The importance of Julie Dash, an overlooked cinema pioneer
Since cinema’s inception, the film industry has been notoriously cruel and exclusionary to female filmmakers. Hollywood has routinely limited the opportunities given to women, allowing mainly white male directors to dominate. While the past few decades have seen more female filmmakers rise to prominence than ever before, the film industry is still overwhelmingly white. Black female filmmakers are still a rarity, reflecting Hollywood’s deep-rooted issues with racism and misogyny, otherwise known as misogynoir.
The history of Black female directors dates back to the silent era, where names such as Eloyce Patrick King Gist and Madame E. Touissant were active filmmakers. However, their work is routinely ignored by critics and scholars, with many seasoned film fans unaware of their vital contributions to the early days of cinema. However, as Hollywood established itself as the dominant cinematic hub, opportunities for any filmmakers who weren’t white men became practically non-existent.
It wasn’t until the 1970s, after the Civil Rights Movement of the previous decade, that Black female filmmakers began to appear. Notably, the late 1960s saw an increase in the enrolment of Black students at UCLA Film School, leading these young filmmakers to be dubbed the ‘L.A. Rebellion’. One of these students was Julie Dash, a passionate cinema lover inspired by the fiction of authors like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, who was keen to make narrative films akin to their work.
The students who formed part of the ‘L.A. Rebellion’ worked collaboratively to create films that stood in opposition to Hollywood’s white hegemony. Dash wanted to use cinema to change the way Black men and women were so often depicted on screen, telling Elle in 2016 that the portrayal of African American people was “all pretty much the same” when she was young.
Speaking to MUBI, Dash revealed that upon the release of her film Daughters of the Dust. She said: “I had someone tell me it was not an authentic African American film because, in their mind, we were out at the plantation picking cotton. It had to be a movie about that or an urban thug. There was nothing in between, you could not even visualise it.”
Daughters of the Dust was released in 1991, becoming the first film by an African-American female filmmaker to receive widespread theatrical release. The fact that it took so long for the feat to be achieved is the ultimate reflection of the film industry’s extreme corruption and prejudice, especially when you factor in the many genuinely terrible movies that white men have been able to make. Despite the beauty of Dash’s seminal movie, which was critically praised, she failed to find success in the film industry due to her refusal to adhere to certain Hollywood moulds.
In conversation with Jenn Nkiru for BFI, Dash revealed, “The stories that I still want to tell, I have not been successful in getting financing for.” Instead, she has enjoyed a prolific television career, directing several television movies like The Rosa Parks Story and episodes of shows such as Queen Sugar, Women of the Movement, and Reasonable Doubt.
In Daughters of the Dust, Dash presents a visually spellbinding and thoughtful portrayal of several generations of Gullah women, focusing on interactions between the past, present and future. Despite its initial acclaim, the movie floated into relative obscurity for many years and still lacks the attention it deserves. Luckily, Beyonce helped to introduce the film to a new generation of viewers after referencing it in 2016’s Lemonade. Dash told Elle, “All of a sudden, Lemonade comes out…and that was a game changer—not just for pop culture, but also for me.”
Dash hopes that as the years progress, Black women will have more opportunities to create movies in genres they’ve typically been outed from. “I see a pattern here – stories that we can tell as women of colour and stories that we can’t touch. We are not allowed in those territories yet.” She added, “We’re constantly explaining ourselves to other people rather than nurturing our own. I don’t want to do films that explain why I’m sitting here.”
It’s a true shame that that industry hasn’t treated Dash with more respect – a symptom of its lack of intersectionality. She told Elle: “There have been more women of colour filmmakers who have been very successful. But still, you can just count them on one hand.” Dash’s work represents the importance of Black female voices, and hopefully, over the coming years, more people will discover her films, which remain severely overlooked.
