Dear Shu Lea and
Kathy:
After nearly platzing
with embarrassment upon reading the transcript of our six-way
discussion of August 13 (why did we have so much trouble finishing
our sentences?). I have ferreted out some topics that may,
in being addressed, question and/or illuminate my particular
methods. Some buzzwords emerge along with more substantive
material: inter-racial/ethnic collaboration, audience, community,
multiculturalism, permission, anxiety, motives, privilege,
money.
For the sake of
our readers I should again recapitulate the two incidents
which seemed to be key for you, Shu Lea, in initiating this
"symposium": (1) My words at the plenary session of the "Viewpoints"
conference (Hunter College 1986) and (2) the subsequent acrimonious
and defensive interchange between Coco Fusco and Berenice
Renaud-and-me in Screen following Fusco's critique
of the "Sexism, Colonialism and Misrepresentations" film series
and conference (Collective for Living Cinema 1988)1. Regarding
the former: I called for a utopian future of media collaborations
between people of color and whites. This came up in the context
of admitting to the naivete of my third film (Kristina
Talking Pictures, 1976), in which two Asian- and African-American
performers were used more for their interesting screen presences
than for their racial or cultural specificity. (Should this
be called a "memory of underdevelopment?")
Coco Fusco's essay
severely, and with some justification, took two very different
and ambitious events to task for their oversights and organizing
premises. One instance involved screenings and panel discussions
around African and African-American representation, and the
other, of which I was a co-organizer, a broader range of films
and aesthetic and cultural positions. The essay produced a
heated defense from Berenice and me, followed by a rebuttal
from Coco, all published in yet another issue of Screen.
Without dredging up the exact panoply of arguments, let me
say that certain salient issues seem to have emerged from
this, along with problems that are not going to be disposed
of very readily. All we can do is keep trying to clear the
air. Which is exactly what you've both set in motion.
OK, second guessing
based on published print, hearsay, direct responses
to Privilege, intuition, common sense, along with our
prior six-way discussion second-guessing some primary
deterrents to "clear air," my interior dialogue begins thus:
"what does this white bitch think she's doing, fooling around
with black viewpoints in her last film? She's gotten a lot
of professional mileage out of this. She's probably making
scads of money running around with this movie and talking
about race. The nervy ponc! She gets all this credit for being
brave... what's so brave about her?! What about all
those people of color who have to scrape and sweat to get
their work done, let alone the problems of getting it shown.
She doesn't have any trouble at all. Look at all the grants
she's received. And now she's found a whole new playground
to mess around in before she's even earned her stripes: Before
it was race and now it's dykes. Now that she's come out she
can appropriate all the underprivileged causes as her own.
But she's got it made: she doesn't have to struggle. It's
not as though she's young and unknown... she can sleep with
whoever she wants, no sweat, no penalty. She's reaping all
the benefits of being a lesbian without any of the tsuris.
She acts like the struggles of others are her oyster. She
exploits the struggles of others by making them equivalent
to her own. And why now? Why is she only just now waking
up to her previous disregard for racial difference? Where
has she been? Has "multiculturalism" opened the way for all
these honkies to move in on and make hay out of the lives
of "Others"? Where do they get off? And meanwhile, outside
of the fringe culture market the same shit goes down. Whose
interests does this kind of work serve, anyway?"
Here I go again
putting words in the mouth of an imagined alter-ego of color,
this time around a young African-American Jewish Lesbian.
If such a person can be stereotyped, I've probably gotten
the vernacular totally wrong (who ever heard of the expression
"nervy ponc"?). Rendered more politely:
How and why can
I, a middleaged, middleclass, white, lesbian, lapsed heterosexual
presume to speak the struggles of those with whom I do not
have precisely the same things at stake?
Stated so badly
it almost seems like a dumb question, one that must be put
into perspective by further questions: If you are no longer
of reproductive age, do you drop out of the fight for abortion
rights? If you are a man, do you not speak out for women's
right to control their bodies? If you are not HIV-positive
do you not take a stand against the government's foot-dragging
policies around AIDS? If you are white do you not express
your revulsion at the neo-con defense of white racist behavior
on university campuses parading under the First Amendment?
