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| Writer/director/editor Julie Dash |
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| actress Lonette McKee |
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| Dash on the set with Ahmed El Maanouni |
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| Alile Sharon Larkin, Stormé (Bright) Sweet, Melvonna Ballenger, and Julie Dash, 1983 |
ILLUSIONS A- USA (34 mi) 1982 d: Julie Dash
Now I am an illusion, just like the films. They see me but they can’t recognize me. —Mignon Duprée (Lonette McKee)
From the maker of Daughters of the Dust (1991), the first feature by a black woman to be commercially released in the United States, this is an earlier short student film while Dash was a grad student at UCLA (both selected to the National Film Registry), part of the L.A. Rebellion in the late 70’s and early 80’s, largely influenced by a Ralph Ellison essay from 1948, The Shadow and the Act, quoted early in the film by a woman’s voiceover, making reference to the disparity between screen images of blacks and the reality of black life, suggesting movie images are mere shadows of black life tailored to fit the ideas of the white mainstream, “To direct an attack upon Hollywood would indeed be to confuse portrayal with action, the image with reality. In the beginning was not the shadow, but the act, and the province of Hollywood is not action, but illusion.” In the midst of turbulence from the 1965 Watts Uprising, the assassination of Malcolm X, the intensifying Vietnam War, the 1966 establishment of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, and the black liberation struggles of the late 60’s, the L.A. Rebellion was a student movement, mostly unheralded artists, a collective group of independent film and video artists who helped create a unique cinematic landscape that was largely inclusive of people of color and their communities, some in solidarity with anti-colonial movements from around the world, helping to illuminate previously unknown aspects of their cultural heritage. With Universal Studios just 15 miles away, “the belly of the beast,” as Dash describes it, UCLA provided a remarkably effective training ground to counter the Hollywood narrative, “When we call ourselves filmmakers it’s because we wrote, produced, knew how to do the sound, operate the camera, to light, and when we took it into post [production] we’d edit our films physically, as well as mix the sound. We were totally immersed in it. We weren’t making films to be paid, or to satisfy someone else’s needs. We were making films because they were an expression of ourselves: what we were challenged by, what we wanted to change or redefine, or just dive into and explore.” According to Christina N. Baker’s Black Women Directors, 2022, Black Women Directors - Google Books Result:
With a sense of awe, I think about the women of the L.A. Rebellion: Julie Dash, Alile Sharon Larkin, Zeinabu irene Davis, and many more. They were determined to resist Hollywood’s marginalized narratives and creatively experimented with different narratives and styles, rejecting the assumption that a film must fit Hollywood’s limited and problematic expectations. Together, as a collective of film students, they too created something new.
Something of a theoretical analysis of black women’s cinema and a scathing critique of the exclusionary practices of the Hollywood studio system, raising many more questions than it answers, at times hilariously satirical, yet also academically insightful and astute, multi-layered and complex, this film exposes the responsibilities and challenges confronting black women in the contemporary filmmaking industry, described by Clyde Taylor, one of the film professors at UCLA who coined the term L.A. Rebellion, as “one of the most brilliant achievements in style and concept in recent American filmmaking,” receiving the 1985 Black American Cinema Society Award and the Black Filmmaker Foundation’s Jury Prize in 1989 as best film of the decade. From D.W. Griffith’s BIRTH OF A NATION (1915) to Stanley Kramer’s GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER? (1967) to Steven Spielberg’s THE COLOR PURPLE (1985), black people appearing on Hollywood screens are largely presented as a problem, as Hollywood was only interested in telling white people’s stories, with blacks seen as obstacles to their progress. The traditional Hollywood narrative has blacks appearing only as peripheral characters, basically used as props in somebody else’s movies, something the L.A. Rebellion sought to radically change, producing remarkably eloquent works like Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1979), Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts (1983), both in the National Film Registry, or Zeinabu irene Davis’s opulently realized Compensation (1999), a film that should be in the Registry. These are heralded filmmakers with only a brief window of making films, and few options afterwards, as their careers were prematurely cut short in an industry that refuses to recognize their worth. Generating a sense of outrage, the essential argument of the film is that mainstream Hollywood cinema fabricates reality instead of replicating it, revealing how the contributions of blacks within the industry have been marginalized to the point of non-existence, having been censored, destroyed, hidden, and otherwise erased from public memory. In this instance, women of color are heard but not seen, as the Hollywood studio system erased black women from history through sound synchronization, synching their offscreen voices to onscreen white actresses, so over time they are