Ava DuVernay, the Year's Best Christmas Gift
Friday, December 25, 2015 at 2:00PM One of TFE's cinematic heroes Ava DuVernay -- she made our top ten list with both of her recent films in 2012 & 2014 respectively -- had a tremendous year in 2015. She kicked it off with a Golden Globe Best Director nomination, a hit film in theaters (Selma) and she ended it immortalized in collector Barbie doll form via Mattel. The Mattel doll sold out in less than an hour earlier this month. And when Amazon briefly offered more of them they sold out just as quickly.
So any little girl or girlie boy or grown ass person who received one under the tree or in their stocking this morning got the year's best Christmas gift.
Ava's rise this past few years has been quite meteoric. Publicist turned indie director with critical raves but no media or public attention to speak of until 2014.
Selma gave her name recognition and more leverage -- she famously turned down Marvel's Black Panther which has to be the right move given the beauty of her more personal films to date -- and we're anxious to see what she does with it. She spent the year promoting Array, her distribution company and artistic collective intent on releasing indie films by women and people of color... and she's got two new projects in the works, an untitled Hurricane Katrina feature film with one of her regular muses David Oyelowo and the tv series Queen Sugar (based on the book of the same name) with Oprah Winfrey. We're impatient for something to actually watch but they'll get there.
And before we do what a treat to see such a beautiful news story develop this month.
Representation matters. So does response to representation. And her story and career has been beautiful to watch develop.
For my daughter. #AvaBarbie @AVAETC @DIRECTHER @Barbie pic.twitter.com/X90aJN2ZRf
— Viola Davis (@violadavis) December 16, 2015
Just a wonderful story I've been thinking of this holiday week.
Reader Comments (21)
Had I known there was an Ava DuVernay Barbie I'd have bought one for myself! Damn!
I'm really torn about DuVernay.
I really want African-American women (or, you know, women in general) directing more films but.......... she is a terrr-rrible director. She just is.
Not much better at writing either.
So much of the dialogue and characterisation and relationship dynamics in Middle of Nowhere was just twee and undergrad. And the compositions were not self-consciously arty so much as tackily self-concsious. As much as I appreciated seeing this under-explored milieu from this particular perspective, I was ultimately so disappointed that it amounted to something so amateurish and obviously cheap without even the raw energy and spontaneous poetry of something like Wanda or Killer of Sheep.
And from a strictly mise-en-scene perspective, Selma was just a mess. So awkwardly shot and paced and edited. And so-o much ham-fisted exposition.
It's impossible not to be moved by the subject matter so I still kind of like the film overall.
But I remember before I saw the film being really excited when DuVernay got a major precursor nomination (Globe? DGA?) and being furious when she missed out on an Oscar nomination. And then I saw the film and thought, you know what? Thank god, she missed it. Because her direction is extremely unsophisticated and the nomination would've reeked of 'equal opportunity'. It would've played right into the agenda of anti-diversity people, and we'd have very few viable arguments to strike back with.
Sorry to be so negative here, because in many ways I really do admire a lot of what DuVernay has achieved. But honestly? I wish she and Dee Rees (who has demonstrated roughly 187 times the talent and singular vision that DuVernay has) could swap hype-levels.
And of course I wish fifty other black American women were directing high profile films in the industry right now.
Oh and despite everything I've said above this doll is completely awesome and it's so exhilarating to think that there are girls out there today playing games with dolls that makes them see themselves as writers and directors rather than glorified mannequins.
I wish she and Dee Rees (who has demonstrated roughly 187 times the talent and singular vision that DuVernay has) could swap hype-levels.
Bessie shows Dee Rees can't be trusted where it counts. She botched a simple assignment. Sure her black queer female vision is necessary but it does not mean she knows what else to do when the gaze must fall on something she's not personally invested in.
Goran: agree to disagree. And the TFE, and the Oscar and the globes and the industry in general also disagrees.
Please develop your arguments a little better, because saying something is amateurish and stoping there is amateurish criticism.
Okay, Marcello.
Let's take Middle of Nowhere:
- The editing in the big dinner table fight scenes between Corinealdi and Toussaint - despite excellent acting - lacked rhythm, continuity and spatial logic. Multiple takes of the scene with different energies were mashed together in a way that clashed tonally. The camera often crossed the 180-line without achieving any particular aesthetic effect, so it just looked like an accident and rather than sticking with the characters' emotional throughline you had to readjust. The framings and composition were often random without adding anything to the mood or sense of what the characters were feeling. But more on this later.
