Magic and play: Julie Dash and Jenn Nkiru in conversation

Julie Dash was the first African-American woman to receive a general theatrical release with her 1991 masterpiece Daughters of the Dust, a non-linear story of three generations of Gullah Geechee women, which expanded on Dash’s acclaimed shorts Four Women (1975), The Diary of an African Nun (1977) and Illusions (1982). In the years since, she has written novels, directed music videos, films and TV and lectured at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia.

Most recently, Dash wrapped filming on Seeking, produced by The Ummah Chroma – a renowned artist collective run by the Grammy-winning British-Nigerian director Jenn Nkiru (REBIRTH IS NECESSARY; the video for Beyoncé’s ‘Brown Skin Girl’, 2019) alongside the director Terence Nance (HBO’s Random Acts of Flyness, 2018-) and the Oscar-nominated cinematographer Bradford Young (Selma, 2014). Leila Latif sat down with Dash and Nkiru for an engaging exchange.

Julie Dash: Seeking, for the Charleston International African American museum, is about the Gullah Geechee, I keep finding myself returning to them. There’s so much rich history and opportunity to delve into ideas that have not been brought to the fore before. Not only as African American, but also a marooned society and it’s women. I like all that complexity, just like you, Jenn.

Jenn Nkiru: In your edit it sweetened my soul when I heard the men doing the calls…

JD The calls, the field cries are a gorgeous part of our legacy and history that we don’t see in mainstream media, because they don’t recognise the importance or their African origin. I grew up in New York City, in the projects and I heard these calls and I thought they were gang calls but I had no idea until I got into graduate school that these are ancient methods of communicating and a form of camouflage so you could speak privately.  Each family has their own call so when you hear it, you know what family is calling from a distance. It’s like language itself that’s now being lost. I’m thinking of your film Techno, which is my favourite, it captures the sounds of Detroit. But the first one of yours I saw was another short with little kids all together and one turns towards the camera and they have rasta hats on.

JN: That is from a piece I did for Neneh Cherry. I was looking at images of Bob Marley’s funeral, and I saw this particular image of this woman with this child looking back and that seeped into my subconscious. Images will stay with me to the point of haunting until I release them in a particular way.

JN: My first time being introduced to your work was when I went to Howard [University, in Washington DC] in 2009 and I was in my directing class with Haile Gerima [director of Sankofa, 1993]. He showed us Daughters of the Dust, and I had never seen anything in proximation to that level of complexity and depth and heritage and culture and story. It really thwarts Western understandings of that time. That image of the women in the white by the water seeped into me. 

JD: I subbed for Haile for a year at Howard. His children are grown now and they’re filmmakers. It’s a family thing.

JN: That’s beautiful.

JD: When I got to UCLA they were having a party for Haile, who was leaving for Howard. I was really there with Barbara McCullough [Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification, 1979] and [documentarian] Stormé Bright, but I worked with Larry Clark [Passing Through, 1977] and [Charles] Burnett and I would come look at Haile’s films. Haile and I always bumped heads but we are close friends. Now people from Howard tell me: “Professor Gerima used to talk about you!”

JN: I wouldn’t be the filmmaker I am today without Haile’s tutelage. The funny thing about Howard was you’d have five cinematography classes and two directing classes. There was such a cautious and deliberate conversation around the image and the psychology of the image, which you wouldn’t get anywhere else.

JD: I lecture at Spelman College when I’m not working on a film, and thinking back to the late Teshome Gabriel, who used to teach film and social change at UCLA; all of that same interrogation of the frame and the image, I learned there. I came up in the Studio Museum of Harlem and from there I went to City College – then the American Film Institute, where I learned a lot about Hollywood. But it was so bizarre. I did the whole slew of filmmaking through schools that were very different, but at UCLA they would show Haile, Charles and Larry’s films and it seemed like a really a direct line of ideas and discovery.

JN: Intergenerationally, for sure.

