I went cruising last night for something old on my streaming
services. I don’t mean something from five years ago; I mean something from 50
or 60 years ago. Before I was born. Before blockbusters. Before every film was
made in color by default. I’d been watching entirely too many 2019 films and I
needed a little palette cleanser.
You won’t be surprised to learn that I struck out.
You can’t find anything truly old on streaming services.
If they're there at all, they're buried so deep that using the site’s
ordinary search mechanisms won’t uncover them, unless you were to know exactly
the title you were looking for. I know Kanopy would have obliged me, but I have
to hook up my computer to the TV to watch it on a decent screen, and I just
wasn’t up for it last night. I just wanted to point and click and watch
something from Hollywood’s golden age. I miss Filmstruck and I never even had
it.
So 1991 – the year I graduated high school – would have to
do.
In truth, the bias toward newer releases is so pronounced on
Netflix and my Australian streaming service, Stan, that even finding something
as old as 1991 leaves you kind of taken aback. You have a hard time imagining
which suits would demand these titles among the buyers, or offer them among the
sellers. It seems like someone made a mistake and this is the result. That
said, I jumped at my opportunity to recently re-watch Ulee’s Gold (1997) on Stan, as I had not seen it anywhere else in
ages. (Too bad it wasn’t as great as I remembered it being.)
Fortunately, the new-to-me movie from 1991 I found on
Netflix, Julie Dash’s Daughters of the
Dust, was really great.
This is a film that came on my radar five or so years ago
when there was a list going around of the best films by African-American filmmakers.
This, in fact, was one of the first, or, to be more precise, the first feature film by an
African-American woman to receive a general release. Yes, that ceiling was
shattered only 28 years ago. Hard to believe. (Side note: I had to keep
reminding myself that the director was Julie Dash, not Stacey Dash, who plays
one of Cher’s friends in Clueless. And wow, I just googled Stacey Dash to make sure I was spelling her first name right, and she's in the news, having just been arrested for domestic battery.)
It's a non-linear story about the descendants of freed
slaves who lived on an island off the coast of Georgia with their own
Creole-English hybrid language, and it takes place in 1902, when a number of
the residents were making the tough decision to sail to the mainland and begin
living a more modern existence. At first I thought I was failing to comprehend
the story, in part because of the difficulty of understanding all the dialogue,
but I eventually came to recognize that it’s being told in an episodic fashion
during several time periods, where currently living people interact with
ghosts, or maybe with people who haven’t been born yet. This is not a movie
about story, but about theme, and about capturing a specific place and time and
the feel of that place and time.
I usually prefer movies that have a more straightforward
narrative, which is one of the reasons Terrence Malick’s insistence on making
movies the way he does has steadily worn me out. A couple movies that way, sure
– they’re beautiful and poetic. But every movie that way? I get cranky about
your artistic limitations.
Dash here is a bit like Malick before Malick, or at least,
before all but two of Malick’s movies. And because it’s not the same filmmaker
doing the same thing over and over again, it felt fresh and exciting. There’s
voiceover and the imagery is poetic, with lots of shots of characters in
flowing turn-of-the-century lace and other garments, against water and jungle
and watercolor sunsets. It has a distinct feeling of emotional weight, even if
some of its story elements are confusing or not easily discernible. (The
Wikipedia plot synopsis helped me realize it wasn’t just me, and helped me make
a few narrative connections that deepened my appreciation of it.) Ultimately I
found it beautiful and really rich.
And it did really scratch my itch for something “old,” both
because it depicted a time 120 years in the past, and because the actual
filmmaking was clearly of a different era. There’s some traditional score in
here, but the rest of the score is kind of a fusion of traditional music and
late 1980s synthesizer, which dated the film, but not in a bad way. I also
noted that the use of slow motion was clearly of another era; at first glance
you might call it “cheesy,” as nowadays slow motion is only really used in the
context of big action sequences and bullet time, and this is certainly not
that. But I also found it kind of hypnotic, which I think would have been the
experience of audiences at the time as well.
Now, if only Netflix could have a category, or even a secret
category I could unlock, of films from before 1960, I’d be really happy.
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