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Ep. 38. Ashley Clark, The World of Black Film / Daughters of the Dust
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In today's episode I talk to Ashley Clark about his new book The World of Black Film: A Journey Through Cinematic Blackness in 100 Films (2026) as well as Julie Dash's canonical film Daughters of the Dust.
Ashley Clark is a writer, broadcaster, and film programmer. He has organized numerous film seasons at international venues including London's BFI Southbank, New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Toronto's TIFF Lightbox. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Reverse Shot, Sight & Sound, and Film Comment, and he is the author of two books: Facing Blackness: Media and Minstrelsy in Spike Lee's Bamboozled (2015); and The World of Black Film: A Journey Through Cinematic Blackness in 100 Films (2026). Ashley was born in London, lives in Jersey City, and works in New York City, where he has been the curatorial director of the Criterion Collection since 2020.Episode notes:
- Julie Dash, Illusions (1982)
Book recs:
- Keith Ridgway, A Shock
- Amy Sall, The African Gaze: Photography, Cinema, and Power
- Patrick Radden Keefe, London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth
Follow the show on Instagram and subscribe to the Substack for transcripts and more links. Please leave feedback here.
Follow Ashley on Instagram @_Ash_Clark
Produced, hosted, and edited by Chris Lloyd.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Books Up Close'
00:00:02
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Books Up Close, I'm Chris Lloyd.
Focus on Ashley Clark and 'The World Black Film'
00:00:05
Speaker
Today I talk to the Ashley Clark old friend, long time friend, his backstory, maybe we'll get into it, about his book The World Black Film and we're going talk about an extract from this book that's about Julie Dash's film Daughters of the Dust so then we're going close read that too. So listener, you're in for a slightly different episode this time but it's going good, I promise.
Ashley Clark's Career Highlights
00:00:28
Speaker
Ashley is a writer, broadcaster and film programmer. He has organised numerous film seasons in international venues, including London's BFI Southbank, New York's Museum of One Art, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Toronto's TIFF Lightbox. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Reverse Shot, Sight and Sound and Film Comment. And he is the author of two books, Facing Blackness, Media and Minstrelsy and Spike Lee's Bamboozled, which I did review many moons ago in Black Camera. Go find that review, people.
00:00:53
Speaker
And the world of black film, a journey through cinematic blackness in 100 films. Ashley was born in London, lives in Jersey City and works in New York City, where he's been the curatorial director of the Criterion Collection since 2020. Ashley,
Cinema Memories with Chris and Ashley
00:01:07
Speaker
welcome.
00:01:07
Speaker
Thank you so much for having me. I don't think we should dance around our backstory because we we are connected cinematically. We are. From a stint working the kiosk at the Clapham Picture House many, many years ago. Many, many years ago. We had so many great conversations behind that desk and it was it was always fun. Actually, just this weekend I had a memory and I wonder if you recall this too.
00:01:33
Speaker
It was a lady who came a lady who came in, looked at me and said, I would like one ticket please for contagion. And I said, come again? And she said, one for contagion. And I said, do you mean contagion?
00:01:51
Speaker
Oh my god. And yeah, and that was the kind of, she was lovely, of course, but yeah we did meet some fascinating people. So those were happy days and i'm I love the podcast and I'm very happy to be on.
00:02:03
Speaker
No, this is great. um This is a lovely opportunity to talk to you The book is beautiful. Yeah, those Pitch House days are absolutely Sometimes I'm like, did that happen? um If you've ever worked in a cinema, I'll listen to that.
00:02:17
Speaker
It's just a particularly singular experience, right? You've got this rush of people, then suddenly the movies start and it's dead. And then suddenly there's like a million people again saying, I want to see this movie. And then you tell them it's got subtitles and they're like, I couldn't do that.
00:02:30
Speaker
and Why would I do that? Yeah. It's hours of boredom followed by seconds of terror. Yeah. It's a terror over and over again, over and over again. It's really good. And then you just pick up people's popcorn at the end of the movie while people are banging on the doors to watch the next viewing. fail Yes, beautiful backstory. And this book is great. And many things I want to do with it, I guess, and think about how we close read both your text about films and then also how we read close read films, because those are very interesting overlapping kind of things.
The Art of Close Reading in Film
00:03:01
Speaker
I want to ask you first the question I ask everyone, which is how do you feel about close reading? And you may have answers in relation to text or film. I don't mind wherever you want to go with this.
00:03:11
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, the first thing that came to my mind was actually the the pleasure and and respect and and dignity of being close read, being edited very well, because it's an increasingly rare thing that happens. Publications don't really have the the resources to do that.
00:03:28
Speaker
A lot of the time editing can essentially be taken to to mean it's uploaded in the CMS and someone presses publish. Right. If you're lucky, someone will fix that rogue apostrophe. But there's such an act of care in being having your work truly appreciated and having an editor who is truly invested in making your work the best that it can be, which I think is the the gold standard of editing and as opposed to somebody trying to impose their ideas on you and and and understanding that there's a real emotional component to it as well.
00:03:59
Speaker
um One of the first pieces that I wrote for a publication called Reverse Shot, which is the house publication of the Museum of Moving Image in Queens, it is now, it was a review of a film called Trance, the the Danny Boyle film, which funnily enough, I watched at the Clackin' Picture House and was curiously taking notes. I remember that one. I think at that point, I'd been used to not being edited, especially carefully. And, and I wrote something and I thought to myself, well, this is great, send.
00:04:26
Speaker
And because of the time difference, I woke up the next morning, and it had come back a line by line, Eddie, I think a fisking, they call it. line by line edit and it was bruising it was a bruising encounter and it was necessary and it was one line of critique which was always really stuck with me and informed how I've proceeded as a writer and an editor when I've had the opportunity to do that and and the comment was I'm not sure that you know exactly what you mean here and if you don't what chance does the reader have
00:04:57
Speaker
you know The idea that someone's looking out for you as well. e and Are you sure you want to go out into the world with that? Because your name is on this piece. So it's someone being invested in you and helping you to articulate articulate yourself as clearly and with as much precision as possible, which was the first thing that came to mind with close reading.
00:05:16
Speaker
Then from a ah film perspective, reading the text and having the opportunity when you're fortunate enough to to have that length and and that space ahead of you to write a fully ah fully engaged and and formally and textually and texturally precise critique of a film is a lovely thing. I did it i did a book-length analysis of Spike Lee's film, Bamboozled, which involved watching that film, a film about...
00:05:40
Speaker
ah the America's history of blackface minstrelsy and mental illness and racism, a film that nobody should watch the amount of times that I watched it in a row. yeah um But it was it was a revelatory experience because I was, you know, in watching and re-watching and really paying attention to what is in the frame,
00:05:58
Speaker
and And the thing but when I'm teaching students, you know, film students, the the first thing you would say is nothing in is in this frame by accident. You know, there's ah there's a strange ah paradox where you want to you want to let the text wash over you. You want to be enraptured by it and believe that it's just happening.
00:06:15
Speaker
But you've got to separate your brain and realize that this is all intentional as well. and Yeah. it can be a quite transcendent experience to manage to fuse the two at once. So have your pleasure receptors and the analytical part of your brain working at the same time.
00:06:28
Speaker
And that's, I guess, what i'm striving to do when I'm when i'm critiquing. But in in Bamboozled, it was it was, for example, noticing that the the reaction shots that Spike Lee chooses to include of the first big kind of blackface minstrels minstrelsy performance are not just white people laughing, but it's black people laughing as well.
00:06:46
Speaker
And a lot of outraged critiques of the film seem to operate from the premise that he was just hammering white liberals and that surely we all know this is wrong. But what makes the film so thorny and so problematic is that everyone's involved in this. And that plays into a long history of Amos and Andy and and the NAACP and being very upset at Shaft, for example, and complex intracommunal relations with onscreen representation of black people. So to be able to close read the text in a way that you wouldn't do if you were just firing off a 500 word consumer guide review for the weekend is a really beautiful thing.
00:07:23
Speaker
And I get to do the occasional long piece of writing for criterion. um You know, we do those those liner notes essays, which are included in the booklets, and they can be anywhere from 2000 3000 words.
00:07:35
Speaker
So the precise circumstances have to make themselves apparent to be able to go into that level of detail. But it just feels like a a respectful and reverential thing to to really dive in and and and and and look into the choices that are being made in terms of form, camera, sound.
