Daughters of the Dust

I, too, just watched Daughters of the Dust, and I am wowed. Aesthetically, the movie was positively sumptuous. In terms of subject matter--well, I sat down in front of the screen expecting something significantly *less* fascinating. A family member had warned me that the slow pace was snore-worthy--boy, was he WRONG. I guess that's a matter of how inured one is to Hollywood's lightning-paced editing, but in truth, no one can deny that "Daughters" is splendid in its use of color and its "character development" (by character I guess I mean the Peazant family, in collective, as a sort of "character.")

I remember reading somewhere that Julie Dash wanted all the costumes to be pure white--but the actors' skin was so dark that their light clothing didn't show up properly onscreen. Eventually the snow-white garments had to be replaced with pink-tinted ones in order to make the clothes look really "white." The white-on-black contrast throughout the movie accentuated the beauty (and the implications) of the characters' ultra-dark skin--and the purple tinges (specifically on the hands of Nana Peazant, as a result of the "poisonous blue dye") added a whole new dimension and symbolism to the film's color scheme.

The sea was a recurring theme I also found intriguing--particularly via the contsant, semi-facetious reference to "salt-water Negroes." Since the film took place on an island, the beach was almost a perpetual setting--and the foam swirling in and out with the tide, coupled with the image of the African statue bobbing upon the water, seemed to symbolize a mixing of past and future, of African roots with the new "American" identity of the turn of the century. One of the characters told a story about how African people who first stepped off colonial slave ships onto the North American coast took one look at the new land, turned around, and walked straight back into the water again, drowning themselves. The fact that the Gullah people are probably the closest Afro-American link to those African ancestors infuses this story with a new and multi-faceted meaning within the movie's context.

I could go on and on, because I loved "Daughters of the Dust" for many reasons--but I'll just end by saying that this film truly inspired me as a would-be filmmaker and gave me all sorts of new ideas for where to take my final project in this class.