not remembered or recognized. After a clarinet-infused jazz montage of documentary footage from WWII, superimposed over a film studio is a title, Hollywood 1942, a year after Pearl Harbor, as a man’s voice drones on concerning patriotic directives, which turns out to be a man in uniform, Lieutenant Bedford (Ned Bellamy), stationed at the studio to do public relations, evidently dictating notes for his secretary. Heard reciting the opening quotation, viewers hear her voice before we see her, as her introduction is delayed, with Lonette McKee playing Mignon Duprée, a light-skinned black female studio executive passing for white, given a position of status and influence working for studio head C.J. Forrester (Jack Rader) as the lone executive assistant at National Studios, a fictitious Hollywood studio trying to capture the patriotic fervor by producing war films. Shot in black and white on 16mm by Ahmed El Maanouni, with additional camerawork by Charles Burnett, who also helped Dash with the editing, Mignon has to fend off the unwanted advances of the lecherous Bedford, who not only makes catty remarks while subjecting her to ongoing abuse, but indecently opens her mail, trying to blackmail her for sex, so she defiantly sets him straight, always holding her own while continuously standing up to him. After watching a lengthy music and dance sequence starring white actress Leila Grant (Gaye Kruger) and two male dancers, dressed in a satin gown with a feather boa, set to the music of Ella Fitzgerald’s 1940 recording of The Starlit Hour, Ella Fitzgerald: The Starlit Hour - YouTube (3:13), Forrester hands a problem off to Mignon, as the sound technicians have informed them that the sound operator lost the synch during the filming, as the picture and music track do not match. Since they can’t reshoot, as the singer is overseas, they must rely upon another solution, using a black dubbed vocalist, Esther Jeter (Rosanne Katon), to sing over a filmed recording, instructing her to watch the screen as they record a new musical soundtrack. While the two white sound men are captivated by watching the movie screen, Mignon turns her focus instead to Esther, apparently mesmerized by her talent and abilities. In perhaps the most indelible image of the film, divided into three illuminated screens separated by darkness, including Mignon in the studio with the two sound men, Esther singing in a sound recording booth, and the movie screen, accentuating the spaces between illusion and reality, it’s a consolidated language of moviemaking that remarkably creates the illusion of screen unity.
Dash unmasks the façade of Hollywood filmmaking, showing the romanticized idealization of the white actress onscreen, the dominant face, yet her star persona is only achieved by the reality of black labor, the unseen face. While it’s all an illusion, surprisingly reminiscent of the dog Toto pulling back the curtain in THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939), revealing the true face of the all-powerful Oz to be just an ordinary man operating machinery that projects a giant ghostly image. Racialized biases run all throughout the history of cinema, as the voice of Ella Fitzgerald successfully passes for that of a white singer. In the 30’s and 40’s, it was not unusual for black vocalists to sing specialty numbers in dramatic films, but often these numbers were cut for screenings in the American South for fear they might dissuade viewers from purchasing tickets, yet it was far more common for musicals featuring black stars to be sung by white singers. In Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones (1954), for instance, Dorothy Dandridge, a formidable singer in her own right, was replaced by white opera singer Marilyn Horne in the lead vocals, as dubbing was Hollywood’s version of whitewashing an overriding presence of blacks. In similar fashion, women’s contributions to films were also minimized or erased, with men often taking credit for their work, as revealed in Pamela Green’s Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché (2018), while the sophistication and stylishness of Mignon resembles Lela Simone, who served as the music editor and assistant scorer on the Arthur Freed Unit from 1945 to 1958 that specialized in the production of musicals at MGM studios, while also serving as an executive assistant to Freed, reportedly one of the best editors in the business. Despite the labor-intensive nature of her work, given the arduous task of synching music to the production numbers, often working simultaneously on two or three different musicals at the same time, she was responsible for the painstaking process of sequencing sound to match the sophisticated dance movements in SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN (1952), especially the rain dance sequence, Singin' in the Rain | Gene Kelly Sings Singin' in the Rain | Warner Bros. Entertainment YouTube (4:02), accentuating each of the necessary sounds, yet she was paid substantially less than the men and remained largely invisible behind the scenes until, finally exasperated, she walked off the post-production set for GIGI in 1958. Mignon is powerful, ambitious, and intelligent, and as the film progresses, we hear a conversation between Mignon and her mother over the telephone, revealing her interest in generating real change within the industry. Unlike the women in 95% of Hollywood movies, she is not defined by romance or influenced by male flattery, nor will she allow herself to be bullied by white underlings. SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN mythologizes the coming of sound to Hollywood in 1927, giving us