The answers to
the above are self-evident to anyone who sees her/himself
as a progressive. The ticklish part is when those in more
advantageous positions white, first world, with more
money, behind the camera, rewarded, institutionally legitimized
represent the "struggles of others". The debates around
documentary and ethnographic film have amply delineated the
problems inherent in the invisibility and supposed neutrality
or objectivity of the filmmaker, who is ipso facto empowered.
For me, the documentary format is daunting for these and other
reasons. The combination of the inevitable authoritativeness
of its "truth" along with my directorial discomfort as an
intrusive, voyeuristic manipulator always with a card
up my sleeve, a disingenuous candor, a veiled agenda
puts me in a position of bad faith even when my agenda is
not entirely known to me until long after the shoot. And yet
I continue to be fascinated with the "speaking subject" so
to speak, and, more to the point, the presentation of the
self in front of the camera. The illusion of authenticity
contained in the illusion of spontaneity is compellingly persuasive
and as such has its necessary place in the political documentary.
The always tempting, ever retreating ideal of the "real,"
however, can be deployed for something other than the enlistment
of the experiential as an argument for social reform. Like
fictional narrative conventions, the "talking head" can be
utilized to create a provisional space of recognition and
identification to be opened up for political dialogue.
I could go on at
greater length about this, as I have in the past, but the
point that is more relevant here is that for me the representation
of "the struggles of others" is inextricably bound up with
formal options. The idea of "collaboration," which seems at
the heart of your agenda for this symposium, Shu Lea, comes
into play here. Rather than collaborating in the traditional
sense of co-director, co-editor, etc., I collaborate with
others' writing by staging interchanges of quotations. Granted,
this is a somewhat one-sided notion of "collaboration." Aside
from occasionally seeking permission, I rarely communicate
with the authors whom I quote. But there is something to be
said for the re-contextualizing of theoretical and literary
material to symbolically empower, and restore the dignity
of, disenfranchised characters. The Puerto Rican alleged rapist
in Privilege quotes Eldridge Cleaver and Frantz Fanon;
the lesbian character quotes Judy Grahn and Joan Nestle; the
African-American filmmaker utters synopses culled from Caste,
Class, and Race, by Oliver Cox, an African-American Marxist
historian. Broadly speaking, no one is original. Much of the
phraseology and syntax of this epistolary essay might be traced
to literary sources and conversations encountered in my mid-adolescence
through mid-30s. A lack of confidence in my fiction-writing
talent and skills may have been one factor that initially
propelled me into the area known in the art world as "appropriation,"
a term which became canonized in the postmodern "death of
the author." But when I began to think about racism and sexism
as possible companions in a film, it was the eloquence and
power of writers of color, of lesbian writers, of those whose
subjectivity was at risk, that moved me to put their words
into the mouths of those of my characters who lived on the
other side of social privilege.
Gloria Anzaldua
has written:
"Some
white people who take up multicultural and cultural plurality
issues mean well, but often they push to the fringes once
more the very cultures and ethnic groups about whom they want
to disseminate knowledge. For example, the white writing about
Native peoples or cultures displaces the Native writer and
often appropriates the culture instead of proliferating information
about it. The difference between appropriation and proliferation
is that the first steals and harms; the second helps heal
breaches of knowledge."
It may be too
early to establish whether what I have done is harmful or
healing, and, needless to say, I would certainly prefer to
"proliferate" than "appropriate" knowledge. A more urgent
issue is whether the voices of the people of color in Privilege
have been pushed "to the fringes" or crowded out, by the menopause
narrative of the white protagonist. It is true that the mainly
white audiences who attend screenings are more inclined to
discuss female aging and sexuality than racism after seeing
it. This may be due more to their discomfort with the latter
than to any structural imbalance in the film. It is up to
me to lead discussions in another direction without covering
over differences between respective inequities.
Which brings up
the another area of potential "displacement:" In our increasingly
dire economy of scarcity, will a white woman's rap on racism
be used as a substitute for the voices of the people she is
rapping about? In this case I rather doubt it. Much of the
"professional mileage" I am deriving from this film is coming
from its reputation as "the menopause movie." As for my motives,
they are no more opportunistic than those of anyone else who
makes feature-length films. I want to make powerful work that
makes people squirm, that makes them confront facets of their
social conditioning that they may be ashamed of. (Yeah yeah,
I know you can lead a horse to water but can't make it drink.)
What kinds of people? In the past they were "women" and "men."
