In 1992, Julie Dash became the first Black woman to have a feature film receive a wide theatrical release in the United States. More than three decades later, her seminal Daughters of the Dust, which follows three generations of Gullah women as they weigh the consequences of a move from their home on the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina to the mainland, remains both culturally and visually radical. Its aftershocks were still being felt when Beyoncé drew from it for the visual album Lemonade in 2016. Dash grew up in the Queensbridge Houses in Long Island City. As a senior in high school, she enrolled in a film workshop at the Studio Museum in Harlem; screenings of François Truffaut, Sergei Eisenstein, and Satyajit Ray exposed her to the world beyond New York. But it was on the West Coast, where she attended grad school at UCLA, that she found her voice as part of a group of renegade Black filmmakers dubbed the L.A. Rebellion in the ’70s.
Her ensuing career has been marked by a persistent restlessness and unwillingness to be boxed in by Hollywood’s dictums. Dash has worked on music videos, TV movies, documentaries, even Wanda Sykes’s recent comedy special. This summer, Dash brings that omnivorous spirit to Aspen as the keynote speaker of the Aspen Art Museum’s AIR festival. Ahead of her address on July 30, Aspen Art Museum Chief Curator Daniel Merritt sat down with the filmmaker to discuss landscape, creative freedom, and the long, joyful art of “figuring it out.”
Daniel Merritt: Your interest in filmmaking was really fostered through screenings at the Studio Museum in Harlem—Italian neorealists, Sergei Eisenstein, and other challenging filmmakers that you encountered at a young age. Can you talk about your formative cinematic experiences?
Julie Dash: We could also include [New York’s local syndicated film series] Million Dollar Movie on television because they played the same film over and over all day long—especially in the summer when your mother said don’t go outside. I was especially drawn to films I did not understand. There was a black-and-white film called Portrait of Jennie—at the end you’re like, Was she dead? Was she a ghost? It made you think. And The Manchurian Candidate, where someone dressed up like a playing card. I was fascinated by the unknown.
Then years later at the Studio Museum, the director of the film program, Randy Abbott, was playing Jules and Jim. I had never even heard the term ménage à trois, but I loved the fact that these friends were running around having fun and she was dressed up like a man. It was just so out of the ordinary. And then of course Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin: the first time I ever saw subtitles. This is long before closed captioning, so it was, “Do we have to read this?” It’s silent, it’s black and white. And then within 10 minutes, we were captured by the spectacle of it all. The baby carriage sequence going down the steps—riveting.
We came from the Queensbridge housing projects, so you’d think that would be something uncool or uninteresting, but it was so other that it totally captured my attention. And then I just fell in love with foreign films—Satyajit Ray, then Japanese films, then Latin American filmmakers, African filmmakers, Chinese cinema. My films have always sought to do something unknown. I embrace the other. I love when people are saying, “What’s going on? What are you doing here?” Just keep watching. Some people will figure it out and some won’t. But I’m satisfied.
Merritt: In your films there’s a real embrace of the unresolved—characters caught between two forces. I’m thinking about Diary of an African Nun, Mignon Duprée [the main character of Illusions], so many characters in Daughters of the Dust. How do you give form to that in your own vision?
Dash: I love a good challenge. Diary of an African Nun was a project assignment at UCLA, really my first narrative film. The challenge was it had to be non-sync, narration only. I had to tell the story through visual rhetoric. And I knew nothing of Catholicism. I was raised in the Baptist Church. It was based on Alice Walker’s short story of the same title, and I started looking through books, finding pictures of nuns in Africa. I was fascinated by the barrenness that this woman chose: nuns dressed in white with the wind blowing in front of ice-cold mountains. I was very much influenced by foreign films when I shot it, especially the low-angle shots of the feet. That was something my classmates were not doing.
Merritt: I just can’t believe that was a student assignment. It’s so fully realized. Did you have the vision from the beginning, or did it become something bigger as you developed it?
