Shadows Dancing On A White Wall

Shadows Dancing On A White Wall

The definition of an illusion, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is a thing that is or is likely to be wrongly perceived or interpreted by the senses. 

Illusions (Julie Dash, 1982) lives up to its name in a multitude of ways, especially in today’s modern context. An illusion, besides fooling one’s brain and senses, also reveals how the brain normally organizes and interprets sensory information. Film, as most genres of entertainment, is a product of the standards that society expects. The film opens with a narrated quote from Ralph Ellison, a noted African American writer from the 1940s. The main character, never referred to directly by name but supposedly called Mignon Dupree (Lonette McKee), speaks slowly in a soft but knowing tone, over a gradually shimmering figure of an Oscar award trophy floating closer and closer to the camera: “To direct an attack upon Hollywood would indeed be to confuse portrayal with action, the image with reality. In the beginning was not the shadow but the act, and the province of Hollywood is not action but illusion.” 

Just as the United States has grown and prospered with white people above black people, and with men above women, since its conception, so too has the film industry. The illusion so accepted by the public and by society in the classical Hollywood era, the so-called “Golden Age,” that black people and women were not involved in filmmaking. The dominant white society then expected and interpreted an all-white film as the standard, and if and when that standard was disrupted, it was an attack on everything Hollywood had been built as within America’s patriarchal white society. Illusions delves into this concept of disruption of the norm, and of quite literally whitewashing black voices; the idea that black people in cinema were nothing more than “shadows dancing on a white wall.” 

The surface level illusion within the film, and the basis of the plot is that Mignon appeared white to her coworkers, but was actually African American. She works at a fictitious film studio in 1942 in Hollywood, at a time when it was rare for women to work on the production side of film at all, let alone a black woman. When the film Mignon and her coworkers are producing has a problem with the audio, they seek out Esther Jeeter (Rosanne Katon), a black woman, to dub her voice over the film they’ve already taken of a white actress. 

A much more technical illusion is that of making the film look and sound like one actually created in the 1940s during World War II. When I first began watching, I had to double check the film’s release date because I thought I had chosen the wrong film, as I expected something much more modern-looking from 1982. The entire film is in black and white, and the audio has definite similarities to the audio that earlier Hollywood cinema has. A performance from Ella Fitzgerald, a legendary black jazz singer from the classical Hollywood era the film is set during, is used as the singing voice of Esther Jeeter when she dubs the video of the white singer. The entirety of that scene has quite a few apt similarities to filmmaking techniques I’ve seen used in other films really created in the 40s, from the distorted reflections of the audio producers in the recording booth glass to the super-imposed video of the white actress. It gives the film an air of truly feeling like it is from the 40s.  

The meaning behind setting a film about race and feminisim in the World War II era 1940s is one aspect of the film that is decidedly not an illusion. The metatextual result of using this time period may be one that focuses too heavily on the past, and may lead the audience, however educated and societally aware, to believe that the issues of race and gender in film is one of the past. Clearly, especially with the events of this year, the United States has an extremely large distance to go before this movie truly represents a by-gone era. Even with the calls for justice made in recent years, like hashtag “#OscarsSoWhite” that has gained such massive popularity, there are still massive disruptions to be made within the film industry.  

In a review of Illusions as part of a larger thesis on writing history in films, Lesley Victoria Butler describes Dash’s filmmaking as “imaginative and affective,” and goes on to say that through her “innovative representations of race, gender, and history,” she is able to “expand the contours of female subjectivity,” to “include women of all ages and appearances, complex emotion, and collective identification.” 

I would agree with Butler’s statement, however, I also believe that Dash did more than expand simply within the realm of women. The illusion that the film may be about either solely black people’s rights, or solely women’s rights, rather than feminism as a whole is a blatant misconception because the two are inextricably and permanently linked, especially in the film industry. There cannot be one without the other. When Mignon sees Lieutenant Bedsford (Ned Bellamy) reading her personal letters towards the end of the film and discovering that she is not white, Mignon’s face is framed in the mirror hung on the wall, her expression clear and stern. The go on to argue about her keeping her true race a secret, and it eventually culminated in Mignon asking the nonchalant and ignorant Lieutenant, in a bout of rightful anger: “Why are you so afraid of me? I develop musicals, Lieutenant. Escapist films for a war-weary country. You’re the one with the power and the influence behind you. I fear you and I envy you at the same time.” She also goes on later to admonish the Lieutenant for telling her to give it time, and to wait until after the war for the power dynamics of society to change: “How dare you talk about time to me. We are overseas defending some sort of a democracy that does not even exist here in this country.” 

In another review I read about Illusions, the focus on Dash’s commentary on America’s self-proclaimed democracy seemed to be a primary point within the critique. Film Critic and Professor Judylyn Ryan states in a 2004 article that “Of the many commitments [Julie Dash] embraces in Illusions, perhaps the most significant is her commitment to exploring and expanding the narrative responsibilities of democracy. Dash foregrounds her critique of the construction of “democracy” and “history” in Hollywood narrative with the opening reference to Ellison, her voice-over narrator grappling with the problem of how to mount “an attack upon Hollywood” for its role in perpetuating undemocratic representational practices that endorse White supremacist ideologies.” 

The focus on World War II propoganda and the influence film has on a war-time democracy that Dash uses in the film also contribute to the feel of the 40s. However, there is still more to it than simply immersion. As Ryan describes in her critique, Julie Dash’s use of having Mignon calling out the democracy that the United States so frequently names as its goal is a culmination of everything Illusions tries to accomplish. It names some of the issues America has always had and will have for a considerably long future, and overall accomplishes an illusion just as much as America has for all its history.