especially in places like National Geographic were used exploitatively to sell magazines. The African women's stories if they were described at all were written by white western journalists as infotainment. All the people in the photographs were otherized. 

Muholi says, “The aim of my project is to speak about historical cases, confronting the politics of race and pigment in the photographic archive.” Her photographs have been called, “A manifesto of resistance.” In the post-production of her self-portraits Muholi has darkened her skin. This brings to mind Jean Kilbourne’s essay on advertising, “…The ads sell a great deal more than products. They sell values, images and concepts of success and worth, love and sexuality, popularity and normalcy. They tell us who we are and who we should be.” (p.121) I look at Muholi’s self-portraits as a rebuke of the persistent lightening of black skin in photographs of models and celebrities. Her self-portraits are in one part about the value judgment that we make on black skin and about showing us the the pain of surviving and triumphing over great cruelty. I am also reminded of the horrifying and degrading images of white people in black face (unbelievably, still a Christmas tradition in The Netherlands). Muholi reclaims black face and forces a reckoning in the minds of the white viewers. 

Zanele Muholi's artistic activism confronts a global history of racism, colonialism and homophobia. She is a daring and fearless artist working at a time of global authoritarianism and activity by violent groups of white supremacists. In her native country as well as many other countries including the US, her photographs force the viewers to confront the humanity of LGBTQI by not denying their existence. The fierceness of the gaze in all of her images provokes the question of what we are doing to help stop the violence of a community under siege in so many parts of the world. She says, “If given a chance to express ourselves, we have to do it consciously. And I’m not there to speak for the people, but to share and change the portrayal of black bodies in a space like London, or any other European space. It’s about time that we bring positive imagery of us in space where we are there, but hardly seen.” 

References

bell hoooks, The Oppositional Gaze

John Berger, Ways of Seeing

Jean Kilbourne, Women in Advertising 

Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston

I was first introduced to the works of Zora Neale Hurston in my “Anthropology of Black America” course by Professor Jacqueline Nassy Brown. Throughout both this course and the “Introduction to Cultural Anthropology,” I had read many novels and ethnographies by male authors such as W.E.B Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. Although the works were powerful in theory and message, it was obvious that anthropology was a male dominated profession. Zora Neale Hurston was the first African American women anthropologist that I had read works from, additionally, she was also the author of the first set of works that truly spoke to me and made me want to minor in cultural anthropology. Unlike the work from her colleagues, Hurston did not work to explain the experience of her people but rather show it. Hurston wrote in the dialect of her hometown, Eatonville, Florida. Eatonville was the first all-black governed city in the United States. Professor Brown explained that Hurston had a hard time getting her book published due to this decision to write in her native dialect. This was because due to the inequalities in the access to education, the population of publishers and readers were mainly white. Secondly, African American scholars during the Harlem Renaissance believed Hurston writing in the dialect highlighted African American’s illiteracy.  Despite this, Hurston believed if she was going to share the stories and culture of her people, it should be written in the dialect for which they spoke. Hurston’s insistence on writing with a dialect allowed for me to truly understand the importance of cultural anthropologist, for they document the human experience. Hurston intersectionality as an African American women who also identified as lesbian was reflected in her work, especially in her work Their Eyes Were Watching God. The protagonist, Janie, is a product of generations of rape without justice. She was a character that was forced into three marriages of abuse and men that tried to suppress her voice and make her submissive as a result of patriarchal expectations of women.  Bell Hooks explains patriarchy as, “a political-social system that insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with right to dominate and rule over the weak to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence” (18). She speaks for women liberation and independence. Janie never folded, she never accepted the roles placed upon her, she led with her dreams.  She allowed for a diverse array of representation of women thought and expression, including those who accept their role in patriarchy due to “a collective denial about its [patriarchy] impact on our lives” (Bell Hooks 24). Overall, she demanded her literal voice to be heard. Her work offers an insight on African American communities and culture, such as Hoodoo practices and potlucks, as well as explaining the tribulations and experiences of African American women. Through her character of Nanny (A runaway slave, grandmother to Janie, who use to be consistently raped by her slaveholder), Hurston writes, “the white man dumps his load on the black man to carry and the black man dumps his load on the black women to carry” (29). An additional work I would recommend by Zora Neale Hurston is Mules and Men. This ethnography documents African American folklore, works that express how African Americans created art despite their forced enslavement. This work allowed me to understand the strength and resilience of those who experienced slavery and offered insight on their traditions, experiences, and morals. 