Dash: The locations defined the visuals. We hopped a fence at a construction site that is now the Fox Hills Mall off Sepulveda Boulevard. There was this one lonely tree on a hill, and I thought, That’ll look like Uganda. I’ve never been to Uganda, but it looks like Uganda to me. Let’s go.
The whole film was determined by the availability of location. I had an apartment with a little balcony, so I got shots of her looking out the window. I wanted to do a process demonstration shot of removing the habit layer by layer, revealing herself at night. It was a great story to work with, using visual metaphors and visual rhetoric without having the nun speak at all. I think the film goes a little Russian when I’m shooting the different crucifixes—different ways of looking at Jesus. That was probably due to some Russian films I’d seen.
Merritt: There’s such a beautiful line in Diary of an African Nun: “The mountains we see around us are black. It’s the snow that gives their icy whiteness.” And I love that anecdote about finding Uganda in Los Angeles. As you transition toward Daughters of the Dust, where the landscape is almost a character, can you talk about your approach to place?
Dash: Since my family is from there, it wasn’t really an unknown location. It looks very Jurassic, palm trees mixed with what looks like aloe plants. It doesn’t look like the South. And as Americans, we all think we know the South. We don’t.
I very much did not want to make a film that looked like Gone With the Wind, which is still the standard for Southern films. It looks nothing like that. The accents are nothing like that. I’ve done several films on the coastal South Carolina and Georgia, and most recently a short called Seeking: Mapping Our Gullah Geechee Culture. The production designer arrived and said the foliage wasn’t authentic to the location. I said, “Wait a minute. Yes, it is.” Even people who study art and production design can become very myopic. They think they know what the South looks like. Either the Mississippi Delta or the swamps, and nothing in between. But there’s a lot in between, and I like to work there.
Merritt: You almost have to create these mediated conditions for an authentic understanding of landscape to come through.
Dash: You can’t really say controlled because you can’t control Mother Nature. I would have scenes in my pocket for when things happened unexpectedly. One day while we were shooting something else on the dunes, the sea rolled back, and the sand was glossy and flat. We should have known that’s a warning sign for a tsunami. Instead we said, “The sea’s just rolled back, let’s go down there and shoot.” That’s the scene where the unborn child is seen with the men through the camera. I drove my first AD crazy—it was not on the schedule—but we grabbed our stuff, ran down, and shot the scene.
Another time we were shooting a picnic on a dune and a windstorm picked up. I said, “We can shoot a scene where the wind is blowing.” Another time, the sky turned orangey-maroon. Kinda scary but interesting, so we shot the trolley car scene. Things would happen on the coast, and you could never plan for it. We had our little Farmer’s Almanac with us, but you never really knew.
We were in pre-production when Hurricane Hugo hit. The landscape changed after Hugo, trees just uprooted. We’d look at an exposed root and say, “That’s a visual metaphor. Let’s change the location for this scene to where the roots are exposed.” You’ve got to be open to whatever nature offers.
Merritt: There’s a real hypnotic quality to your films, a layering of image, voice, and music. Your relationship to the world of visual arts is really interesting, especially your relationship with Kerry James Marshall, who worked as production designer on Daughters of the Dust.
Dash: And also on a film called Praise House that we shot together, with [choreographer] Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and the Urban Bush Women. That was based on [artist] Minnie Evans—they had a two-hour stage production based on her work, Draw or Die, and we shot it in an Atlanta cemetery. When you’re dancing on the grass in a cemetery, the worms underground think it’s raining. So the worms started coming up. We had to hurry up and get out.
Merritt: Do you find that conversations with people who work in different media influence how you make your work? I feel like there’s a real kinship between your approach to filmmaking and how other artists approach world-building.