00:07:53
Speaker
All of these things that are are so intentional and they're not necessarily unique to the medium of film because, yes, some are present in television as well. But what makes this a film? And those are that the formal and technical aspects are are inherent to that as well. And I think it's important to to pay notice to that as well, and not just the representational aspects of the film, not just what it's saying, what you want it to say, how it's operating in in the discourse and the counter-discourse, which is obviously a prevailing...
00:08:20
Speaker
a prevailing theme of our moment. I think yeah film one battle after another, which, you know, quickly the horse bolted on that one. and And instead of textual analysis that could also factor in the social and political aspects of the film, we were subject to a a counter, you know, discourse, counter discourse that picked out individual elements of the film unmoored from the context of
Film Criticism in the Social Media Age
00:08:42
Speaker
the rest it, which I personally find frustrating, but i understand why it's the case. Discourse. What a word. Shivers.
00:08:51
Speaker
but But you're right, like how do we how do we approach the text kind of without all of that noise and baggage and stuff But like it almost seems impossible now, right? Like there are so many films I haven't seen that I'm like, I feel like I've seen them because they've been shaped for me by others. So when you do go and you're like, wait, do I have a different response? You know, like you feel you're missing something. It's so hard to just watch a thing on its own terms now. Completely. And that's so it baked into the ecosystem of writing and publishing as well. I mean, something I remember from my point my journalism days would be writing a piece. I'd, you know, work hard on it for Vice magazine or The Guardian, and it would go out with an inflammatory headline, yeah um which didn't really correspond to the contents of the piece.
00:09:36
Speaker
Then you had the the comments section, the the the war on context, you know, where even screen grab technology you know Back in my day, it was you couldn't do a screen grab. And then suddenly, on a smartphone, yeah you could just screen grab it.
00:09:50
Speaker
And the discourse would would would be around a decontextualized screen grab of a piece of writing rather than the toothpaste is out of the tube. you know There's no sort of... coming back from that but it's how to insist on texture analysis and also factor in these other aspects of it which are also integral to the text it's about bringing them together it's about i think synthesizing them in a generative way yeah it doesn't try to separate the ideology and and the art they're all the same thing but it's just how to tease it out in a way that feels at least in part way respect to the native form that that the art is created in
00:10:27
Speaker
Right. And I feel like every episode almost I've done of this show, we kind of talk about like going back to the language because we've lost the ability to just like, what did the words say? What are they actually communicating? How are they doing it? Rather than the stuff around the words.
00:10:41
Speaker
And I feel like film viewing is the same, right? Like when I don't want to make do a screen about like media literacy, but like I don't think... You know, like as a culture, as a contemporary society, we're not very good at reading images either. Right. like it's It's not even just language, but like images, like how do we understand, as you said, like a shot or a piece of lighting or a framing, right?
00:11:03
Speaker
What do we do with it? How do we read it? How do we unpack it? Or do we just say I'm more interested in the message or the meaning of the film, right? As though that was easy to take away anyway. Yeah. So I don't know what we do with that other than keep trying to practice it, right? Those people that are good at it, let's keep doing it Absolutely. Keep trying to practice it and pay it forward as well, like wherever possible.
00:11:24
Speaker
um I think a lot of, again, I'm repeating myself. Unfortunately, it happens a fair amount, but it's all wrapped up in the technology of it. You know, there's this kind of exploding genre of screen grab criticism, you know, the the one perfect shotification yeah of criticism where someone will post something perhaps in the wrong aspect ratio with the the wrong color grade. and we'll be like What a shot.
00:11:45
Speaker
yeah But how is it actually operating within the context of the the film? yeah yeah You know, sometimes it's it's a nice thing to look at. But yeah, it's it's a constant struggle. Yeah. And don't get me started on color grading. Anyway, that that's a whole other episode. Whole other different podcasts. I am done with gray films. Anyway, when we're talking about ah kind of the close reading of your writing here, i wanted to ask you quickly about how you feel about kind of film criticism and its relation to style more precisely. Like I often, i don't know, maybe people don't think this, but this is how i imagine. Like you read a review, right? Like a short little review in the newspaper or online. and it's really there to kind of like deliver some kind of information, right? Should I go watch this new movie? Right. I was going to do an example, but that's maybe mean. Should I go read this thing? What does Ashley say? or What does this person that I like trust say about it? And I'm not necessarily reading the review for its own style, its own language, right? I'm going to it to kind of get the, what are what stars is it getting at the end? But I feel like criticism as a genre, like we don't talk about it enough, right? as ah As a constructed aesthetic form in itself, right? It's about argumentation. It's about choosing interesting words to describe this movie, trying to translate this movie into...
00:13:00
Speaker
this other form, right? i want I wonder how you feel about style and and writing in film criticism. um Yeah, I think that... functionality is a big part of this. I've done so much so much criticism in different forms. Everything we've spoken about from the 250 word timeout film review where I'd go and watch, I don't know, Ice Cube and and Kevin Hart in Ride Along and I would, you know, find ways to be as mean as possible about that film in 200 words for 50 pounds.
00:13:32
Speaker
And you're really trying to get to get a quick hit, you know, so yeah so your language is very much... you're you're in this dense cap, you're in a very dense space yeah and you're really trying to convey in the context of what this timeout is doing, is this worth your while to yeah spend money on this this weekend or not?
00:13:49
Speaker
To the the other kind of spectrum, which is writing a... you know, 2,500 word piece about race and representation in Taxi Driver for the reverse shot symposium about Martin Scorsese, which is in and of itself, the fact that they're mounting a whole symposium to this filmmaker, it's an act of reverence. yeah So you're not taking the opportunity to knock Martin Scorsese down a peg or two.
00:14:12
Speaker
So you're trying to be careful in your language to show that there is and a level of respect for this this filmmaker and and the brilliance of the work. but also trying to articulate what you find troublesome and problematic about it.
00:14:25
Speaker
And that's where specificity comes back in. Not making broad assertions, but really diving into the text. I've always responded in terms of criticism to a sense of style in the writer, not something that's overly voicey, but I think it's perhaps a function of me growing up and being obsessed by music magazines.
00:14:43
Speaker
growing up in in the golden age of, well, a golden age, because everyone has their own version of what that is, but of NME, Select Magazine, Q Magazine, Melody Maker, all of these things.
00:14:54
Speaker
And there was a sense of enthusiasm and a sense of people wanting to share their passions. And I think that has always been um something that I've responded to um when it's come to to criticism and and and prose style.
00:15:07
Speaker
Perhaps, again, it's culturally specific, but a sense of associative logic or references or humor that I that i find funny. yeah um And then I took a really hard left turn because when I started writing for Sight and Sound magazine, I look back on those pieces now and it's like, it's not even me.
00:15:23
Speaker
It's this sort of chin-stroking, ultra-serious version of myself because I was clearly feeling insecure. yeah Sight and Sound had a more academic reputation and I clearly felt a sense of pressure that I didn't want to be...
00:15:37
Speaker
Who's this bumpkin with with the gags? So I kind of leaned the the completely the other way and and developed this very strange and stilted tonality and and choice of language and perhaps overuse of adjectives and adverbs in a way, which is which is an enemy of specificity.
00:15:54
Speaker
um So you can see all the insecurity in that language. And then again, the economic aspect comes into it How much am I being paid to write this? Because when you're getting paid, you know, a small amount of, I used i say i would say this is students you have to you have to think in economic terms.
00:16:09
Speaker
If you're getting paid £50 to write a film review, that's an hour to get to the cinema, two hours to watch the film, three hours maybe to write a first draft, an hour back, I forgot to say, from the cinema.
00:16:22
Speaker
You go to Costa Coffee, that's £3 for your coffee. By the time you do the economics of that, so you have to ask us yourself how much are you bringing to the table is another thing. And and that can that can certainly influence how much style you're willing to bring to the table.
00:16:36
Speaker
yeah that That aspect of functionality is present. But yeah, and I just think the psychological element of of being paid for work versus doing it for fun, the writing that I do for my, my sub stack is just, you know, I found a freedom to that. And it sounds like me.
00:16:52
Speaker
And the minute someone, the minute money comes into the equation, and deadlines come into the equation, I wish I could have more control over my own psychology and and try and be the fun guy that's writing for free. But weird things change and it and it bears on me in all sorts of different ways that are difficult to pass.