-Hooks, Bell. The will to change: men, masculinity, and love.

-Hurston, Zora Neale. Mules and Men.

-Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Amma Ashante and Belle - Post 5

Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Dido Elizabeth Belle and Sarah Gadon as Lady Elizabeth Murray

A few months ago, while scrolling through YouTube, the trailer for a film called Belle caught my eye; not only because of the beautiful 18^th-century dress worn by the main character in the thumbnail, but because the character wearing the dress was Black. As much of a guilty pleasure we all must have for seeing Keira Knightley in a poofy dress, Gugu Mbatha-Raw makes for a far more inclusive alternative.

            Belle, released in 2014, tells the story of Dido Elizabeth Belle. Belle was the bi-racial daughter of British naval officer Sir John Lindsay and an enslaved woman named Maria Belle, whom Lindsay met while stationed in the British West Indies. The film details Dido Belle’s life from being born into slavery and being brought by his father to England, where she was raised as a British aristocrat.

         

Amma Asante with her BAFTA

   Belle was written by British-Nigerian screenwriter Misan Sagay and directed by British Ghanaian filmmaker Amma Asante. Like other films under Asante’s directorial belt, it is a historical romantic drama in which the main character is Black. This goes without saying that the romance in this film is highly politicized. Asante does brilliant work in making Belle into a kick-ass main character in a time when women were far more disadvantaged than now. While this film surely takes a few liberties with what may or may not have happened in the real Dido’s life, Asante’s spin on the historical figure makes for a great feminist film.

            In regards to the film, Asante states, “I was drawn to the story of Dido Belle by the history… the fact that I could give a voice to a young woman of color who was infamous, had played a part in our history, that could be played by an incredible young actress of color, and that she could be front and center in this story.”

After being dropped off to live with her Great Uncle and Aunt, Lord and Lady Mansfield, Dido comes to realize exactly how her status as a Black female aristocrat affects her life experiences. As she grows up, she questions how she can be “too high in rank to dine with the servants and too low in rank to dine with [her] family.”

Once she reaches the age at which she is to look for a husband, the mother of one of Dido’s

Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Amma Asante on the set of Belle

suitors asks whether or not she has a tongue, to which Dido responds with “I have a tongue. Though yours explains well enough why I may not marry your son. My greatest misfortune would be to marry into a family who would carry me as their shame.” Dido’s articulate clap-back is directly in contrast to what Jean Kilbourne states in Deadly Persuasion; “..when a girl enters adolescence, she faces a series of losses… the loss of her “voice.” [Kilbourne, 129]

As the Chief Justice of England, Dido’s Uncle Lord Mansfield was required to make a ruling on the case of the Zong massacre, in which the crew of the slave ship Zong threw slaves overboard when they realized that they were running low on potable water because they would be able to collect insurance money once they reached port in Jamaica. Historically, Mansfield did rule against the Zong’s crew. In a discussion he has with Dido about the case, Dido states that she wants a voice “for people like [her] mother, who do not have one.” Dido’s statement again relates back to the Kilbourne reading.

In Peggy McIntosh’s piece “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack,” McIntosh states that as a white woman, her “skin color was an asset for any move [she] was educated to want to make.” [McIntosh, 4] While Dido’s skin color was not the asset for her throughout her life, her status and education proved to be assets to her – especially when Mansfield confirms Dido’s freedom in his will; something which other bi-racial children born into slavery could not enjoy.

In Amma Asante’s other works A United Kingdom and Where Hands Touch, she tells similar stories of interracial couples and bi-racial characters who lived during tumultuous times politically. A United Kingdom tells the true story of Sir Seretse Khama and his wife, Ruth Williams Khama. Where Hands Touch, released this year and starring up-and-coming actress Amandla Stenberg (The Hate U Give, Everything, Everything, The Hunger Games), tells the story of a young bi-racial teenager growing up in Nazi Germany. However, I believe Dido is the most outright feminist film Asante has released since her directorial debut – overall it tells the story of a young, Black, female aristocrat who is quick to question the patriarchal and racist society around her.

Works cited

- Fox Searchlight: BELLE Featurette: "The Power of Belle"

- Belle (Film)