Filming Social Death and the Fixed Position of Blackness: On L.A. Rebellion Director Julie Dash’s Four Women

Abstract:During the late 1970s and early 1980s, critically acclaimed Black auteur Julie Dash wrote, assisted with, and directed films while attending the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Film School. At UCLA, Dash participated in the L.A. Rebellion, a group of Black filmmakers who sought to make independent cinematic productions that subverted racist images of Black people that often appeared on mainstream Hollywood screens. In this way, the L.A. Rebellion’s filmography and, specifically, the group’s distinctive narrative form and style, is central to the Black indie movement. Dash therefore currently occupies a unique and highly esteemed place in the history of American film. Her most famous works—her UCLA thesis production, Illusions (1982), and her theatrical feature, Daughters of the Dust (1991)—have become celebrated for their narratives centered on Black women as well as their implicit critiques of Hollywood and slavery, respectively. In this article, I examine Dash’s Project One UCLA student production, Four Women (1975), to argue that her Black characters are positioned by what sociologist Orlando Patterson calls social death. Most broadly, I argue that Dash employs narrative strategies and cinematic style to highlight the fixed position of Blackness from slavery to the present era, while also illustrating the consumption of racist stereotypes vis-à-vis Black women in American culture and society.