00:17:09
Speaker
So yeah, that's a very long and winding answer to your question. But I think all of these things are interconnected. yeah um The economics of of writing certainly influences the amount of style you can bring to it.
00:17:19
Speaker
yeah But my own personal grounding and enjoying criticism and was always a sense of responding to a sense of wit and humor and enthusiasm and that yeah willingness to share.
00:17:31
Speaker
And I've always tried to carry that when I've been fortunate enough to write about things that I'm passionate about and that i like. and also in the films that I program. Obviously, I've told this story a lot, but the real road to Damascus moment for me with film programming was at the Clapham Picture House when I put on a screening of of Do the Right Thing the yelp by by Spike Lee. And that was a moment of of sharing my love with this film for other people and seeing them respond to it in such a an emotional and invested way. And it made me think, oh, maybe there is something to this as as a career. I didn't really think of it as a career at that point, but that's what it came to be.
00:18:06
Speaker
Well, I remember that screening and I remember you really taught me how to read that film hu because I was very overwhelmed by that movie and conflicted in so many different ways. And you really forced me to lean into like the ambivalence of what Spike Lee does. Like he seems very provocative and then you're like, actually, he's not making any claims. in a particular way, right? He's making contradictory claims, simultaneous claims, clashing claims. And there's like an ambivalence about like, you sea that's on you, right? Like, and it really helped me think through that film in complicated ways that I'm still like, oh yeah, don't know what to do with it, but in a good way, right? It's an ever shifting piece of work. I mean, yeah there's ah there's an explosiveness and it and a forthrightness to the film, which renders its ambiguity quite paradoxical. Yes.
00:18:54
Speaker
And because it touches on so many like a live third rail emotional themes and ideas, it's ah it's a profoundly discomforting experience. And it's a great one to teach and a great one to talk about. Yeah, 100%. And I think that's part of Daughters of the Dust 2, right, which also resists It resists reading in certain ways as well as it invites them. I wonder whether you could read out this little section that we've chosen from your a kind of overview of the film from... i should probably backtrack
Exploring 'Daughters of the Dust'
00:19:22
Speaker
just slightly. Listeners, The World of Black Film is this beautiful, beautifully illustrated book and actually walks you through 100 movies.
00:19:30
Speaker
And each movie, it's a kind of like overview, but it's also a kind of analysis. It's also a kind of you should probably watch it, people. with And each piece is very different in tone and kind of some of them are kind of like, let me fill you on in this history that you don't definitely don't know about. and You've never heard of this movie. And then others are kind of like, I don't need to sell you on this. Here's a piece of knowledge you wouldn't have known about its construction. But in this one you kind of give us the backstory, but then also try and I think anyway, evoke some of the aesthetic of the movie in your sentences.
00:20:01
Speaker
Like numerous films in this book, from Munomoto to To Sleep with Anger, Daughters of the Dust reflects on the struggle between tradition and modernity. Here, this dynamic is embodied by the family matriarch, Nana Peasant, Korra Lee Day, who feels spiritually and physically enmeshed with her Gullah land and heritage.
00:20:24
Speaker
and urges her relatives to temper their expectations when they travel north for pastures new in the embryonic days of the Great Migration. When you leave this island, Nana warns her great-grandson Eli, a different images Adisa Anderson, you ain't going to no land of milk and honey.
00:20:44
Speaker
Daughters of the Dust is a thematically rich, genuinely mesmerizing cinematic experience. Despite the large cast, Dash clearly and expertly draws the connections between the Pazant family members with a particular focus on complex female relationships.
00:21:02
Speaker
And the whole film seems to flutter along in one rhapsodic moment, like a pleasurably extended exhalation of breath. Gorgeously composed images flow into one another, while an atmospheric score intermingles with a poetic, polyvocal, and multi-generational voiceover to immerse the viewer in a dreamlike headspace.
00:21:23
Speaker
The film's artistic majesty is no surprise when one considers the constellation of talent involved in its creation. Cinematographer Arthur Jaffer and production designer Kerry James Marshall both went on to become internationally renowned visual artists.
00:21:42
Speaker
Thank you. Again, you're listening to you read it and rereading it. You're having to do a lot of work in these shorts. They're not even whether they're essays or I don't know how you were thinking of them. Right. But you are having to like spin multiple plates at the same time. So i wanted I want to ask you about that a little bit later in terms of the writing process. But, you know, you're having to be like, oh, remember this person who was in this film I just told you about three pages ago? And also here's some stuff about like the filmmakers. But also I want to talk about the whole film seems to flutter along in one rhapsodic moment. Like you're trying to grasp for what the film is doing through language.
00:22:18
Speaker
Like how are you spinning all those plates? um with With tremendous difficulty, um I have to say. I was keen to to revisit this one because i literally remember where I was when I wrote this. I was in the cafe up the street and it was one of maybe three or four times when...
00:22:36
Speaker
I felt touched by the the hand of the the God of writing. And it just kind of flowed out of me as opposed to the kind of more mathematical structural process of a lot of these entries where, as you say, I'm i'm juggling so many things, text, context,
00:22:52
Speaker
history, connecting it to the rest of the book. And what I really came to find, and this is this is an interesting, I think, um reflection when it comes to reading film, I found to my dismay around three or four entries into the book that I was going to have to watch all of these films again. And as someone who has a very demanding full-time job and family, I was like, this is already going to be hard enough to do.
00:23:14
Speaker
But I realized that when I was trying to write about these films from memory without engaging with the text again, first to refresh myself, the writing was very stale. And it was taking much, much longer than my calculations had allowed for.
00:23:28
Speaker
I thought, okay, I've seen this film. I can do this. This will be quick. And I'm sitting there hour three, like blood out of the stone. So I remember going up to the cafe and being like, okay, it's Saturday. It's Daughters of the Dust Day.
00:23:40
Speaker
And I sat and ordered my tea and pressed play. And I was pretty much in tears for the whole thing. And I think it might have been like the stress of the the situation of knowing that I still had 40 entries to write before my deadline, whatever it was.
00:23:54
Speaker
But I think that just clearly you can you can feel that in in the the choice of the words that I'm using to describe the film. I'm really trying, as you said, to evoke a spirit, to evoke the sort of of what watching the film is like through my language.
00:24:08
Speaker
And that idea of being carried along with it is is has always been my experience of of Daughters of the Dust. And it's doing something alchemical. chemical in terms of the film. Yeah. ah But again, it's that interplay of so many different aspects, the the text, but also the context of the film, of knowing the sense that this was at the late age of 1992, the first film to have a national release to be directed by a black woman in America at that absurdly late date.
00:24:37
Speaker
To know at the same time, not that Julie Dash has not gone on to have a brilliant career, making you know as a professor and making lots of short films. and But that this is her only theatrically released feature film. There's an undertow of what we what we might have had.
00:24:50
Speaker
I don't even want to project onto Julie Dash. Maybe she didn't want to make 10, 15 films. It's a personal thing. I want 10, 15 films on Julie Dash. yeah So there are all these things swirling and there's there's ah there's a yearning in the film as well. And it just feels like it's such a unique piece of work at that scale, at that level of craft.
00:25:09
Speaker
That's the other thing. you know You're watching this film. I mentioned AJ and Kerry James Marshall in there as as these contributors who've gone on to do amazing things. And I just felt that I owed it to the reader to try to at least give some sort of a sense of of the experience of watching this film.
00:25:27
Speaker
Yeah, like you are doing long sentences here, right? like you are I think you are pushing beyond your, you know, I need to write a snappy sentence that describes it clearly, but like here this dynamic is embodied by the family matriarch, comma, Nana, who feels spiritually and physically enmeshed with Golan. And, you know, you go, you kind of push on in the way that the film does, right? The film, right that physically enmeshedness, like how do you how do you describe physically enmeshedness in language, right? Yeah.
00:25:53
Speaker
and temper their expectation when they travel north for pastures new in the embryonic days of the Great Migration. Like, you didn't have to go there, right? You could just... But trying to extend the sentence so that we feel how the film is really interested in temporality, right?
00:26:08
Speaker
It's saying, like, past, present, future. is's all in It's all there at the same time. And you're if you're confused... and shut up you know it's not even like it's not even like i don't care it's just like that's not the point of this right i should have that should have been the final sentence if you're confused shut up just shut up just just just watch and like listen yeah it's interesting that you've got like the quote from Nana, right? And maybe this is like a stylistic, like film criticism thing, but when you leave this island, Nana wants her great grandson, Eli, you ain't got no land in milk and honey, right? Like there's, you could easily write in different ways.