Dash: I think it’s all very exciting. I teach too, and my students say, “Would you choose film now coming up?” And I probably would not. I would probably go into world-building through computer-generated animation as well as A.I. storytelling. I was just watching on the news this morning—there’s an Iranian filmmaker who made his first feature film entirely with A.I., and it’s at Tribeca right now. He made it for $2,000.
It’s exhausting trying to convince people of the story you’re trying to tell, and they keep trying to bring it down to something they’ve seen before. As someone who came up in independent filmmaking, we like to explore. I could do episodic television. I could do documentary. I’ve just completed a Wanda Sykes comedy special for Netflix. She gave me total autonomy. That was a lot of fun.
Merritt: Song feels like a central text in your work, from the Nina Simone in Four Women to your recent collaboration with Davone Tines on Homegoing, which completely blew my mind when I saw it at MOCA. Can you talk a little about your relationship to music as a director?
Dash: I play music and listen to lyrics when I’m writing to get into the mood. Four Women was another assignment at UCLA. I shot it one day and thought, How would you show “Sweet Thing” in contrast to “Peaches” at the end? I love that process, maybe even more than the filmmaking itself—the figuring-it-out part.
At AFI before UCLA, we had an instructor who was a montage artist in Hollywood for many years, and he always told us you can’t just film another art form. You have to transcend it. You have to bring your own point of view and take it to another level. It’s not enough just to document it like a surveillance film of a piece of art. You have to elevate that art as well as your own.
Merritt: And there’s a years-long backstory to Homegoing and your collaboration with Hamza [Walker]—I’m curious how it came into the world.
Dash: The collaboration with Nasreen Alkhateeb, the cinematographer, was central to it. Charleston is still quite provincial. Davone and Hamza had been reaching out to Mother Emanuel AME Church for over a year explaining what they wanted to do, and there was no response. Then they brought me on and I said, “Guess what—my family used to go to Mother Emanuel Church.” I have relatives buried in their older cemetery. My great-grandmother was part of Mother Emanuel before she went over to Mount Zion Church. The Dash name carries a lot. I had also shot a film inside Mother Emanuel years before, for the 100th-year anniversary of the Great Migration. They don’t welcome a lot of people coming in to do something about the Emanuel Nine—it’s a very sacred space. So I reached out to Mr. Bennett, the church historian, and we talked for a while and found out we’re probably related. Everybody’s related to one another in Charleston. And from then on, the doors flew open.
I came up with a concept because I didn’t just want him standing there singing—it had to mean more. It had to involve church members, the choir. And my favorite place is the Angel Oak tree on Johns Island, which my father had taken me to many years ago. I always try to incorporate it into whatever I do down there. Davone came out the day we shot it and everyone just stood there in awe. For me, those ancient oaks are sometimes known as witness trees. Something that’s 500 years old and still growing—it was there during the colonial period, during the Civil War, when the Native American communities were there. They witnessed everything. Davone felt that too. He was walking past the branch and then he said, “Can I remove my shoes?” I said, “Absolutely.” And I’m down there with the camera on the feet, because I love a good foot shot.
Merritt: That tracks completely.
Dash: And Nasreen just has such a fascinating eye for framing. I came upon her because I saw something on Apple TV and called the producer and said, “Who shot that? It was incredible.” They said her name is Nasreen Alkhateeb. A couple of years later I finally met her and found out she’s Iranian and African American. I thought, This works. She was also traveling with the Kamala Harris campaign. So I called the producer and said, “Do you think I could call her and she’d maybe consider shooting Homegoing?” He said, “Here’s her number.” I called and she called right back and said, “Sure, I’ll do that. When’s the shoot date?”
And then it gets even better because she just shot the Wanda Sykes special for me too. She said, “What if we make all eight camera operators women of color?” So we had Asian, Hispanic, Arabic, Black women of color shooting Wanda Sykes. I don’t think it’s ever been done before. There was some pushback from the men who usually rotate through all the comedy specials, but Wanda and her executive producing partner said, “Yeah, let’s do that.” We’re trying something different.
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