- A lot of the small talk in between the film's plot-advancing scenes was sluggish and amounted to 'character says something mundane'/'other character comes up with a mundane response'/'first character follows it up with the most obvious statement'. Great writers or even good writers regularly turn mundane dialogue into poetry (random example cause I reread it recently: in Birthday Party, Pinter tells you everything you need to know about a character and to form a relationship to her purely from the way she repeats a couple of lines about cereal). So, purposefully mundane dialogue can rather elegantly sum up a character who is feeling trapped or bored etc. In DuVernay's script it often sounded like a writer sitting at their laptop and writing down the first line that comes to their head, then following it up with the most obvious possible response. This accounted for big chunks of the first extended conversation Corinealdi has with a friend at the beach early in the film. There was no subtext to these lines and they were not intermixed with other action. In fact the action would simply stop while we watched an extremely mundane conversation take place with no subtext and no consequences on the plot and no particular new information revealed about the character. Usually as you're directing this kind of scene you realise scenes like this are overwritten and undernourished, so you either mix them in with some action (I don't mean running or fighting, I mean a series of looks exchanges, or the character looking unusually distracted etc) or you trim them. DuVernay chooses not to do these things. This implies she is in love with some dialogue she wrote in a particular state of mind that isn't actually connected to the story unfolding on screen or at least isn't sufficiently seeded in. You often see this in short films/student films. Endless conversations of platitudes or navel gazing or 'real people talk' without any of the messy rhythm or overlapping threads of 'real people talk'. It's a writer/director who has fallen in love with their dialogue not because of what it say but because of the fact that they've written it.
- There were pauses in conversations that were meant to be loaded/'pregnant'. Except they often followed up a character stating a cliche/platitude. So instead of 'pregnant' they came across as ponderous.
- The visual compositions routinely featured a whole lot of dead space. A character looking left-to-right was placed in close-up in the bottom-right corner of the frame, and vice versa. This happened all through Corniealdi's final prison-scene confrontation with her husband. This type of framing was self-consciously 'unusual' but not in any way evocative of the characters' emotional space/dynamic. And it didn't make the images somehow prettier (not that that would've been appropriate as a priority as this kind of narrative juncture in this kind of relationship-driven drama.)
- The talk in the plot-advancing scenes often amounted to characters outlining their positions and indignantly spelling out subtext. - Yes, we all do that sometimes when we're at breaking point or we're stating something that's been building up for a long time. But even then our more assertive statements are mixed in with disorderly slip-ups and things said or half-said in a panic. Unlike characters in DuVernay scripts, we don't communicate in topic sentences.
- Emmayatzi Corinealdi's dialogue also regularly sounded like the writer talking through the character rather than the character talking as a consistent entity independent of the writer. eg. "I like to watch those arty films with subtitles." ("But I won't cite a single example, and you won't ever see me doing this, or having the time to ever do this, or demonstrating character traits that hint at an affinity for arty films with subtitles.)
It's a very undergrad first-draft habit that you usually - in fact, almost always - find in first or second screenplays by unproduced writers, hence my use of the word 'amateurish'.
There were other examples but it's now years since I've seen the film so forgive me for not being able to cite them at short notice in a spontaneous, already rather lengthy blog comment which is a follow up to another spontaneous, already too lengthy blog comment, which despite what you say, featured several concrete examples by way of supporting arguments.
So really I should say, above all, forgive me for being so amateurish as to disagree with you or with the TFE and the Globes. I should learn never to comment here when that is the case. Because what's the point of commenting on a blog post unless you fully agree with what's being said.
at tonight's performance the role of the grinch will be played by goran
Interesting points, goran. I haven't seen Middle of Nowhere, but that sounds like Indie-itis. I saw no signs of that in Selma, which I loved.
OT: It's just "TFE" not "the TFE" (redundant), you two. Merry Christmas!
I saw signs of it in Middle of Nowhere, but I found it's thesis so intriguing and the performances so rich that it didn't bother me too much.
Paul, for me Selma suffered of TV-movie-itis more than indie-itis. It was more polished, though once again, there were multiple choices I found... uh... I'm sorry I can't think of another word for amateurish. eg. the thudding exposition (as with MoN, only this time on a more operatic scale), the bang-me-over-the-head slow-mo, the way MLK communicated exclusively in stentorian monologues even in intimate scenes with friends, often really obvious use of music, the this-happened-then-this-happened-then-this-happened-but-to-this-other-guy-now-let's-go-back-to-our-guy approach to biopic structure, the way every surface looked colour graded (the only time I've disliked Bradford Young's photography is when he's working with DuVernay), the way every location looked like a set (even when it wasn't) etc etc
Overall I still liked the film and definitely a lot more than MoN but I think that's because I responded to the subject matter. In fact I found myself actively trying to block the shaping creative voice and her choices in order to keep up my connection to the people on screen.
par's comment is why I wish there was a "like" button on TFE.
OK NOW I SERIOUSLY DEMAND A VIOLA DAVIS OR COOKIE LYON BARBIE DOLL...ASAP!!!
Alice28 - they'd also sell out
Sean - liking your like with my imaginary button
Wow. Catty.
Okay re-reading my posts, I can see my tone was wrong in this context and I probably should've kept my opinion to myself at least this time.
