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The Post-Soul Cinema of Kasi Lemmons Edited by Dianah Wynter The Post-Soul Cinema of Kasi Lemmons Dianah Wynter Editor The Post-Soul Cinema of Kasi Lemmons Editor Dianah Wynter California State University, Northridge Northridge, CA, USA ISBN 978-3-031-12869-1 ISBN 978-3-031-12870-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12870-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. 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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland In memory of Lena Osborne Wynter Valentine ‘Rag’ Wynter, Ray Wynter dedicated to Dr. Sylvia Wynter P reface There is a woman of peculiar grace, a courageous existence for a woman of any race. This passage is paraphrased from the aria, ‘A Boy of Peculiar Grace,’ from the opera Fire Shut Up In My Bones, music by Terrence Blanchard and libretto by Kasi Lemmons. The celebrated opera opened The Metropolitan Opera’s 2021–2022 season and is “the first time that a Black composer and a Black librettist have found their way to The Met.” (https://www. newyorker.com/magazine/2021/10/18/the- tense- turbulent- sounds- of- fire- shut- up- in- my- bones). Through her artistry, Lemmons has grace- fully transcended mediums, roles, and forms—she epitomizes “peculiar grace.” She first became known as an actress and then boldly redefined herself as a writer-director with Eve’s Bayou (1997). While expanding her sphere of creativity to include opera, she executive produced the ‘prestige television’ event, Women of the Movement (2022), ABC’s mini-series which chronicles Emmett Till’s murder and his mother’s relentless pursuit of justice. Lemmons directed two of the four episodes in the Netflix mini- series, Self-Made: Inspired by the Life of Madame C.J. Walker starring Octavia Spencer, and ‘Hour Five: Before the Storm’ in the acclaimed lim- ited series Shots Fired (2017), which traced the aftermath of a police shoot- ing of an unarmed black man. For her upcoming film, I Wanna Dance with Somebody, the life story of Whitney Houston, starring Naomi Ackie (Small Axe), Ashton Sanders (Moonlight), and Stanley Tucci (Spotlight), Lemmons teams with writer-producer Anthony McCarten (Bohemian Rhapsody, Theory of Everything). It is anticipated to reach theaters in vii viii PREFACE December of 2022. Also a writer of poetry and short stories, her creative well seems limitless, and moreover, she has the courage to explore its depths. Twenty-five years ago, Lemmons’ first film Eve’s Bayou became the highest grossing independent film of the year and won the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature. Film critic and theorist Andrew Sarris, who codified Truffaut’s Auteur Theory, called Eve’s Bayou “the product of a purely cinematic imagination, amazingly accompanied by a full range of novelistic nuances and storytelling skills, some going back to F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise” (1997). Her status as an auteur was sealed. In 2018, Eve’s Bayou was inducted into National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, in honor of its “cultural, historic and aesthetic importance to the nation’s film heritage.” https://www.loc.gov/item/prn- 18- 144/library- of- congress- national- film- registry- turns- 30/2018- 12- 12/ The Golden Age of African American filmmakers emerged around 1985 when a ‘new wave’ of African American artists was entering adult- hood and expressing themselves without the nostalgia of the sixties; Lemmons is situated squarely in this ‘Post-Soul generation.’ Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991) laid the foundation for American women filmmakers of color, however, their Golden Age began in 1997 with Eve’s Bayou. This collection is devoted to the appreciation and exploration of Kasi Lemmons’ first five feature films, Eve’s Bayou (Trimark, 1997), The Caveman’s Valentine (Universal, 2001), Talk to Me (Focus Features, 2007), Black Nativity (Fox Searchlight, 2013), and Harriet (Focus Features, 2019). Northridge, CA, USA D. E. Wynter c ontents 1 Introduction 1 D. E. Wynter 2 “Some Illnesses Are Hard to Put a Finger on:” Race, Memory & Revision in Eve’s Bayou 7 Chinaza Amaeze Okoli 3 The Caveman’s Valentine: Fight the Towers that Be 23 D. E. Wynter 4 Talk to Me: A Post-Soul Allegory 45 Jonathan Tazewell 5 Black Nativities: Transgressing Tradition 69 Monique M. Taylor 6 Framing the Feminine: Harriet, Constructing Black Female Subjectivity and Agency 87 Joi Carr ix x CONTENTS 7 Conclusion: Lemmons and the Art of Post-S oul Resistance 113 Dianah E. Wynter Index 123 n c otes on ontributors Joi Carr earned her PhD in American Literature and Film from Claremont Graduate University. She is a tenured Professor of English and Film Studies at Pepperdine University-Seaver College. She serves as Chair of Film Studies, director of the Multicultural Theatre Project, and as Academic Director of the Institute for Entertainment Media and Culture. Carr is a Visiting Scholar and Visiting Professor at Harvard Divinity School and a Research Associate for the Moses Mesoamerican Archive and Research Project at Harvard. Her courses include Women and Film, World Cinemas, African American cinema and Post Civil War literature. Her mono- graphs include Encountering Texts: The Multicultural Theatre Project and ‘Minority’ Literature (2015) and John Singleton’s Boyz N the Hood: Shifting Hollywood Terrain (2018). Chinaza Amaeze Okoli received his PhD in English Literature from the University of Mississippi where he has taught courses in Cinema Studies and Literature. His research includes Cinema and Cultural Memory, and considers the intersections of vernacular cultures and Black literature since the eighteenth century, as well as Race and Performance in the Black Atlantic. Formerly a senior reporter for the Nigerian Times, he is editor-at-large for AfricanWriter.com, and co-editor of the anthology, Footmarks: Poems on One Hundred Years of Nigeria’s Nationhood. Dr. Okoli is currently the Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Literature, Media and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. xi