The Watermelon Woman and Film History: An Exercise in Cultural Preservation

Introduction: The Phantom Stage

Some time ago, I learned about Soundstage 28, the oldest Universal Studios sound stage where numerous Universal films were shot over eighty-nine years before it was demolished in 2014 (theStudioTour.com, 2014) as part of Universal's plans to build several new theme park attractions (Erik, 2014). I found it rather depressing to hear about the elimination of this site that was so major to film history for decidedly capitalistic reasons. It motivated me to seek out the silent film adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera (Julian, 1925). In a sense, I thought of it as my way of helping keep the memory of this article of film history alive. Featuring it prominently on-screen, this film is arguably the poster child film for Soundstage 28, so much so that it is often colloquially referred to as "The Phantom Stage."

Since its demolition, the image and memory of Soundstage 28 survive to a certain extent in this film and other images that document the sound stage's existence. Likewise, films from this era are themselves preserved in physical media such as the Blu-Ray and DVD of The Phantom of the Opera that I own. A major studio's willingness to dismantle one of the longest-serving sound stages of all time to make way for a theme park ride is a sign of an industry with, at best, mixed feelings about preserving film history. As such, it is not outside the realms of possibility that without the advent of these widely available physical media formats as well as organisations like the British Film Institute archiving these films and the history of their production, somewhere down the line the movies too would be lost.

 

Messages in Bottles

Now and then, I think about The Story of Film: An Odyssey (Channel Four Television, 2011), the documentary that got me deeply interested in cinema as an art form in the first place. Based on the book of the same name (Cousins, 2004), director Mark Cousins set out with the project to diversify film history. Cousins opines that the conventional wisdom about film history centring American and English-language cinema is, "outdated and racist by omission", and given their tendency to focus almost exclusively on the men in the industry, "unfair to women directors" (Cineville, 2012). It is clear from watching this documentary and reading its book counterpart that one of Cousins' intentions was to spotlight films from around the world, made by filmmakers of various backgrounds over the decades that are often overlooked by mainstream accounts of film history. This seems to be in the hope that these films and their creators would be remembered where they would otherwise be forgotten, given the capitalist hegemony of Hollywood cinema. In the Programme Notes accompanying the DVD boxset for the documentary, Cousins writes:

I was angry, too, that movie history is often so parochial, so provincial. We remember Garbo but not the great Chinese actress Ruan Lingyu, we worship Pixar but not the great Iranian kids' films of Mohammed Ali-Talebi. This is blatantly unfair. The playing field is not level. The bullies with massive marketing budgets force their movies on us, whether they're good or not, thus restricting our choice (Cousins, 2012, p. 3).

In addition to his frustration with the gender and racial bias of mainstream accounts of film history, Cousins also speaks in The Story of Film and the Programme Notes of cinema as a means of cultural preservation, a given film being like a "message in a bottle" (ibid). I already find myself particularly attracted to this notion within film analysis that any given text could act as a record of a particular culture and people not only across the world but also across time, but it becomes even more worthy of discussion in cases where the films themselves are made with this level of significance in mind.

 

The Watermelon Woman

For a while, I have wanted to learn more about films made by people of colour, among other marginalised backgrounds. On the one hand, this is an attempt on my part to correct some blind spots I have regarding my knowledge of film history; on the other, I do so to seek out new and interesting experiences, having become somewhat disillusioned with mainstream Hollywood cinema overall. My only problem for a while was that I was not quite sure where to start. After watching Maggie Mae Fish's Nebula-exclusive video on the films of Cheryl Dunye (Maggie Mae Fish, 2023), I decided to seek out her flagship film The Watermelon Woman (Dunye, 1996). This turned out to be an ideal place to start when it comes to learning about Black filmmakers and their work. The film's central narrative is all about discovering a performer of colour often overlooked by film history, but also about gaining new perspectives on that figure's works and her life outside the industry – specifically, in this case, Fae Richards who was regularly typecast in "Mammy" roles throughout the 1930s.

The Watermelon Woman places a great deal of emphasis on the necessity of people of colour being able to tell their own stories and recount their own histories independent of white mythologies and narratives about them. It also illuminates the importance of preserving those histories and spotlighting those artists of colour lest they be forgotten by a history predominantly controlled by white capitalism and the biases imbued within it: "I know it has to be about black women because our stories have never been told." "She did so much, Cheryl. That's what you have to speak about. She paved the way for kids like you to run around makin' movies about the past and how we lived then. Please, Cheryl, make our history before we are all dead and gone." "What she means to me, a twenty-five-year-old Black woman, means something else. It means hope. It means inspiration. It means possibility. It means history!"

Of course, race is not the only aspect of identity that The Watermelon Woman spotlights. The film also addresses Richards' romantic relationship with film director Martha Page who directed many of the plantation dramas featuring Richards in these "Mammy" roles. This same-sex relationship is often obscured by history and emphatically denied by Page's sister during Dunye's interview with her: "You're not trying to infer that something went on between the two of them? […] My sister was not that kind of woman!" In addition to images of Richards and Page's relationship, the film depicts Dunye's relationship with Diana, which has its own conflict partially due to Diana's values and agenda about the project conflicting with Dunye's. Ultimately, both of these storylines help to achieve very similar objectives: chief among those being to draw attention to black and lesbian identities, their histories, and their stories to ensure that they are remembered and represented authentically: "Hollywood Lesbians by Doug Mcowden – I wonder if he's a lesbian." The copy of the film that I have is the 20th Anniversary Restoration DVD release which opens with an intertitle detailing how, as part of their Outfest UCLA Legacy Project, the UCLA Film & Television Archive preserved and remastered the film. It is not outside the realms of possibility that, without this project, The Watermelon Woman itself may, at some point, have been obscured and forgotten by a decidedly white capitalist construction of film history.