fiction as history, while Dash reveals history as fiction, exposing sound editing and synchronization as intentional studio strategies to conceal their own racist practices. While some of Debbie Reynold’s songs were dubbed by another singer, in Dash’s film this stands for the repression of race. Unlike the white stars of the more famous film, a generic love at first sight romance, this film is not merely about passing in a white world, but about living as a black woman, accentuating Mignon’s professional work and ambitious thoughts, where her power does not come from sexuality but from talent, ability, a sense of purpose, and confidence, suggesting to her boss that they make films depicting the effects of war on the average person, or another about the Navajo code talkers playing such a significant role in the war effort, yet despite her position, she’s still unable to get her own film projects off the ground. But she’s planting seeds lightyears before its time, offering a counterpoint to the escapist Hollywood entertainment that was historically screened, while Dash dares to imagine that a black woman’s anger and moral indignation at sexual harassment and racist historical erasure is also capable of envisioning and constructing a different future.
Despite all the accolades Dash and her films have received, she was never offered another feature film opportunity, though she has worked in television, yet many projects she worked on simply dried up and disappeared, and in that respect her career mirrors that of Mignon, as both must navigate the racism and sexism of the film industry, placed in a distinguished position, aiming to change the system from within, yet unable to generate the kind of changes that need to happen within that industry, which has long ignored the requests of underrepresented artists and communities, instead accentuating the inequities perpetuated by dominant white male ideologies. While there are more black female directors today following in the footsteps paved by Dash, it has also been forty years since this film was made and black women are still paid 64% of what white men earn. Given a central position in the film, Mignon and Esther bond together and support each other within an industry known for creating images and alternative realities, yet also denies the totality of their existence, quickly viewing the other respectfully, with Esther grateful and appreciative that someone in her position can be supportive on her behalf, immediately recognizing that she’s black, something that still remains oblivious to everyone else working there. The ease with which the two speak to each other has a natural feel to it, a surprising lack of pretentiousness, as their dialogue is much more animated and heartfelt, while the whites in the office feel more robotic and lack a sense of urgency, representing entitled office behavior within a patriarchal studio system, occasionally making offhandedly racist remarks, while Bedford is the male sleaze you can never get rid of. Both black women are beautiful and intelligent, understanding one another intrinsically, yet they may as well exist in another universe, as no one else in the film remotely understands or appreciates them, while the white women are stereotypical cardboard cutouts, including one secretary aptly named Blonde Bombshell (Sandy Brooke), while even Leila Grant’s performance feels cliché’d. In each case, both racial groups remain outside the purview of the other, as if they’re invisible. Esther even describes getting outside herself when preparing for these roles, which she does with regularity “Sometimes, when I go to the theater, I sit and listen to my voice coming out of those movie stars. I close my eyes and pretend it’s me up there in a satin gown. It’s a funny situation, ’cause I know how to sing that sad song.” This brief liaison with Esther only re-emphasizes Mignon’s personal mission, claiming she made her see herself a little clearer, perhaps awakening her consciousness, which demonstrates the tremendous benefit of having colleagues that support your vision and aspirations. Even when her mother asks when she’s going to get married, she defers interest, claiming she has more serious concerns at the moment. While this is a piece of historical fiction that utilizes Hollywood aesthetics, it nonetheless offers a sense of truth and validation through strikingly imaginative filmmaking, and through her innovative use of race, gender, and history, expanding the female subjectivity of the artform. And while Dash never appears before the camera, there are hints of herself in Mignon’s comments, “People make films about themselves.” Yet a central premise of the film comes near the end, observing “History is not what happens. They will remember what they see on the screen. I want to be here, where history is being made…People will always remember and believe that the actor Don Ameche created the telephone, or that Claudette Colbert looks like Cleopatra.” The black women in the film are portrayed as strong central characters, never dictated by the actions of anyone else, but rather create their own destinies out of the positions in which they find themselves. Furthermore, these women are accomplices of a lasting friendship instead of the popularly depicted backstabbers within the industry. This film challenges the concepts of racial identity and racial, gender, and power relations all by utilizing a different perspective from which history is approached, exploring the multiple illusions created by Hollywood and the illusion of racial identity, marking the beginning of new possibilities for the future of black feminist filmmakers.