00:26:41
Speaker
Yeah. Nana wants her grandson when you leave this island, but there's that pause, right? When you leave this island, pause, yeah let me give you some information. and actually the, the bit after is like, whoa, it's the kind of dig, right? You ain't going to land in milk and honey, which is one of the things of the film, right? It's like, this isn't a paradise and that's not gonna be a paradise either. just to one of the One of the key themes for sure, and I think it's it's really interesting, that's why I'm really enjoying this, because I don't think it was a conscious choice, but what the way I've broken it up, it does not only the temporal break, but it also does give a sense of suspense, because you don't know, the hammer blow is, yeah it delays the hammer blow, but it's coming, and it's connected, and and it it closes up the the paragraph, because it opens with the the more the more kind of explicit calling back to other films, which are about that.
00:27:28
Speaker
yeah my My choice of saying it reflects on the struggle between tradition and modernity. I'm wondering if if I'd done it again, i would say the struggle yeah because that's quite grand language yeah instead of a society struggle. yeah But this is close reading for you and and puzzling over what choices I might have made.
00:27:48
Speaker
But that isn't that that to me, even that the use of that the definite article there, because yeah yeah the yeah it sort of presumes that there is an existing struggle between tradition and modernity that is raging all the time, yeah which is actually quite, that's a bit too broad.
00:28:03
Speaker
Yeah. Or as though that, yeah, there is one version of tradition versus modernity. Exactly. Because tradition versus modernity for the Gala people in like the Carolina islands, like is a very different tradition versus modernity for like the Harlem Renaissance or something, right? For sure. um I did the American version of that for everyone listening. Hope you appreciated that. rather than rene He'll record an English one. Yeah, yeah. um I do it for my students all the time. they're like what word are you saying? and like, Renee, you say that. Oh, but I've been here now. I've been in, I've obviously born in London and I've been in America since 2014.
00:28:38
Speaker
And there, and for me, it's like a lot of the, the words that I'm using, i don't even know, like saying premiere instead of premiere, which i just French, but I'll write you instead of, I'll write to you all sorts of things that I'm not, I don't notice I'm doing so. yeah Thank you for flagging. things No, no, it's always entertains me.
00:28:55
Speaker
You then say Doors the Dust is a thematically rich, genuinely mesmerizing cinematic experience. And then again, you've got this really long sentence, despite the large cast. You've put expertly draws the connections between the Pizan family members with a particular focus on complex female relationships. Like i mentioned that in like, why that in brackets, I guess.
00:29:16
Speaker
Well, it was either brackets or M dash. And just that, that day, the, but the, the, the parenthetical came calling and for for for reasons that, you know, yeah, we'll forever remain inscrutable. I think I just wanted to, to hammer home the point that this was a film that is very female forward in its conception and execution and focus. yes um There are dudes, you know, hanging around on the outskirts. Yeah.
00:29:42
Speaker
And they they play very interesting roles. you know they're not They're not completely on the margins of the film, but it's such a female-focused story. And those relationships, I think, are what Judy Dash is is interested in and and what has helped it resonate with not just female viewers, but but viewers over the years. because You don't see that level of care and detail around the the relationships between Black women on film very often at all. right So I think that bringing that out,
00:30:12
Speaker
was just another way to emphasise what I think is a really important facet of the film. Yeah, for sure. And then you you know you talk about how the film seems to flutter along in one rhapsodic moment, like a pleasure-extended exhalation of breath. You've got like all this F sound, right? Like family, focus, female, film, flutter.
00:30:30
Speaker
But then the the breath, like the TH on breath, kind of picks up some of that kind of like soft F-ness. And it does feel like that. Gorgeously composed images flow into another more Fs.
00:30:42
Speaker
ah Then you do poetic polyvocal, a multi-generational voiceover to most of you in a dream. Like you're you're extending this out so much in a really enjoyable way. Thank you. Yeah, you can, there's that meme of the guy like playing the piano, like, and it goes on fire.
00:30:57
Speaker
Like, that was kind of how I was feeling. You could you could tell, you know, that there's not a great deal of language like this in the book. And I just think we reading this is just evidence of how inspired I was. Yeah.
00:31:09
Speaker
having just watched this film and, and yeah, the alliteration and the the plosives, it's it's all there. And it is fun to to read out, read over it. And you mentioned seems, I said, the whole film seems to flutter along in one rhapsodic moment, which maybe is a subconscious desire on my part to temper some of the hyperbole because I'm not asserting that it flutters along. It seems to flutter. Yeah. Yeah.
00:31:35
Speaker
But, it you know, so so there may be that is some of my kind of built in resistance against getting too carried away. Yeah. In the writing. And yeah I hadn't really thought about that either. But it is interesting that I choose i chose there to say it seems rather than it it did does. It just happens.
00:31:51
Speaker
Yeah, which is funny, right? Because you're clearly making other value judgments, right? Mesmerizing, gorgeously, ah majesty. like It's not as if you're not being like, this is really bloody good. So just go watch it, right? But yeah, be a funny those moments where, again, whether this is like criticism or kind of like survey or overview that are we allowed to have poetic language in these kinds of things, right? It's almost like one of the questions. Like, is that what this is for? And here you're like, yeah, actually.
00:32:21
Speaker
like i think it totally fits it fits the film and that was one of my you know many rules and regulations for myself to as I embarked on this project I wanted to have language in each case that fit the film so if thought of a really really funny quip it wasn't gonna like work in a chapter about apartheid you know I had to restrain myself you know I so so the form of uh the style of the writing had to sort of match the film yeah um and then another rule here which I didn't mention earlier, was one thing I did to make it harder for myself, but hopefully better for the writer, was to separate out the synopsis.
00:32:58
Speaker
and So the synopsis lives on the left-hand side of the page. um We kind of agreed that with the designer early on. So there's a short synopsis. So sometimes in the main text, it will refer to something that has been made clear in the synopsis.
00:33:13
Speaker
Sure. and And that sort of the intention of that was to stop me from resting on synopsis to pack the word count. Yeah. And then and then and then this happens, you know, there's my word. Will that do kind thing?
00:33:26
Speaker
And it was really just a way to free up what is not a great amount of real estate. 450 words, I think, was the maximum that I had to do this, which is ah a tough so tough chunk of words because it's too long.
00:33:41
Speaker
for just the short capsule hit, but it's not long enough. You can't do the throat clearing in that. You know, when you have a thousand words, you can kind of get away with 300 words of throat clearing before getting into it. And in this case, it was like, no, I have to be, every word has to count.
00:33:56
Speaker
Yeah, that's like a ridiculously small number of words to to even get to like, yeah, the breadth of the thing that you're trying to talk about. And yeah, that that writing for a small space is like, what is the most important thing I need to tell you, right? And I think even if you take out the, you know, the kind of superlatives, even just the alliteration, right? You even do it in um when one considers the constellation involving its creation, cinematography, like...
00:34:20
Speaker
you i mean? Like even when you're not doing it for a kind of poetic purpose, like the sound play is there for to kind of move us along through it, right? to kind of help us almost to kind of just move through the sentence.
00:34:31
Speaker
And when when you've got that short word count, it's hard to, what are the key punches I need to give, right? What are the key things I need to hit on Completely to make it enjoyable to to read as well. yeah And I think, you know, when we talked earlier about um mentioning the two films earlier in the book,
00:34:48
Speaker
My dream is that someone picks this up and just sits down and reads it cover to cover. yeah Maybe that's not going to happen. But I did want to plot a ah course through the book. yeah It wasn't done in a more formal, you know, here's a cross-reference in the back, but like a sense of a story unfolding. You know, the chronological aspect of the book was very important.
00:35:07
Speaker
yeah And because you can seed ideas and you can pick up with characters early on and and then they can come back and appear in films or making films later in the book. And in this case, it's it's just a thematic through line.
00:35:19
Speaker
and So that was really important for me as well, to to be able to reference other films in a way that felt organic and that would would make sense to somebody who had decided to read it all the way through.
00:35:31
Speaker
I wish I said I did, but I didn't i haven't v yet finished, but I'm i'm jumping around. It's very much like, oh, I know that movie. Or like, oh, I always wanted to watch that movie. Or like, i wonder what Ashley is going to say about...