Still, my aim wasn't to be pointlessly negative but to be part of a discussion and til now my impression was that this blog was okay with people disagreeing in the comments. Perhaps I was wrong about that too.
No, goran, it was just Christmas. If you've read any (recent) posts, you know people disagreeing in the comments is a pretty everyday occurrence. ;-)
PS. "Cattiness" too.
@goran
Your comments felt like bullying because Bret Easton Ellis and Quentin Tarantino already
went in on the merits of Ava DuVernay as a filmmaker. You're only adding on to the narrative
she's incapable of rising above her television directorial sensibilities. Women regardless of their
color are undermined by Hollywood patriarchy daily hence the lack of visible female auteurs working in the studio system or giving much coverage when they are on the indie side of things.
I make scrutinizing and critical comments constantly. Often accused of hating women for using every derogatory word ascribed to them. But gay men never check their own anti-woman language especially the chicks with dicks who are granted final say so over what I write in the comments section.
People are just especially sensitive because we're all really powerless to change the established structure except to champion the deviations from norm which we can celebrate for even existing.
<Your comments felt like bullying because Bret Easton Ellis and Quentin Tarantino already
went in on the merits of Ava DuVernay as a filmmaker.>
Indeed. Also, if Ava's skills are “amateurish” ... so what? There are dozens, hundreds of amateurish white men who have careers in the industry. Oh, that's right: Only white people (men mostly) are entitled to being mediocre, and have their mediocrity recognized, praised and rewarded (like Tarantino and Ellis). Bah humbug.
Look, again, I see now that my tone was wrong in that Christmas context. Christmas has never really meant anything to me since I was raised in a different place, but that said, I've lived in the West almost twenty years now so I should've stopped to think, and for that I'm definitely sorry.
And as I said above, I genuinely am happy that Ava DuVernay can serve as a role model to young girls, irrespective of my opinion of her filmmaking.
But I got the impression this post was not just about DuVernay's diversity status but also about her filmmaking talent and that was the part I was interested to talk about.
@/3rtful
I don't remember reading the comments by QT and Easton Ellis, and if I did, I certainly wouldn't pay them much attention since I have very little respect for either of them, and the latter is definitely a misogynist (seriously, the writer of The Canyons was attacking someone else for their filmmaking?!).
Diversity and representation is hugely important to me too and I would never criticise DuVernay's skills in an environment where there's a danger of inadvertently contributing to already pervasive racism or misogyny.
But in nearly all of the sites I visit DuVernay is almost exclusively praised, which is something that didn't really make sense to me for a long time based on how I experienced her work. And since I didn't get to see Selma or MoN until months and months after everyone, I didn't get to engage about them with anyone on here at the time. Hence my comments at this point.
@NewMoonSon
I criticise white male mediocrity and sense of entitlement and propensity for giving only hollow roles to women All. The. Time. Like seriously. All. The. Damn. Time.
However in his context I think it's dangerous to treat female or minority filmmakers as automatically untouchable because I feel that gives ammunition to 'the other side' and ultimately works against our goal of equal representation.
eg. The last short film I made had a black female lead (plus, god forbid, subtitles). And any time it gets any success or praise, you always have people in the industry who give you this condescending vibe of "oh, well, of course they 'like' your film - they're not allowed to dislike it" - as in 'it's only there to fulfill a quota and not because it's a story worth engaging with emotionally'.
This is obviously a bullshit attitude and the opposite to the truth - in fact, faces of multiple ethnicities (and genders) glaze over the instant you start a sentence along the lines of "This script is about an Afghan woman etc etc." They don't glaze over anywhere near as quickly if it's a story about a white or especially male person.
However treating stories by and about women or minorities as automatically untouchable fits into these people's anti-diversity narrative and the attitude I mention above. So I find that extremely dangerous.
But okay, at least on Christmas or other contexts of simple celebration, I'll agree to never criticise DuVernay or other people who are facing tough odds in the industry.
Everyone, it's Oscar Isaac singing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uljQuVXuMM
--goran, for what it's worth, once you articulated the specific things that bothered you about DuVernay, I had a lot less issue with it. I will say that when you state something controversial or provocative, backing it up as you did (with that second/third post) is absolutely essential. Otherwise it comes closer to troilling, which isn't your intent.
Goran,
Forgive this late reply, been entertaining guests for the holidays...
No one is arguing that women/people of color filmmakers should be "untouchable"; the issue is that they are not viewed nor treated the same as their white male counterparts. Different rules apply, even when it comes to who gets criticized, for what and how (I don't ever recall Quentin degrading the work of another white male filmmaker in the manner he did Ava). And sometimes it doesn't matter how exceptional they are (case in point: F. Gary Gray being left out of The Hollywood Reporter round table this year). "The other side" isn't interested in challenging the status quo; most of its defenders/enablers also benefit from it.