“There's a Movement Here”: Pioneering Director Julie Dash on ... excerpt from Alison Nastasi interview with Julie Dash from Flavorwire, October 21, 2015
Was the film scholar Clyde Taylor, who named the “LA Rebellion,” one of your professors?
He was not one of my professors, but he was available. He was there and writing about film at the time. I know he coined the term “LA Rebellion” while we were all UCLA, where I went to graduate school. One of my professors was Teshome Gabriel, an Ethiopian film scholar.
Your film Illusions is recognized as part of the LA Rebellion. What was the beginning of that movement like? How did things develop for you creatively and who were you collaborating with at that time?
I arrived in Los Angeles. I started to go to the American Film Institute. I was accepted into that as a producing and writing fellow. This was 1974. That same summer, I began working on an independent film being directed by Larry Clark, who was at UCLA and part of the LA Rebellion. That’s when I met everyone. I met Charles Burnett, Haile Gerima, and other people who were part of the LA Rebellion. But I was not at UCLA until 1976, when I completed my studies at AFI and went over. So, I was working with the LA Rebellion prior to me being a part of it and officially being a UCLA grad student.
Illusions really speaks to the way black actors and creatives were hidden and forced out — but they were used for their talents, such as their voices. What’s your connection to this?
I wrote Illusions and came up with the idea for it while I was a student at AFI, in their writing program — but it was not a project that I could make there. They only had five or six productions that were approved and certainly not [Illusions]. My writing teachers told me it was ridiculous.
This is not unusual. Everything I’ve made, pretty much, being a female filmmaker, my male teachers would say, “Why in the world are you wasting your time on that?” Illusions, Diary of an African Nun … everything was like, “Oh for god’s sakes.” That continues. When I was doing my segment of Subway Stories , I remember a lot of male crew members gritting their teeth when I had the flowers blowing across the subway track. They were looking at their watches like, you know, it’s time to go. That was the ‘90s. It continues. It’s something that female filmmakers, who were working and investigating the culture of women, faced and what we continue to face. There are different cultural set points, traditions, and all of these things that may not even interest the male counterparts and might even annoy them, because they may seem frivolous. Even with Daughters of the Dust, when we won the Best Cinematography award at Sundance in 1991, I would have people look me in the face at times and say, “Let’s not even talk about it. I don’t even know what the hell it’s about.” At that time, Matty Rich’s Straight Out of Brooklyn was at Sundance, and it won the Special Jury Prize. It was given a standing ovation. Young, urban, male films were the thing in the ‘90s.
A film like Daughters of the Dust, I had one distributor tell me, prior to it being picked up by Kino, that it wasn’t an authentic African-American film. I had another major [exec], after it played 36 consecutive weeks at the New York Village East, he told me it was a fluke. These are the kinds of responses. I won’t tell you who said them, but these are direct quotes. In that same connection, I think I’m the only filmmaker coming off a stage at Sundance having won something that was not given another feature film — and then fast-forward to Ava DuVernay. Thank god she does not have to go through the same ridiculousness of people second-guessing.