JD: We were dealing with chemical filmmaking and celluloid film. We were testing film stocks and learning about what we had to do to make it ours. When I made Illusions I wanted the black to be velvety, and we could only do that with black-and-white reversal film to get that dark in the shadow areas. I wanted it to look like those old Hollywood movies.

Now, with digital filmmaking, it’s all different. You could dial it up to be whatever you want it to be and play with the beauty within the shadow. But then I see commercials today and some films that are shot digitally and they let Black people go off into the darkness and you can’t see any facial features.

JN: Just eyes and teeth!

JD: Right! And it’s like, “Wait a minute? That was solved 30 years ago. There’s no excuse for this!” Just because there’s a two-stop difference between light skin and dark skin, they try to separate people. In the old days they would take the person who’s brown skin and pull ’em out of the scene. I had shut that down on a film called Funny Valentines [1999], and on a terrible film I made called Incognito [1999] that had people painted silver next to a brown-skin, beautiful woman. The cinematographer said, “I can’t do it.” It’s like, “Nope, you have to light her.” Those arguments are why I’m very careful about who I work with.

JN: When I directed Beyoncé’s ‘Brown Skin Girl’ it wasn’t about difficulty so much as intention. We knew we’d have a multitude of hues, so I had conversations with my colourist before the shoot, with the make-up department, the lighting team and the cinematographer and with costume around colours. Even if it’s a big celebrity, I’m so intentional. Everybody asked, “Why aren’t you shooting? Why aren’t you shooting?” I had to ask them to respect my process, and I took my time crafting the lighting, the direction. We got that a lot; then after the first takes everyone relaxed. I don’t like to do takes more than three times: one for camera, one for talent, one for magic.
JD: I usually do two. Then if there’s time I say, “Let’s play!” But you have it in one or two takes and there’s no reason to keep going over and over it. It’s not a stage production, because you’re gonna edit it exactly your way.

JN: It’s also an honouring of a subconscious core that leads my decisions. My work is intrinsically linked to the conversations I’m having spiritually. There’s a certain way in my spirit. I see Black people and now those are the images that I’m making. I’m more interested in Black consciousness, Black spirituality and what goes beyond hair and skin.

JD: We are still struggling to get beyond that. And yes, there are tons of civil rights stories that need to be told, but there’s stories beyond hair, skin, civil rights and being in reaction to trauma. What about our intergroup relationships?

I’ve been doing a lot of television lately and limited series. But the scripts that I’ve written for television; the stories that I still want to tell, I have not been successful in getting financing for. My favourite was a series about the 850 African-American women who served overseas during World War II, including ones living in Birmingham, England.

And 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. So instead I watch Star Trek: Discovery [2017-] so I can see us in the future, along with all the other aliens, thriving and having a zestful life. While now, 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.

JN: It’s so trite.

JD: I love futuristic stories and sci-fi, but we could have Afrofuturism right here on this timeline and paradigm. How do we get those films financed that deal with where we are right now here today? Films to do with our internal being, our internal joy, not lack and loss and limitation.

JN: I play in surrealism because it deals in the here and now, as opposed to the speculative. I’m more interested in having intra-Black conversations about the complexity of what Blackness is.

I’m doing a piece at the moment on Manchester, and there’s a lot about UK Black Northern culture that we are just unaware of. Black people are not a monolith. It’s different, the American Black experience, the British, the European, the African, the Australian…

JD: The idea of a diasporic experience that has to do with intergroup relationships. Thirty years ago it was all about urban testosterone-driven dramas. That was real to distributors, that’s what was trending. I remember being told that Daughters was not ‘authentic’ – but I cannot be in reaction to that. I just have to push forward.
Now you see some of these commercials that are so on-trend, but it’s just not working. People think they can put out a few podcasts and a beautiful sizzle-reel and drive culture. Guess what? It doesn’t work.

JN: Nope!