00:35:43
Speaker
Tyler Perry. and And were you surprised with what I said? I feel like you were very nice in a way. I thought you were going to go for the jugular, but you were um quite tempered, I thought.
00:35:57
Speaker
Magnanimous. Yeah. Not often a fair word use to describe you, but you know. like no no No, no, no, no, no. It was, ah yeah, I showed my my lesser spotted magnanimous stripe but for this.
00:36:08
Speaker
It was a hard one to write, actually. i know we're talking about Doors of the Dust, but I don't know if you've ever actually watched ah a Tyler Perry film. Oh, I have. But they truly operate on their own, in their own universe.
00:36:19
Speaker
And I think that was what perhaps influenced me to be more magnanimous than i than I might have done, because he truly is doing his own thing. It's it's a very singular style of filmmaking. And this one in particular, it just it just doesn't operate by the standard rules, even down to the the title, was really making me laugh, because it's called Medea Goes to Jail. And I chose this one because it's the the biggest box office success. I'd never watched it before.
00:36:44
Speaker
And I'm looking at my my watch and 75 minutes in, she still hasn't gone to jail yet. ah And that for me is an emblematic of, he doesn't play by the rules. No.
00:36:54
Speaker
But you can't ignore him. If you're trying to do a somewhat, you know, I would never call this fully comprehensive because it would be hubristic in the extreme to suggest that I could do that in this format.
00:37:06
Speaker
in this format But ah pretty in a broad-based appreciation of black cinema that has been important and influential in the last hundred or so years, yeah no small task, Tyler Perry plays a a huge role in that. And his contribution echoes throughout history from other black artists and entertainers who've been deemed disreputable.
00:37:27
Speaker
and, you know, potentially harming the cause of the race. You know, there was his infamous beef with Spike Lee. yep then you look And I mentioned it earlier, but you look back at how Shaft was received by the NAACP, how Amos and Andy was received, and even though that was very popular with black audiences.
00:37:43
Speaker
So again, it's one of those aspects in this book where there is a lineage that you can chart throughout. And I was trying to be attuned to that with the language I was using to describe things, which is why magnanimity was there with this Mr. Perry.
00:37:55
Speaker
yeah you're a better man than me no i think i taught diary of a mad black woman once on a on like an adult education film course and everyone was like furious with me for like making them watch it and i was like he's like one of the richest black filmmakers like working so if you want to if we need to talk about like black cinema in the us which i think is what the course was like you're gonna have to watch at least one of them and they were just like no this isn't good like what but do You think we have have to reckon with
Engaging with Popular Cinema in Criticism
00:38:23
Speaker
him. You have to reckon with stuff that you don't, um yeah you might not love. I think that's a really important, sounds simple, but it's such an important part of all this as well. Yeah, but it'd be like talking about other cinema, right? Like talking about contemporary cinema generally and not even looking at the fact that Marvel make movies. Do you know what mean? Like it would be just ignoring the money-making machine.
00:38:43
Speaker
in favor of like but we need art you know like okay but this is what people go and see quite a lot of the it's true but also crucially like wrestling with with the text as well because the again with that the dreaded d word the discourse and the meta text is so omnipresent yeah that you know the temptation can be to stray from the the hard work which is wrestling with what is on screen yeah Okay, listen, we're going to try a thing. This may be terrible, but Ashley and I are just going watch the just first like minute or so of the movie. I can't play it for you for copyright reasons, but I'm sure you can go find Doors the Dust. Go buy the actual special edition Blu-ray or DVD because it's beautiful. go Just go buy it.
00:39:20
Speaker
But I just want talk about the very opening because it's... We've discussed your kind of treatment of the film, but for people that haven't watched it, I think the visual language and style of the movie is like quite singular.
00:39:31
Speaker
And it'd be worth just like talking through some of the things that you see, some of the things that I see, just for a little, just for a couple of minutes before we move to your kind of writing. so we're going to press play at the same time and hope that it makes sense.
00:39:44
Speaker
So we've had this title card, right? And then we go straight onto these hands with like the dust, like coming out of them. And it's this slow-mo shot, I think, right? It's like, it's very slow. And immediately you get the crossfade to this guy washing in the water. Another crossfade to like a bedroom with these like billowing white curtains. And we see like a...
00:40:10
Speaker
person another crossfade let's just pause there because i can see the the water and the boat in the distance right yes like just think about like the crossfade right like the film opening on just images bleeding into one another Yeah, and that sets the tone, doesn't it, for the entire film? And it kind of gives you a a nod to those questions of intergenerational mingling in conversation and and how the voiceovers are divided between like the the the the unborn child like delivering a voiceover and Nana as well. So there's this whole swing of generation that is delivering the voiceover in the film. yeah um And that is ah just a really good example of...
00:40:53
Speaker
editing choices no they're not hard edits you know you're not having to reset every time you're being encouraged from the very first minute to settle into this rhythm and to understand that things are things are interconnected and that's just the film's form announcing that not in a in especially ostentatious way no it's just happening and and you're seeing that also with the colors of the film as well and and you're being asked as a viewer to to look closer and connect the dots yourself. Who is this person? I don't know yet, but you've come to trust the storytelling and that that steady hand as it proceeds.
00:41:29
Speaker
Yeah, it's a voice. We're like, we don't know who this is yet. This is not a film that's saying, you've got a voiceover, but you clearly know who it is, right Because I'm going to show you a photo, like a shot of them getting up out of bed or whatever, right? Text under the screen. Yeah, yeah literally. Yeah.
00:41:44
Speaker
And also, you know, the the first bodies that we see, we see hands, but we don't see the person's face, right? It's kind of cut off. We then see like a silhouette of a person in the water. Like we don't see who they are. Then we get a person lying in a bed, but we don't really see who they are. Like it's refusing us at like at various levels. Like you don't need to know who they are right now.
00:42:02
Speaker
make sense of these like bodies in space almost right and this is also i think something that you know the film took it was so long for it to get funded like hollywood didn't have anything to do with it my understanding is that pbs ended up american playhouse ponied up the cash to get it made and the first idea for it was in 1975 So that's 16, 17 years from conception to execution.
00:42:27
Speaker
And when it comes to commissioners or people being interested in this work, it's a very white dominated, very male dominated industry. And your she Julie Dash is presenting us with images that are not necessarily immediately legible to that demographic.
00:42:44
Speaker
Yeah. and So it's it's quite easy to turn away from what is this? I don't know. that It's too slow. Yeah. It's, you know, i don't i don't know what I'm looking at here kind of yeah kind of thing. Yeah. and And what I love, and it becomes ever it's more moving as time progresses, just how much she sticks to her guns with this film. Yeah. And how consistent the the aesthetic and the style is. How yeah clear the vision is as well.
00:43:07
Speaker
Yeah. a debut film, obviously that's slightly misleading because she'd been making short films for a long time. Yeah. you know If listeners can find her 1982 film Illusions, it's just absolutely beautiful. She made that UCLA um as part of what retroactively became known as the LA Rebellion School of Filmmaking, alongside the likes of Charles Burnett and Haile Gerima.
00:43:30
Speaker
um So she's been making films for a long time. This wasn't a total newbie, but still it's a debut feature. And the steadiness and the surety of the style and the vision, I find very moving and kind of exhilarating. Yeah, for sure. There were the title cards just before the bit that we started watching. and it kind of describes like the Gala people of the sea islands. And you're like, this is a film that is like, it's not it's easing you in, but it's not giving you things yet.
00:43:55
Speaker
And that tension, right? It's like, this is a soft movie in a way, right? It's very, it's not, it's not irreversible. you know what I mean? It's not challenging you visually in that way, but it, but is challenging you in a, in a slightly different way.
00:44:07
Speaker
It's asking you to to engage with it. Yeah. It's asking you to do some work, which is too much. It's too much.
00:44:15
Speaker
We love you, Julie. All right, let's first play again. Okay, let's go. we've got this boat in the distance. Another crossfade. And now we've got some people on this boat. Tell me what you see. Well, there's a person at the front rowing the boat and there's another crossfade into the kind of neck and chest region of one of the characters who's dressed all in white and her face is covered.
