-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Eleni Palis, Race, authorship and film quotation in post-classical cinema, Screen, Volume 61, Issue 2, Summer 2020, Pages 230–254, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjaa012
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
Diana: ‘So, tell me more about this project you’re working on. Is it for school?’
Cheryl: ‘Do I look like I’m a student?’
Diana: ‘I don’t know. You could be.’
Cheryl: ‘Well, I’m a filmmaker.’
This dialogue from Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman (1996) highlights crucial questions about visibility, representation and the status of the look implicit in any Hollywood historiography – especially one conveyed through narrative feature film. While on the surface Cheryl’s question about whether she ‘looks like’ a student seems to reference age and appearance, this dialogue is deceptively rich. Her quip about what a student or filmmaker ‘looks like’ works doubly, suggesting both the object of a gaze (the student or filmmaker’s outer appearance) and the subject and quality of a gaze (how a student or filmmaker ‘looks’ at the world). Cheryl challenges Diana, and the audience, to reconsider the visual expectations, in both demographic and aesthetic terms, that have dictated what a film student or filmmaker – or an archivist, historian, teacher or viewer – who is invested in classical Hollywood ‘looks like’.1 Dunye offers a visual metaphor to elaborate her complex relationship with vision, redefining the classical auteur position traditionally associated with singularity of gaze. Proclaiming herself a proud black lesbian filmmaker, Cheryl’s ‘look’ is both a demographic intervention and an auteurist ‘re-vision’, offering a self-referential, archival and pedagogically oriented authorship.
