By Annarose King, Staff Writer
Dr. Frank B. Wilderson III sat at his desk, the enthusiasm in his eyes apparent even behind his glasses and through a computer screen. The Bryn Mawr College for Visual Culture holds a colloquium on art every Wednesday afternoon: Dr. Wilderson’s special evening lecture was given only on Tuesday, September 22, over Zoom. Titled “Cinematic Slavery: the Loungee Durée of Social Death,” it centered around the impact of slavery in the United States. Dr. Wilderson discussed how anti-Black violence in historical fiction and nonfiction shapes perceptions of Black lives. He spoke of how non-Black people can be unwilling to fully discuss violence specifically experienced by Black people. Through his film critique, he explored the impact of cinema on narratives with Black characters.
Dr. Wilderson is a professor of African-American Studies and a faculty member of the Culture and Theory Ph.D Program at the University of California, Irvine. The director of the 2005 documentary Reparations…Now, Dr. Wilderson is also an award-winning poet and author. He was elected to the African National Congress in the 1990s, one of two Americans to hold the position. He is an activist, both in the underground movement against aparthied during his five and a half years in South Africa, and in organizations in the Bay Area.
Dr. Wilderson began his talk with a comment that he was “very animated” in regards to how Manderlay (2005, dir. Lars Von Trier) may be examined through the lens of Afro-pessimism and social death. Afro-pessimism interprets how the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, colonialism, and racism affect past and present Black lives. With origins in Black feminism, and Orlando Patterson’s 1982 study Slavery and Social Death, it offers a perspective for understanding anti-Black violence on its own terms.
In Manderlay, Dr. Wilderson states, the first of the two structures that hold the plot aloft is that White women can be equally violent as White men. Furthermore, slaves are the recipients of this violence, which, as Dr. Wilderson says with a reference to Orlando Patterson, exists as “a relation between” Black and non-Black characters. Social death, an absence of acceptance of other people as fully human, is constructed through “natal alienation, general dishonor, and gratuitous violence.” Natal alienation is a disconnect between a person and their culture, history, religion, for generations before and after that person. General dishonor is a lack of respect towards a person, or group of people, from the rest of society. Non-Black people do not live with this dishonor or loss of face, except for when they “transgress laws,” ethical codes, or social norms.
Manderlay
Manderlay, set in 1933 in the Deep South, begins with the travels of a young White woman, Grace Margaret Mulligan (Bryce Dallas Howard), her father, and their posse of gangsters. Dr. Wilderson described how Grace and her father discover Manderlay, a slave plantation “which has appearently not gotten the message that slavery ended 70 years ago.” Flora (Suzette Llewellyn), a young Black woman and a slave at Manderlay, entreats Grace to prevent a whipping that is about to happen to Timothy (Isaach de Bankolé), which Grace accomplishes.
Grace frees the slaves and transforms the plantation into “a worker’s paradise that Lenin might be proud of.” Throughout Manderlay’s eight chapters, the British narrator denies the viewer insight into Grace’s inner life. The viewer, without a main character to identify with, is shown a slave’s perspective on the consequences of slavery. Manderlay, Dr. Wilderson said, concludes that a slave is faced with similar outcomes from either a “totalitarian regime”—a slave plantation—or “demoractic socialism”—a worker’s commune. We watched a clip of the end of Manderlay over Zoom together. Dr. Wilderson went over the scene, saying how Grace has become “the lady with the whip,” despite her progressive ideals; her “unconscious aggression” has turned physical.
Dr. Wilderson described how available redemption can be for a character in a film. In classical cinema, he stated, a character’s ethics and emotions change over the course of the narrative. In “a revolutionary intervention in cinema,” Dr. Wilderson said, drawing from Mike Wayne’s film theory, there is “the emancipatory journey of a class.” He used The Battle of Algiers (dir. Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966) as an example of how change occurs through moral considerations of power. The film covers the Algerian War (1954–1962), which was won by Algerian rebels in the National Liberation Front, and lost by the French government. Instead of the usual questions about the morality of a character, viewers consider which characters have power and “what kind of people” those people are. Both of these genres of films have a narrative arc that ends in redemption. This redemption can be for “individuals as they live their lives”—generally, White people as they live their lives—or “of a class”—such as in The Battle of Algiers. Dr. Wilderson’s basic argument is that none of those narrative structures, whether “institutional or political, bourgeoisie or personal,” are allowed for a slave. The possibility of the slaves leaving Manderlay, even when Grace determines that they should be free, does not become a promise.
12 Years A Slave
12 Years A Slave (dir. Steve McQueen, 2013), an adaptation of Solomon Northup’s 1853 memoir of the same name, attempts to demonstrate how America contains “individual evils and institutional excesses” that may be changed if “the right people” change for the better. Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a free African-American violinist living in Saratoga, New York, is kidnapped by slave traders and sold into slavery in Georgia. He is able to send a letter to his family after twelve years, is freed, and returns to his home by the end of the film. 12 Years A Slave has a plot which, Dr. Wilderson said, “moves from equilibrium to disequilibrium to equilibrium restored.” The plot appears to fit the foundation of a usual Hollywood film, but it is also about slavery, so the expected rise and fall of a character’s journey is not actually possible.