In Privilege they were "whites," "young women," and
"men." In the future they may be "heterosexuals." All mythical
categories, I know, that break down into unquantifiable variations
and permutations across class, race, gender, etc. But that's
my method: As a woman I argued and argue with
that part of myself that was/is a "lover of men;" as a white
person I challenged and must continue to challenge
the residues of the white bigot within; and as a lesbian
I will probably re-enact the education of the hetero parts
of myself.
Another vexing
question is "why now?" Why did I not try to grapple with the
racist elements of Jenny's story years ago? The bare outlines
of that story had certainly been on my mind for years, and
for sure, events in the U.S. forced me to think about racism
long before making Privilege. Reading Ralph Ellison,
Richard Wright, Eldridge Cleaver, and Malcolm X laid bare
for me the bromides of melting-pot America. By 1970 the ArtWorkers'
Coalition, in its efforts to involve museums and galleries
in protest against the Vietnam War, was raising issues of
racism and sexism, both of which, unfortunately, got subsumed
under the more overriding anti-war agenda. Even before this
I heard first-hand reports from white friends about the Freedom
Buses and registration of black voters in the south. Sure
I was aware of racism, but not close to home. I saw
my black colleagues in dance and music, few as they were,
as equals, not as exceptional cases, not as people
who might have had a harder row to hoe than I. The very fact
that they were in my line of vision was reassurance that I
didn't have to think about racism close to home. It's
odd but true: racism remained an abstraction, the problem
of other whites, the problem of "Amerika."
(Interjection:
When does self-examination override historical chronology
to become reactive breast-beating, defensive self-promotion?
In explicating her work, what tone can a white filmmaker adopt
that will not siphon off attention from those who have more
difficulty getting in? Can white confessional speech accomplish
more than reinforcing white guilt? My worst irrational,
I hope fear is that, because I am in the position I
am, whatever I say will be on the backs of, at the
expense of, people of color.)
And then, as institutional
programming policies belatedly began to respond to pressure
from the funding agencies, notably the film section of the
New York State Council on the Arts under the direction of
B. Ruby Rich, I began to see independent films by African-Americans:
Julie Dash's Illusions, Charles Burnett's Killer
of Sheep, Monona Wali's Grey Area, Jackie Shearer's
A Minor Altercation, Billy Woodberry's Bless Their
Little Hearts, Camille Billops' Suzanne, Suzanne.
These films and more, with their diverse styles, richness
of experience, subtlety of detail, evocations of the ordinariness
of everyday pain inflicted by social hierarchy brought
home to me more than any previous experience the realities
of everyday life in a racist culture. This was the real beginning
of thinking about how the fabric of my own life as a white
person was implicated, shot through with the by-products,
and benefits, of racism. And once I realized this that
my own life was implicated I began to act on the urgency
and give myself permission to deal with racism
in my work and find the words, and images, to shape Jenny's
story.
(Wow! By writing
the foregoing I've just reconfirmed my faith in the power
of cine-video. Thanks for the opportunity.)
All first-person
narratives make a hero out of the narrator. After working
so hard to "de-center the subject" in her film work, the repressed
ego-in-question returns with a vengeance when she tries to
account for that work. Because she wants to make sure YOU
GET IT. Where will she go from here? Will she find a way to
include people of color in her films who are more than voices
of truth or victims of racism, yet retain their cultural difference?
Does all difference always have to be dramatized as contention
to qualify as drama, to not be boring?
I am still white.
I will always be white. And my newly-found lesbian identity
cannot, as a marker of social stigma, be made analogous to
black identity. As a white lesbian, stigmatized or not, I
shall never "know" black experience. As a white person I can
only heed the advice my feminist voice offers men: Listen,
read, examine your privilege, open your ranks. If you venture
to speak, don't expect to be congratulated. And especially
if you are a white heterosexual man, don't whine about feeling
left out. This is between you and your shrink and can have
no useful place in public debate.
Cheers,
Yvonne
1 The articles
referred to included: Coco Fusco's "Fantasies of Oppositionality"
appearing in both Screen, Vol. 29, No. 4, Autumn, 1988
and also in Afterimage, Vol. 16, No. 5, December, 1988;
and "Responses to Coco Fusco" by Berenice Renaud and Yvonne
Rainer appearing in Screen, Vol. 30, No. 3, Summer,
1989.
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