00:44:39
Speaker
yeah And then we fade into Daughters of the Dust, the the title card of the film. Yeah. And then we get this shot. I'm pausing it just because it's beautiful. You've got this aerial shot. Today it would be a drone shot. This is a full-on helicopter shot of the landscape, St. Simon's Island, Igbo Landing, the Sea Islands of the South, 1902. So we do get a clear sense of time and place imposed on the screen in text.
00:45:08
Speaker
But then we see a... Oh, man. so You don't want to hear me say it talking over it, but it is so beautiful. Just a man looking out at um sunset at this um on the the river's edge. Yeah.
00:45:23
Speaker
and And reads and the sky and such reverence for the language. and Right. he's like praying, right? Yeah. Also he, Muslim prayer. Yeah.
00:45:35
Speaker
Islamic core. So again, that also is sort of disrupting in a way, like what you think from this film. Yeah. Some of the first sounds you hear of the Islamic prayer. Yeah, that was something I'd forgotten actually yeah in thinking about that And again, like the the shots of like the reads, the hands, the book, like a marvel that you are not, that she is not giving us like someone's face for ages.
00:45:58
Speaker
yeah right the Like only here at this, but we start to see two people on the shore. And we're five minutes into the film now. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I don't know. There's something about that refusal of like immediate identification, right? This is the first the first kind of outand out and out close up here.
00:46:14
Speaker
ah Yeah, exactly. one of waiting women, you know, to welcoming this this group that has come on the boat. Yeah. Like wearing this incredible, these incredible clothes, right? That I don't know enough about clothing, but like this kind of, it feels like Edwardian or something, or even Victorian in various ways, clothing,
00:46:32
Speaker
in this swampland of the Carolinas, like people, I think viewers are going to be asking questions of like, who are these people? How are they dressed in this way? Where are they going? What am I seeing? Who are they? There's so much refusal. And I think that's to do with the water as well, right? Like this this film is just saturated with water.
00:46:52
Speaker
She kind of gives into that aesthetically too, right? Just movement. And not always like, not the sea as like this torrential, you know, rolling thing, but rather the swamp or the kind of the bayou as stillness as well, right? Which I think is really beautiful. It's like a really particular choice.
00:47:09
Speaker
Very much so. And something I think about, you know, i read a pretty depressing article a couple of years ago about, I think it was mainly about Netflix movies and about how commissioners are sort insisting now on...
00:47:20
Speaker
exposition and speed the start of a film. And it is increasingly rare to have to watch a film that takes its time. Yeah. That really takes its time. And you were speaking there about obscured faces, you know, even as points of identification, it takes a good few minutes here before you even see someone's whole face, which is again, a remarkable statement of intent.
00:47:43
Speaker
and And it's just, yeah, again, just watching it. I feel like, um I suddenly felt the pressure on there as I was watching this. close reading a film in real time as opposed to a book because I'm just like slack jawed looking at some of these vistas and some of the cinematography yeah and kind of falling behind i was like pausing it because I wanted to take in the yeah but yeah it's just such a it really is an immersive film and and I'm watching and I'm thinking now like it's not a surprise that my language was quite so let's not say hyperbolic but enthusiastic yeah in response to this Yeah, well, yeah, I don't know how you... Yeah, how do you not be enthusiastic about this movie, right? You know something is happening, right, as you watch this. You know that you're watching something that's not usual, right, that hasn't been the norm at that point.
00:48:32
Speaker
But you don't entirely know why, right? It's just like you're seeing lots of... Those fades were actually quicker than I remembered also, right? Like she does throw in quite a few images, right, in those... They're not long, slow...
00:48:45
Speaker
you know, she's not doing a Michael Haneke not moving for like five minutes, right? there's There's quite a few of those cross cuts. And that was quite interesting to me that actually, yeah, like, it's like image, image, iconography, image, landscape, you know, and you're kind of, you feel saturated by this stuff.
00:49:02
Speaker
Yeah. In a way that is both pleasurable and also a bit like, what's happening? Yeah, overwhelming in a way, and and and emotionally so. um and And that's just what I love about it. it's it's the The form of the film is is so consonant with with the landscape, with with the water and and the nature imagery. It just feels organic. and i And I really don't want to speak in cliches, right? I mean, it's sort of these these big statements about...
00:49:30
Speaker
organic filmmaking, but it it does feel so, so unified, the form and the content yeah in a way that is, it's so special. and I think it's why it's become so influential. It's yeah everybody knows lemonade by, by Beyonce, which was such a descendant of this film. and, um I think you we we see it, it pops up in so much other media. And I think it's the clarity and the unity of that vision has made it something that is is relatively, you know, you can take, you can adopt, you can appropriate from this vision. I don't necessarily mean appropriation in a completely derogatory sense. There's a rich history of appropriative art, which is actually quite generative. yeah um But I think in this case, you can really see where um where they're drawing from, which is a testament to the strength of Julie's vision.
00:50:16
Speaker
Yeah. Even if you Google it, listeners go Google it if you haven't seen it. And like, if you just type it in, you look and just the images part, and whatever search engine, sorry, I shouldn't say Google, damn with Google, but like and whatever search engine you you use, um the images, like there are so many striking shots of like the family on the beach, right? All wearing these incredible white dresses, right? And the sand is white and you just see sky. Or then there's a group of men in their like beautiful suits and their hats and they're taking like photos on the beach. like there are so many like,
00:50:46
Speaker
iconic images of the film, even though it's not a film heavy on plot, particularly, right? There's not tons of stuff that happens, but it is so a film invested in the image, both still and move it.
00:50:57
Speaker
There's just so much happening here that we could spend hours to just talking about the first five minutes. Go watch the film. yeah It's a one-off. Yeah, just go get the movie. Okay, you talked a little bit earlier about your writing in cafes. Okay, so A, is that always the way, do you have like a standardized setup for writing, different kinds of writing? oh i try where possible.
00:51:21
Speaker
Yeah, I try to write in my home office, but I think the one consistent feature of my writing is a sort of built-in meltdown for the first few days that I kind of generally just have to get out the way.
00:51:33
Speaker
For me, writing, it hasn't got better as I've got older. It's got worse. um It seems to be the practice that is uniquely attuned to my insecurities.
00:51:47
Speaker
It opens up a ah crack in my mind into which all my insecurities can can leap out and consume me. yeah Because when it's just you and the the page or the screen, let's not be quaint with our descriptions.
00:52:01
Speaker
You know, i'm a am I a fraud? Do I know what i'm talking about? This isn't good enough. It's all of that. and And that all kind of comes rushing up. um And this is a consistent thing for me.
00:52:13
Speaker
And then invariably, I'll somehow get to the end of the piece. Yeah. Through head or high water. And a couple of months later, I'll look back on it and go, that's all right, isn't it? Let's do that again. Let's do that again. When when all the toxicity has finally left my body, I can go, oh, actually, i'll take that commission.
00:52:29
Speaker
um So I think ultimately it's it's ah it's a product of many different circumstances and influences in my life. you know I went through a long period of writing film criticism and coming to be perhaps taken for granted as the guy that would write about black film. And I remember there was a moment when I was commissioned on the same day to write about 12 Years a Slave, A Haunted House 2, starring one of the Wayans brothers.
00:52:59
Speaker
And write a pre-obituary for Sidney Poitier. Oh, my god Because obviously, you know, it was this was long before he died. Yeah. But, you know, it's one of those quirks. Oh, that's why the obituary dropped as soon as this person died.
00:53:10
Speaker
Because someone wrote it five years ago. Yeah. And I remember thinking to him, I said, hang on a minute, this isn't right. No. And feeling sort of that pressure to be the guy who wrote about black film. and trying to reconcile the the complexities of being someone who's genuinely interested in all of that and wanted to write about it and contribute to the discourse and also understand that there was other people weren't necessarily writing about it. So there was a sense of a calling that yeah something I should be doing, but also that I also wanted to write about other things as well. So there's that sort of pressurized element.
00:53:40
Speaker
and There's the economic aspect of it too. You know, how much am I getting paid for this? yeah What is the reading environment? yeah When it goes out into the world, am I going to be subject to, you know, banter from the Twittersphere?
00:53:54
Speaker
So all of those things, I think, and who am I writing for? What is my audience? When you're a freelancer, you're jumping around. So all of these things can kind of commingle to make it quite difficult to know where you stand as a writer so there are these kind of magical moments when it when i find a commission like writing writing the criterion essay for the small axe films the the standard queen series you know i had like 3 000 words to really dig into those films and and that was a beautiful experience But i've always I think I've always enjoyed writing or I used to enjoy it before it became a profession.