Dr. Wilderson described how Manderlay and 12 Years A Slave were created with an eye for what their audiences would understand. Lars Von Tier’s attempt to make Manderlay as an allegory to the Iraq invasion is, perhaps, only alluded to through the tagline of the film: “Liberation. Whether they want it or not.” By focusing on slaves in a plantation in the United States, Dr. Wilderson said, “Lars Von Tier boxed himself into a cul-de-sac” that can only comment on “the grammar of suffering” experienced by Black people. Slavery, and the violence caused as a result of slavery, is different from the violence caused by a war or an occupation.
Later, Dr. Wilderson returned to the portrayal of the violence against slaves, in a scene in 12 Years A Slave. He discussed a moment where slaves are made to dance in the middle of the night by Edwin Epps, the plantation master. Mary, Epps’ wife, comes downstairs, and starts an argument with Epps about their relationship. Mary hits Patsey—a slave whose unwanted and non-consensual relationship with Epps merits Mary’s jealousy—with a whiskey decanter. What actually happened in Northup’s memoir, Dr. Wilderson stated, is that Epps was “among her children, gazing with an air of heartless satisfaction” as slaves were whipped. During the Q&A after the lecture, Dr. Wilderson said how a screenwriter didn’t “think the American public can deal with the series of violence against Black bodies,” as White children were allowed to watch that violence in the 1840s. Jealousy causing violence would be easier for modern audiences to accept.
That past pain might seem to be perpetrated only by sadists during a time of excessive violence. Yet, Dr. Wilderson said, “nothing essential has changed” about anti-Black violence, which has been part of American society from “the slave trade in Africa and forward to the Middle Passage […] all the way up to the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd” this summer.
Questions and Answers
The Q&A lasted about two hours, instead of the expected 45 minutes. It was time well spent on Dr. Wilderson’s answers to questions about both movies, his own personal opinion of Lars Von Trier, a trip to Cuba, and his interest in socialism.
One Bryn Mawr College student asked how social death impacts Black people today, and how to deal with the feeling of it always being present. Dr. Wilderson said his “whole point is not to write the story of Black redemption and redress, because it can’t be written. Once you write that story, you’ve cut out the unassimilable aspects of suffering” that only Black people experience. As for that specific suffering, “I still don’t believe that it is ordained by God,” he said, “or will always be” present. When talking about Afro-pessimism, he says how “all the -isms—Marxism, feminism, post-colonialism—” involve “a description of suffering, and […] Lenin’s question, what is to be done?” Afro-pessimism does not ask what can be done about the suffering, but rather exists to understand it. “What Afro-pessimism allows,” he said, “is the freedom of the Black imagination not to have to articulate with the structure of other oppressed people’s imagination.”
I asked Dr. Wilderson how he would preferably construct a narrative arc that dealt with Afro-pessimism. “I listen to people who know things,” he said, “and fortunately for me, when I was making Reparations…Now, I listened to Saidiya Hartman.” Back then, he “wasn’t a person who could hold onto an analysis of suffering” that didn’t also provide a solution. He recommended studying “films that deal with Blackness, and do not land in a denouement of redemption.” With a laugh, he said, “and don’t ask the filmmakers about this, cause they’ll get angry. I would never go to Cheryl Dunye and say, ‘I’ve been teaching The Watermelon Woman for ten years,’ and that is a true Afro-Pessimism film, where you don’t land at redemption.”
“I think that for undergraduates, this film book, Theorising Video Blackness—and you spell ‘Theorising’ with an ‘s’ because it’s British,” Dr. Wilderson said, can serve as a reference point for understanding what to change in films. Despite how Theorising Video Blackness “is the ultimate book for an oppressed gender identity, or an oppressed class, and a filmmaker who wants to make this,” it has advice that Dr. Wilderson works against. When reading this book, he said, “we have to interrogate [it], as Black people, because it’s not going to help us completely.” The book can demonstrate how to go from personal stories about a character’s moral values, to films that end with the successful overthrow of the powers-that-be. With Afro-pessimist films, Dr. Wilderson said, “the only thing that can happen is that Black people, in a metaphorical [sense] and for real reasons […] we don’t know how it’s going to end or where it’s going.” In an Afro-pessimist film, Dr. Wilderson concluded, the ending can be open, instead of coming to a hard stop. We are going somewhere, even when we do not know where. We continue to go on once the film has run the clock. A Black character does not have to exist in a single identity, such as with Cheryl, a young Black lesbian who is the protagonist of The Watermelon Woman. Yet the oppression that other people inflict upon those identities—anti-Black violence, sexism, homophobia—is not identical. The act of imagining a Black character, and of recognizing the causes of anti-Black violence, provides understanding without having to make any comparisons. We have finished watching the movie, but we have not left behind what the movie gave to us.
Image credit: The New York Times
