Yahoo Movies Why 2014 Was a Breakthrough Year for Black Female Filmmakers
Of the 250 top-grossing films released this year, only 21 — a shameful 8.4 percent — have female directors. But behind that grim statistic is an encouraging piece of metadata: Three of those 21 filmmakers are Amma Asante, Ava DuVernay, and Gina Prince-Bythewood, black filmmakers dynamically reframing the past and present, yielding three movies in which female characters are as vital (or more so) to the story as their male counterparts.
Though these films take place in, respectively, the 1770s, 1960s, and the present, each focuses on a delicate web of interpersonal relationships that change the central character and help him or her precipitate social and personal change.
Asante’s Belle — a surprise hit, earning $10.7 million from its release in May through a lengthy summer run — paints a glowing portrait of an 18th-century biracial woman (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) raised by her aristocratic great uncle, Lord Chief Justice (Tom Wilkinson). The great niece is credited for inspiring legal opinions that led to the outlaw of slavery in Britain.
Meanwhile, DuVernay’s Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. biopic Selma refrains from canonizing one man, instead glorifying many civil rights activists — including Coretta Scott King and Annie Lee Cooper —who braved billy-clubs and gunfire during historic 1965 marches against voter discrimination. Their collective courage and tenacity ultimately led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
AndPrince-Bythewood’s Beyond the Lights, one of the best-reviewed films of the year, is the one fictional narrative in this trio. It casts a gimlet eye on the objectification of women in music (and, by extension, in film) who are little more than spectacles for male pleasure. When its heroine (Mbatha-Raw, again) puts distance between herself and her stage mother and quits exploiting her sexuality, she finds herself, a partner (Nate Parker) — and her authentic voice.
In other words, these groundbreaking films are a far cry from “Great Man” versions of history and culture typically portrayed in movies ranging from Spike Lee’s uplifting Malcolm X to Shane Black’s entertaining Iron Man 3 — movies that lionize the central male figure and put the hero’s mother, wife and/or love interest on the periphery of the action.
To fully appreciate the achievements of Asante, Duvernay, and Prince-Bythewood, imagine what their films would look like had they been made by male filmmakers. Consider this thought exercise: How do their films differ from those made by their male counterparts?
Asante’s Belle takes the conventions of 18th-century portraiture and turns them around. Rather than exalt a white aristocrat by putting him in the foreground and the subservient black in the background, Asante places Dido Eizabeth Belle in the foreground of her film. This signifies that she carries equal intellectual status and importance as her aristocratic great-uncle.
Asante’s (uncredited) rewrite of the screenplay by Misan Sagay depicts the profound filial intimacy between Belle and her great uncle. The family arrangement, built on a blood relationship, transcends skin color. As her uncle considers a case in which a shipping company sues its insurer for losses of slaves at sea, Belle persuasively argues with her uncle that slaves are not property, but humans. This is very much the story of deep mutual love and respect and of a woman who changes the world around her.
When DuVernay received Paul Webb’s script for Selma, it was configured as a face-off between two titans — the civil rights leader and President Lyndon Johnson, with MLK as second lead. In DuVernay’s (uncredited) rewrite, it is the human story of a husband, a wife, their doubts, their community, their courage — and how all of them change a president who, under the weight of media pressure, bends toward justice.
Another writer/filmmaker might have framed Selma using the assassinations of black activists Medgar Evers and Malcolm X. But DuVernay frames it using the deaths of the four little girls during the 16th Street Baptist church bombing in Birmingham and the poll test that prevented Annie Lee Cooper from registering to vote. She shows female victims of injustice and female freedom fighters — not only Cooper, but also Diane Nash, a crucial architect of Voting Rights strategy, and Amelia Boynton, a sustainer of the effort — as well as their male peers.
As for Prince-Bythewood’s Beyond the Lights,it’s a conventional romance highlighting a female protagonist struggling for authenticity in her work and intimate relationships. What makes it unconventional is that the female, Noni, is suicidal despite the fact she is the heiress apparent to the R&B crown.
After being exploited by her label, her white “momager” (Minnie Driver), and a white rapper who sexually humiliates her on national television, Noni feels worthless. A chance meeting with Parker’s police officer and their evolving relationship pushes both of them to find their real voices.
What do we learn from these films? They are not, as is typical, movies simply about a hero or a heroine. They are not, as is typical, about the woman behind the man, but instead about the woman beside the man.
Asante made an intimate history of a woman who changed the world around her, Duvernay an intimate look inside a movement that changed the nation, and Prince-Bythewood an intimate romance involving a woman who changes herself. These filmmakers, like the characters in their films, are agents of change. May their collective success be harbingers of change in American movies.
Watch the trailer for Selma below:
