Photography by Danielle Levitt / August Images
Ava DuVernay, director of the Oscar-nominated Selma,
asked me to meet her at a vegetarian restaurant near her editing
facility in Studio City. DuVernay has long been an impressive filmmaker,
but her prodigiousness is now undeniable. If you are a black artist who
dares to deal with the past, it is not uncommon for others to question
your dexterity and your authority. Her new documentary The 13th—which opens the New York Film Festival on September 30—traces
black America’s dealings with the justice system after emancipation,
and the vast political malfeasance that has allowed mass incarceration
to thrive in the twenty-first century.
Selma entered
DuVernay into the pantheon of important black directors and earned her
wide acclaim. Since then, her acuity and influence as a director have
only grown deeper with each project. What is increasingly apparent is
that DuVernay uses her camera to issue a serious demand to viewers, as
consumers and citizens, to look deeply at black life and black
representation in American cinema. She is unique because of the rarity
of her race and her gender in Hollywood—which reveals her enormous capability not to let the bastards stop her stride—but
even more because she refuses to look merely to the past and mine it
for easy, stagnant material. Instead, much like Meg Murry, the
protagonist of A Wrinkle in Time—the next film she is set to direct—DuVernay works to thread together the past continuous.
DuVernay and I spoke for two hours about prison reform, cinema segregation, and the neighborhood where she grew up.
Let’s talk a little bit about Compton, where you are from. People are
actually leaving the South to go there for a better life. As you show
in the documentary, they’re fleeing anti-black laws and the indentured
servitude of sharecropping that defined the era after Reconstruction,
only to have these prejudices catch up with them in the form of housing
segregation and tough-on-crime policies. Compton is right there in the
middle of all that history.
Compton, Long Beach, South Central—that whole corridor of blackness. Black neighborhoods just kind of strung together.
Rebellious
black neighborhoods. Over-policed neighborhoods. But also black
neighborhoods that don’t necessarily take what’s given to them.
Well,
what black neighborhood does? I grew up there in the ’90s. It was a
time of Rodney King and O.J., a time of tremendous gang presence, of an
encroaching police presence. I had a beautiful childhood. I lived on a
beautiful street with a beautiful mom and dad. But within a black
community there always was a bit of chaos—that’s just a
part of the daily fabric of living there. My mom grew up in Compton, my
father’s from Montgomery, Alabama. They’re from areas that are hotbeds
of black consciousness, but they lived there as people, not as a
political statement. My first consciousness came in college, when I went
to UCLA.
What happened there for you?
It
sharpened my view of what I experienced growing up, and added a
political context to it. You start reading the great thinkers. You’re
reading Frantz Fanon for the first time. You’re going through your red,
black, and green phase.
I remember going through that phase.
And I think one reason your documentary is going to be important is
because a lot of people don’t like to read, or don’t have the time to do
it, so they aren’t familiar with the work that people like Michelle
Alexander and Bryan Stevenson are doing around justice and criminal
reform.
You can read about these things, but not enough people
do. So the hope is that this documentary is a primer about black
liberation theory for people who might not have ever heard of some of
these ideas before. There is value to having it all in one place, in the
documentary. You start to see connections.
Comment by email:
Hi Bill, Thanks for sharing the link, appreciate it! Best regards, Shirin [Shirin Al-Hussein]
Comment by email:
Hi Bill, Thanks for sharing the link, appreciate it! Best regards, Shirin [Shirin Al-Hussein]
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