00:54:28
Speaker
And I think it came from a desire of me wanting to express myself. um and And I spoke about that earlier, but wanting to share the things that I was passionate about. actually found something. can i Can I read you something? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So a couple of years ago, I was going through, like my mum was moving house and we were going through boxes and we found a report card.
Writing Challenges and Inspirations
00:54:46
Speaker
from me from my I think it was AS level theatre studies so I would have been about 16 or 17 and um my teacher Mr Grant wrote and I'll read it to you Ashley can produce very successful theatre studies writing as his early piece on the Red Shoes shows and this was a knee-high theatre production of the Red Shoes I believe that his subsequent assignments haven't been quite as successful because, paradoxically, he finds writing pleasurable and actually part of his persona.
00:55:13
Speaker
What he needs to do is listen very carefully to the subtly different types of writing we study in the exemplar material so that his own writing exactly suits the task in hand, rather than becoming an opportunity to listen to his own voice in a less than critical way.
00:55:27
Speaker
Wow. So I was very much red. Red for Phil. By by Mr. Grant, thank you. And and and that for me...
00:55:38
Speaker
it really stuck with me. It clearly influenced me. It was such a stinging piece of criticism, you know, in a way delivered with tenderness. I think. Yeah. Um, but what is writing for, is it about listening to yourself, because you enjoy it or how can, you know, is there a way you can apply your enthusiasm in ways that are yeah productive and and generative? And, and I, and I really was enjoying it then, you know, that was at the time that I was reading all of those music magazines. I was getting into the idea of critical writing,
00:56:09
Speaker
getting my opinion out there on things yeah there's an element of ego to that right you know listen to what i think yeah yeah i'm kind asking yourself why you know why do i want people to know what i think and then why do i like what i like these are like fundamental questions which i'm always searching for the answers for yeah and but it but it started early for me it started you know when i was 15 16 that would have been 17 when i got that the judgment came down from mr grant and And I started writing, you know, reading film criticism. So I had all the film guides. I had like the, the you know, the big kind of doorstop timeout film guide. Oh, yeah. Virgin film guides. Leslie Halliwell's incredibly miserable, like one line movie reviews.
00:56:49
Speaker
and And all of that was ah's so interesting to me. And that that I think that was what started on my journey of wanting to actually be a writer. And I've just done so many things influenced by my economic realities of what I could afford to write, what commissions I could afford to take on. And there was a stretch for it for many years when I was writing a lot.
00:57:10
Speaker
I was writing for any publication that would have me. And it was reviews, features, interviews, the lot. And I was right i was doing my own blog. yeah you know I was just writing constantly and and figuring out what what my voice was and what I wanted it to be.
00:57:25
Speaker
And I still think to this day that I'm just you know improving as a writer and and honest understanding that like that those ideas, clarity and precision, are just so important for me. I don't want to be misunderstood.
00:57:36
Speaker
So how can i what can I do within my power to achieve not being misunderstood? in In a world where there's such a war against context, it's increasingly difficult. yeah But I think there's there's power and precision there's this's power in in precision of language.
00:57:51
Speaker
And and that those are things I'm always thinking about as I'm yeah i'm writing. if This is reminding me of Andrea Long Chew, critic par excellence. She's got her kind of collected essays in a book called Authority. Listeners, go read that. That's my recommendation today. There's a really good essay in there about the role of the critic over time, which is fantastic. But the introduction is about what do we want from the critic today? And like all the things you've been saying today about like the material realities, like her point is like pay critics more and pay them so that they can do the thing that you think you want them to do, which is to give you a kind of thought out value judgment on the thing. Right. She talks about how, you know, she's in this privileged position where Vulture will pay her like a salary.
00:58:33
Speaker
And if she's reviewing a movie or a book, she's going to read that person's back catalog. Right. So she's reading a new novel by this person. She's going to read every other book by that person to contextualize and understand what this new book is doing or the movie or whatever it is. that She's like, nobody gets to do that. Right. As a critic, like that's so rare, like it's near impossible. So when she was a really, really interesting essay that i think taps into things you're talking about here.
00:58:56
Speaker
I think it's all it's all connected. And if for me, criticism should be revelatory and it should be rooted in in in the kind of love and respect for the art form. So there was a time in my life where the kind of gotcha criticism or the pan, and we speak of Andrea Longchua, a pan par excellence. Yeah.
00:59:18
Speaker
Reading her pans great. You know, they're fun. Yeah. um But over time, I came to kind of take less pleasure in writing those. i think when I started to understand, actually don't know how to put this, but I think I just maybe, I don't want to say I matured because I don't think that's right either.
00:59:37
Speaker
but I just found more value in trying to articulate an issue in the context of care as opposed to this is a piece of shit. you know For me, like I wrote about the FIFA movie, United Passions, where Tim Roth plays Set Blatter.
00:59:53
Speaker
And you know and i got I wrote such a vicious pan for it that I got invited to like radio shows to talk about it. ah And that film is a kind of morally bankrupt piece of shit, so I have no problem with that. But when you're like panning a piece of work that someone has spent, a low-budget filmmaker, yeah yeah five, six years of their life trying to put together, what are you really doing? yeah And in some ways, that's why I stepped back from it, because I also wanted to make sure I was being honest.
01:00:17
Speaker
you know And if i'm if I can't bring my full critical self to the table, I shouldn't be doing it. um So that's about me and the choices of which commissions to take on. yeah But i give you an example, ah you know a critic, um Toby Haslett, who I think is brilliant, um who wrote a great band of the Thomas Chatterton Williams memoir, um which I recommend everyone run out and read. He raised a really brilliant criticism about um the Raoul Peck film, I Am Not Your Negro.
01:00:43
Speaker
And he he he made the point that he was troubled by the filmmakers use of Samuel Jackson to do the voiceover of Baldwin. And it's Samuel. And I really loved the film, but then it that made me see it in a completely different way because it was a sort of intentional or not. It did remove a core part of Baldwin's identity, yeah which is some of which is queerness and his grace. Yeah. You know, when you have Samuel Jackson doing it in full on kind of badass mode. Yes.
01:01:13
Speaker
And I thought, oh my God, you know, for me, like that's one, okay, this is like 10 years ago, but I just remember thinking, oh, that's great criticism. It's something that is is really textually specific. It's something I hadn't thought of.
01:01:24
Speaker
yeah And it deepens my appreciation for the choices made in the film. It doesn't mean that the film's bad. Right. But it's a close reading of it. Yeah. That's what we need. In really thoughtful way.
01:01:35
Speaker
Yeah. Just very quickly. So the writing is chaos. It gets worse. Yeah. when When you, when you take away what you said, you have to write 100 of these entries. Like, did you say, like, I'm going to do one every three days? Is it two a week? Is it like, how did you even think about that mountain?
01:01:53
Speaker
um Yeah, I was essentially trying to get three or four a week done, like when it when it really kicked in towards the end. And I found some sort of rhythm towards the end out of pure necessity. Yeah.
01:02:07
Speaker
And there were these occasional magical moments like with Daughters of the Dust when I was able to find some poetry in there. I was really trying to make the the writing accessible. The person I had in mind for the book was myself at 16 or 17. So it's no good if it's written in a style that's alienating. And it also can't be pandering, but it needed to be specific as well. I wanted to make sure that in each um in each capsule, there was something that was a piece of criticism or reference to...
01:02:38
Speaker
something specific to the medium of film. Yeah. So there's some formal analysis in there. And it was just a case of being extremely disciplined, trying to write three or four a week. And it took it took a couple of years all told. But, you know, there was, I procrastinated for quite a while to begin with.
01:02:54
Speaker
And then when the realities of it hit, yeah you know, I ended up writing, I think about... 40 odd in in five months or something like that. Yeah. So yeah, when the when the pressure was on, I sort of kicked in.
01:03:06
Speaker
But um it's, you know, i don't mean to be too histrionic or overdramatic about writing getting worse. What I mean is it just hasn't got any... Yeah, yeah. It hasn't. It's not like I've reached maestro's day, I've been doing 20 years or whatever, where it just flows.
