The Post-Soul Cinema of Kasi Lemmons

"With her debut as a filmmaker, Lemmons' Eve's Bayou was both miracle and miraculous. The same can be said of this richly deserved, thorough and scholarly examination of her first five films." -- Angela Bassett, Actor/Filmmaker. "This is a solid volume focusing on the work of Kasi Lemmons. This volume should have a very long shelf-life as it has not been embarked upon before by any researcher. Professor Wynter has taken up this mantle because she has recognized there is a dearth in scholarship pertaining to the work of Kasi Lemmons that is most deserving given the filmmaker's body of esteemed work." --R. Dianne Bartlow, PhD Author, Altruism and African-American Women in Contemporary Popular Music. In this edited volume, Kasi Lemmons, the first African-American woman auteur to solidly and steadily produce a full body of work in cinema--an oeuvre of quality, of note, of international recognition--will get the full film-studies treatment. This collection offers the first scholarly examination of Lemmons' films through various frameworks of film theory, illuminating her highly personal, unique, and rare vision. In Lemmons' worldview, the spiritual and the supernatural manifest in the natural, corporeal world. She subtly infuses her work with such images and narratives, owning her formalism, her modernist aesthetic, her cinematic preoccupations and her ontological leanings on race. Lemmons holds the varied experiences of African-American life before her lens--the ambitious bourgeoise, the spiritually lost, the ill and discarded, and the historically erased--and commits to capturing the nuances and differentiations, rather than perpetuating essentialized portrayals. This collection delves into Lemmons' iconoclastic drive and post-soul aesthetic as emanations of her attitudes toward personal agency, social agency, and social justice. Dianah Wynter is a Full Professor at California State University Northridge, USA, where she teaches Women Filmmakers, Directing, and Film as Literature. An Emmy-nominated director, she holds MFAs from the Yale School of Drama and the American Film Institute. Her publications include Referentiality and the Films of Woody Allen. "With her debut as a filmmaker, Lemmons' Eve's Bayou was both miracle and miraculous. The same can be said of this richly deserved, thorough and scholarly examination of her first five films." Angela Bassett, Actor/Filmmaker. "This is a solid volume focusing on the work of Kasi Lemmons. This volume should have a very long shelf-life as it has not been embarked upon before by any researcher. Professor Wynter has taken up this mantle because she has recognized there is a dearth in scholarship pertaining to the work of Kasi Lemmons that is most deserving given the filmmakers body of esteemed work." R. Dianne Bartlow, PhD Author, Altruism and African-American Women in Contemporary Popular Music. In this edited volume, Kasi Lemmons, the first African-American woman auteur to solidly and steadily produce a full body of work in cinemaan oeuvre of quality, of note, of international recognitionwill get the full film-studies treatment. This collection offers the first scholarly examination of Lemmons films through various frameworks of film theory, illuminating her highly personal, unique, and rare vision. In Lemmons worldview, the spiritual and the supernatural manifest in the natural, corporeal world. She subtly infuses her work with such images and narratives, owning her formalism, her modernist aesthetic, her cinematic preoccupations and her ontological leanings on race. Lemmons holds the varied experiences of African-American life before her lens the ambitious bourgeoise, the spiritually lost, the ill and discarded, and the historically erasedand commits to capturing the nuances and differentiations, rather than perpetuating essentialized portrayals. This collection delves into Lemmons iconoclastic drive and post-soul aesthetic as emanations of her attitudes toward personal agency, social agency, and social justice. Dianah Wynter is a Full Professor at California State University Northridge, USA, where she teaches Women Filmmakers, Directing, and Film as Literature. An Emmy-nominated director, she holds MFAs from the Yale School of Drama and the American Film Institute. Her publications include Referentiality and the Films of Woody Allen Preface 6 Contents 8 Notes on Contributors 10 Chapter 1: Introduction 12 Works Cited 17 Chapter 2: “Some Illnesses Are Hard to Put a Finger on:” Race, Memory & Revision in Eve’s Bayou 18 Slavery’s Time 21 Reconstructing the Past 23 Mapping the Illness 26 Bayou’s Space 28 Works Cited 31 Chapter 3: The Caveman’s Valentine: Fight the Towers that Be 33 Who and Why? 36 Where and When? 43 Works cited 51 Chapter 4: Talk to Me: A Post-Soul Allegory 54 Works Cited 76 Chapter 5: Black Nativities: Transgressing Tradition 78 Notes 93 Works Cited 93 Chapter 6: Framing the Feminine: Harriet, Constructing Black Female Subjectivity and Agency 95 Framing the Feminine: The Analysis 97 Critical Frame: Employing Mulvey and hooks 98 The Gaze and Black Female Radical Subjectivity 101 Composition: Minty’s Authenticity and Revisioning 103 Looking Relations: Contestation and Interrogation 105 Her Gaze: Active Resistance 106 Her Faith: Active Resistance 109 Stepping Into Freedom: Constructing Black Female Subjectivity 111 Framing Her Gaze: Gideon or The Rushing River 112 Deep Space Composition: Stepping into Her Freedom Alone 112 Her Authenticity and Arrivals 113 In Her Own Voice 115 Her Freedom: Self in the Self 116 Conclusion 118 Works Cited 119 Chapter 7: Conclusion: Lemmons and the Art of Post-Soul Resistance 121 Works Cited 129 Index 131