Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust was an idea when Dash was studying at the American Film Institute in 1975, to be finally released in 1991.  It’s a feminist project in a number of ways – its focus on the stories of the women of the family, of a sense of a matriarchy within that family and, not least, in Dash’s blending a story that resonates both the personal and the political.

The film is set on the Sea Islands (sometimes called the Golden Islands) that lie off the coast off South Carolina. These islands were, originally, a staging post for slaves brought from West Africa before they were turned over to their masters on the plantations. Therefore, the descendants living on these islands have a very specific culture that descends from their West African roots, brought and surviving in a contained area within the new world.

Dash’s family is descended from Sea Island Gullahs, and her film is drenched in the very particular cultural knowledge – of the way the language is spoken, the food, and even (for Dash) the way the characters move. It is a celebration of her own family history, but it is an exploration of a history of African-American history. Tellingly, Dash comments herself that this was a beginning into a new life, but that the people arriving brought with them the knowledge of a whole culture. It is interesting to reflect that, arguably, the history for African-Americans has become that history of oppression and release, thereby ignoring the depth and wealth of history that came from the original home. The search for roots has become a dialectical engagement with that oppression, searching through that for the mythical home that was denied several generations. In Dash’s film, there is a representation of people who live in both, live in a place of repression but which is occupied by their family still living, fully living, their cultural traditions everyday.  Nothing is lost – it is a celebration of that longevity and living connectedness to worlds that are worlds away. This is symbolised immediately in the presence of several generations – from the dead spirits, to the unborn child who narrates the film.

In honouring these traditions, Dash’s film has immense attention to visual detail. Its vivid cinematography represents, for example, a banquet, in all its colours and textures. It is held by the families on the sands before several of them leave to travel north, a move from the islands to find better opportunities on the mainland. The cinematographic focus on the food is, itself, a rendering of the how sharing food is a sharing of traditions and feelings that unite and create a community, even for those who never shared the original experience. Whilst Dash identifies that experience as very specific to her community and to that film, it is very universal; across cultures and religious traditions we can (hopefully) all recognise how grandparents, together with parents, drip-feed our cultural history through food. (Mine’s London working class high tea. In Dash’s hands, it might have filmic possibilities. What’s yours?)

Dash’s attention to this kind of detail makes for a different kind of narrative structure for the film – one which, consciously, rejects a Western male narrative drive (her words). Instead, the story unravels and unfolds – taking place over the day and a half before some of the family leave, but moving back and forwards in time, incorporating black and white footage of the era and including fantasy sequences. Set in 1902, Dash aims to catch the turn of one century as we were moving to the turn of the next. It moves around the small area of the island, identifying areas of cultural history. The visit to the graves, where sea shells are piled up on each grave, is an example of where we move through all these different landscapes in her film as one of the members of the family group. The languid exposition, so that we attend different scenes and events, does challenge any ideas you might have about narrative drive in a film. Instead, it unfolds with a sense of existing within this world, within this culture and this particular group of people.

It does capture a moment in time- when the younger generation designs to move on, to find ‘something better’ and the old world and order have to be left behind. Dash’s film makes real the cost of that through the character of Nana Peasant (a mesmeric Cora Lee-Day) – who lets go her family with that kind of understanding that old age (when will that be valued, now, in Western media forms?) allows. This culture is represented as a matriarchy. And Dash’s style of narrative represents that matriarchal strength as a spinal cord through the old and new. Women dispute with each other, with their men, tell stories to their children, cook, comfort each other – they look forward and backward within their own culture. Women, I think, recognise this form of storytelling very easily – it has moments of high melodrama that punctuate moments of relative normality or banality. Dash describes it as unfolding in vignettes, and it’s challenging to watch because it lacks the drive of plot and conflict we might be used to in mainstream cinema.

Dash’s film had a long gestation due to the inevitable need to convince potential backers about its marketability – a film about family, with a focus on women. It found an audience (released, initially, on one screen in USA) and grossed $1.6 million. An audience (or audiences) were ready for a representations of a different culture, using a different narrative form. Of course, it did not result in institutional change or breakthrough, but Dash continues to work. The vision of Daughters of the Dust came out of years of work in American Independent cinema – Dash used actors she had worked with before, including Tommy Hicks (who appeared in She’s Gotta Have It). She regards her opportunity as theirs – a characteristic of the independent sector, which rejects the hierarchical order of mainstream cinema and its auteurist approach.  This film exists in how it speaks to a particular audience – the user reviews on www.imdb.com are stimulating and detailed responses that prove this.

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