01:03:22
Speaker
That's just not the case. There are too many psychological... economic, yeah um professional factors yeah yeah that that flow into my own experience of writing and why I do it and when I do it, yeah that there's it allows for very little consistency. Yeah, good. I think it's nice for people to hear, right Like, you are the criterion man, right? Like, that's...
01:03:44
Speaker
you in my head. I'm like, if the criterion man struggles to write these like beautiful essays, then we can all struggle and it's fine. i believe in being honest about this. And and i and I believe in in not pretending that writing is easy. It shouldn't be easy.
01:03:59
Speaker
We live in a society. We live in a society. where forces are conspiring on an extraordinarily aggressive level to get us to stop thinking for ourselves. Yeah.
01:04:12
Speaker
To punch things into language learning models, to to not bother doing research, to not you know to not try. And ultimately, writing is hard. It's hard to dive into your own mind. It's hard to articulate yourself in a clear way.
01:04:28
Speaker
it's hard to come up with a consistent position on a text which itself might be ever shifting. yeah I'm sure you have been in a position, I certainly have, where I've sat down to review a piece of work and just as I'm approaching my deadline, uh-oh, I don't agree with myself anymore.
01:04:45
Speaker
What now? yet Writing shouldn't be easy. And I think you should probably only be doing it if you something in you is telling you you have to do it. yeah um I think that um it's at its best, it's really rewarding um because you you kind of can come to understand yourself a little more clearly after after the fact as well.
01:05:05
Speaker
yeah And understand why why you are, again, i'm I'm saying it again, but it's a fundamental question. Why do I like what I like? That is a hard question. Because sometimes you respond to things and you have no idea why.
01:05:16
Speaker
Sometimes it's a question that people don't want to ask themselves for very good reasons because it might reveal something about yourself you're not yet overly comfortable with. So when I say writing doesn't get easier, i don't you know i don't mean that it's...
01:05:29
Speaker
downhill all the way, some you know downhill spiral to yeah to death. But it really is something that is tricky and I think it should be. And I don't have a problem with that except when I actually open the laptop and start to write. And I do have a big problem with it. Yeah, disagree with myself. don't even know what I think most the time. So yeah, I'm like, you know, it's one thing saying like, I really like this thing. Hey, you are the person who I've never met before. Like you, I think you might like it. and These are the reasons why I think it's good. yeah Or the all the reverse, right? Why don't I like it? Well, I just don't.
01:06:01
Speaker
Why not? Because it's shit. Yeah, just because it is. That's what I'm saying. You can do, isn't it? Like when you when you show someone, like a friend or partner or whatever, I really like this. And then you're sitting watching them watching it and you get this horrible sense five minutes in that maybe they're not.
01:06:16
Speaker
so So there is something very vulnerable about sharing hundred percent why you like what you like. 100%. Even in like class when I give students books, like I'm like, well, I'm teaching you this for a reason, right? There's like a clear reason why we need to read this book. But also, like I really care about it. and If you hate it, don't know going to do about that. It's not often that they're like, I really, really hate this, Chris. But like sometimes they're just like, it's fine. like, fine.
01:06:38
Speaker
Yeah. This is Nella Larsen's passing. Like, I feel like you should just leave. Like, what do want me to do? Just get out. Oh, actually, funny enough. i Should I say this? Yeah. Well, let's say a certain teacher at school showed us what the exams were done. This was when we'd have been in about 15, 16.
01:06:55
Speaker
They put on the film of Glenn, Gary Glenn Ross, because David Mamet, love him or hate him, has a very particular style of language. you know He's one of those.
01:07:05
Speaker
You can listen to three lines over David Mamet. You know it's him. You know. There were a couple of classmates who were sort of giggling and not really paying attention, and he screamed at them. He said, get out.
01:07:17
Speaker
And we were all kind of shocked into silence, but I remember, like... that seeing that passion, not that I would advocate for excommunicating a couple of students after the exams are done because they weren't fully paying attention, but he was so invested in wanting us to pay attention to the language yeah that his passion just kind of over overflowed there. yeah And there is, again, it's that vulnerable. He was probably feeling that. He was like,
01:07:44
Speaker
I want these kids to understand how this language is operating. And these are not, these kids are not, um, so they can leave. i love it. Yeah. Okay. My last question. So I always say like, what books might you recommend, but I'm going allow you to break this little bit. If you want to recommend books and films, you can, but it's up to you wherever you want to go.
01:08:04
Speaker
No, this is, this is books up close. I'm going to recommend books.
Recommendations and Reflections
01:08:09
Speaker
A novel called a Shock by an Irish author called Keith Ridgway, who's based in London.
01:08:16
Speaker
And a friend of mine recommended this to me a couple of years ago, and it really got under my skin and and stuck with me. It's a very fragmented and queer and funny and very disturbing portrait of disparate individuals in in London.
01:08:32
Speaker
And it kind of deals with the the last collapse of the reverberations of the last collapse of the Labour left in a way that's not explicitly political, but it kind of colours the way the characters interact. um And it just struck me as very, just very unique and thoughtful and funny. And I loved it. So A Shock by Keith Ridgway.
01:08:53
Speaker
I think Amy Siles' book, The African Gaze, which is the a kind of textbook about African film and photography. which came out also a couple of years ago, dare I say is a nice kind of compliment with my book. and they They take a similar-ish approach. you know um Hers is kind of slightly more academic and in in tone, I think, than mine and has other great contributors in it. So it's slightly more of a poly vocal piece and it's just so beautifully designed and made with such love and She spent so much time with all of the filmmakers, the still living ones.
01:09:26
Speaker
So I think Amy Sall's book is great. um And I just read London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe and kind of tore through it in a couple of days. I thought it was just exemplary storytelling and it reflected London back to me in a way that I knew kind of existed, but it gets into those crevices and corners in a way that's very illuminating. And again, just the the control that the...
01:09:50
Speaker
the the control of the language and the pacing and when details are introduced. yeah So many times I was like, oh, that's why you mentioned that five pages ago. You got me again. you know yeah. yeah um I thought it was terrific. So those those are the three that popped to mind. Those are very different, very, yeah, great suggestions. um Yeah, what he does is a particular skill, right? And like it is the same as fiction, right? You're like, I need, if I'm having this thing here, I need this thing here. i need to make this formal choice about, you know, I've heard some complaints about like, oh, the chapter then goes off to this other place and I want to stay with this story. And it's like, this is called form people, right? Like there's there's a structure for a reason, just like stay with it, right? Like,
01:10:30
Speaker
it's ah I don't know, this is me going to off on one, but I'm going stop myself. But like, there's like a distrust, right, of like, the the author, the person who made the thing. Sometimes I think, I feel like this is the same as you know, we hate experts now i'm writing contemporary life, like expert, like down with expertise. And sometimes like just let the author or the filmmaker or the artist like take you just suspend yourself for like a minute, please.
01:10:54
Speaker
and Maybe they know what they're doing. Yeah. Yeah. And if they don't, just like wait till the end to say that. But anyway. um Can I just say
Collaboration with Criterion
01:11:00
Speaker
one quick thing? Yeah. You know, I'm Mr. Criterion. I just want to shout out like the criteriaterion Criterion editorial team as well.
01:11:07
Speaker
You know, I wrote my first piece for them um in 2017. It was this film, a Black Girl. I wrote the liner notes for the for the Blu-ray premiere of premiere of Black Girl by Usman Semben.
01:11:19
Speaker
Just the the level of detail and and the the just the kindness and the thoughtfulness that goes into the editing process. And I've written it numerous things, even though i work there in a curatorial position, occasionally write write um long-form essays for for them as well. and they're just the best in the business.
01:11:37
Speaker
And I feel very honored and grateful to get to to work with them. And yeah, keeping the art of editing alive, it's amazing, it's beautiful. And there's nothing on the theme of close reading, nothing more moving than being edited well, yeah read with care, and shaped to be the best version of yourself that you can on the page. I love that.
01:11:58
Speaker
That's a great place to end. Ashley, this was a joy. Thank
Listener Engagement and Feedback
01:12:02
Speaker
you so much for doing this. Loved it. Absolutely loved it. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this episode. Please subscribe if you haven't already. Leave a review on Apple Podcasts or on YouTube and share with people on socials. Follow the show and me on Instagram at Books Up Close.
01:12:21
Speaker
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01:12:33
Speaker
You can also get show transcripts and more information by subscribing to the Substack. This show is made possible by an Impact Accelerator Award from the University of Hertfordshire and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.