 

Conclusion: Seen, Heard

On the subject of the late Belgium lesbian feminist filmmaker Chantal Akerman, scholars have at times written of the importance of her flagship film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Akerman, 1975) in terms of depicting the experiences and anxieties of women that are traditionally excluded and obfuscated by mainstream patriarchal cinema. Catherine Fowler, for example, writes that:

[…] it puts on display the ambivalence that so strongly accompanies the work of the housewife and mother. Those who saw the film on its first release agreed that Jeanne Dielman shows actions hardly ever seen before in the cinema, and what is more it shows them in excruciating detail. The fact that these actions and details graphically described the habitually overlooked routine of many women in the domestic space made the film an ur-text for both second wave feminism and feminist film theory in the mid-to-late 1970s (Fowler, 2021, p. 41).

In the book's concluding passages, Fowler states:

The film's slow – unjudgemental, patient, open – looking turns into an ethical act when it is directed at subjects who have typically received no visibility on screen; or, more accurately, subjects whom film history has recorded as being uninteresting to watch (ibid, p. 86).

Writing for Sight & Sound, Laura Mulvey makes a similar observation on Jeanne Dielman:

[…] on the side of form, it rigorously records her [Jeanne's] domestic routine in extended time and from a fixed camera position. In a film that, agonisingly, depicts women's oppression, Akerman transforms cinema, itself so often an instrument of women's oppression, into a liberating force (Mulvey, in Sight & Sound, 2022, p. 84).

Mulvey continues that Akerman, "creates a kind of lexicon of domestic gesture, which takes this invisible culture and puts it at the centre of an avant-garde film, at the centre of art" (ibid, p. 87). Through this lens, not only does Jeanne Dielman's style and overall perspective make perfect sense, but its significance to film history and feminist scholarship becomes abundantly clear. We often think of film history as, first and foremost, an instructive area of academia centred on the importance of learning facts and figures about the industry – box office figures, the advent of sound and colour, how the industry responded to the advent of television – and these things are important, even fascinating in some aspects. But what organisations like the BFI and people like Cheryl Dunye, Mark Cousins, and Chantal Akerman teach us by not only preserving but diversifying (film) history is that we can learn even more from this history, things that dimensionalise culture as well as our experiences and shared enjoyment of that culture.

That is the purpose of pointing out cisheteronormative, racial, and patriarchal biases in conventional wisdom about culture and history: not to devalue those creators and works that are commonly remembered, but to draw attention to gaps that deserve to be filled in by including the overlooked, the unconventional, and the marginalised in equal measure with dominant groups. I think The Watermelon Woman, even more so than the other texts I mentioned here, taught me this in a way that has truly stuck with me on an emotional level. Culture is important, history is important – for all the things they can teach us about the world, about each other, and about ourselves. The shape of conventional wisdom about culture and history is often the result of choices made by powerful groups about who and what deserves to be highlighted and who and what to ignore depending on the priorities and agendas of those in charge of making those decisions. Ultimately, the more we uncover about culture and history, the more previously excluded perspectives we choose to include, the more insightful and ethical culture and history can be.

 

FILMOGRAPHY

 

Film

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). Directed by Chantal Akerman [Film]. Belgium/France: Progrés Films.

 

Film on Blu-Ray and DVD

Phantom of the Opera, The (1925). Directed by Rupert Julian [Blu-Ray and DVD]. Based on the novel by Gaston Leroux. London: British Film Institute.

 

Film on DVD

Watermelon Woman, The (1996). Directed by Cheryl Dunye [DVD]. London: Peccadillo Pictures.

 

Television Series

Story of Film: An Odyssey, The (2011). Channel Four Television.

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

Booklet

Cousins, M. (2012) The Story of Film: An Odyssey Programme Notes [booklet]. Network Releasing: United Kingdom.

 

Books

Cousins, M. (2011) Story of Film, The. 2nd edn. London: Pavillion Books.

Fowler, C. (2021) Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. London: British Film Institute.

 

Magazine Article:

Mulvey, L. (2022) 'Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles', Sight & Sound, (1 December), pp. 84–89.

 

Videos

Cineville (2012) Mark Cousins over The Story of Film | Cineville [online]. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=indtGfuozgc (Accessed 16 September 2023.)

Maggie Mae Fish (2023) Cheryl Dunye: Pushing Boundaries [online]. Nebula. Available at: https://nebula.tv/videos/maggiemaefish-cheryl-dunye-pushing-boundaries (Accessed 16 September 2023.)

 

Webpages

Erik (2014) 'Historic Soundstage 28 At Universal Studios Hollywood Set To Close?', Behind the Thrills. Available at: https://behindthethrills.com/2014/08/historic-soundstage-28-at-universal-studios-hollywood-set-to-close/ (Accessed 15 September 2023.)

theStudioTour.com (2014) Stage 28. Available at: http://www.thestudiotour.com/wp/studios/universal-studios-hollywood/front-lot/soundstages/stage-28/ (Accessed 15 September 2023.)