Women and Girls

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Remaking Country’s Gender Politics, One Barroom Weeper at a Time

      by

      Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.Monday morning at the office: Shane McAnally was writing a country song with Josh Osborne, a regular collaborator. McAnally, compact and tight-strung in jeans and T-shirt, sat on a chair with his sneakered feet up and a laptop balanced on his thighs, an acoustic guitar and an enormous carryout cup of iced tea within reach. Osborne, mellower, in a purple hoodie, sat on a couch cradling another guitar, on which he picked out a loping groove in the key of A.They started with a line they heard spoken at a songwriters’ gathering, “I drank alone a long time,” when someone raised a glass in appreciation of getting together with fellow musicians after pandemic-induced isolation. McAnally recalls that he and Osborne exchanged a wordless look: That’s a song! Now they were writing it. When one of them had an idea, he would half-moan nonsense syllables as placeholders for the parts he hadn’t worked out yet: “Yeah that whiskey sure used to burn, now it’s sweet on your lips mmmmhmmmm anana turn …” The other would murmur along in harmony, a fraction of a beat behind, testing resonance and mouthfeel.The lines of the first verse had a cantilevered quality typical of McAnally’s songs, surprising the ear a little and adding a sense of urgency by going past the expected rhythmic endpoint and wrapping around into the next in a lilting run-on: “I don’t mind if they turn on the lights/And last call don’t faze me at all/My glass was half-empty before you were with me.” The developing song featured McAnally’s favorite chord change — “a 3 minor just breaks my heart,” he says — but his distinctive lyrical flow was the surest mark of his authorship. Plenty of popular songwriting sounds as if the words have been written to fit the groove, but McAnally’s songs sound as if the groove grows organically from the poetic rhythm inhering in the words. “I can almost instantly tell when I hear something Shane has written,” Kacey Musgraves told me by email, “even when it’s sung by another artist.” Once McAnally and Osborne got going, the song came in a rush. After they finished, they recorded a rough take to serve as a guide for a demo they could pitch to singers. McAnally would normally sing the rough take, but he had been having problems with his voice, so Osborne sang it. They talked about whether the song might be right for Blake Shelton. (“I Drank Alone” is currently on hold for Carly Pearce, meaning she has the right of first refusal to record it.) Afterward, McAnally told me that Sam Hunt, another regular collaborator, talks about “the window being open for a few minutes — it’s like God walks through the room and you better be holding a guitar when it happens.” Such inspiration makes frequent visits to this cozily appointed room in the Nashville headquarters of SMACKSongs, McAnally’s music publishing and management company. Framed posters of country artists who have recorded McAnally’s songs cover one wall. Another is tiered with “10 Songs I Wish I’d Written” awards from the Nashville Songwriters Association International, honoring songs like “Merry Go ’Round” (a hit for Musgraves), “John Cougar, John Deere, John 3:16” (Keith Urban) and “Body Like a Back Road” (Sam Hunt — 34 straight weeks at No. 1, a record at the time). The windows look out on Music Row, the stretch of 16th Avenue South lined with the offices of record labels, radio networks, recording studios, public-relations firms and music-licensing and publishing outfits like ASCAP and BMI. It’s the Wall Street and Madison Avenue of country music, as well as a hub for gospel, pop, Christian music and other genres. Possibly it’s the place on earth with the greatest concentration of expertise for creating and distributing popular songs.McAnally, who has been wildly successful at reaching a lot of listeners and winning critical acclaim by making songs for other people to sing, would seem to be the quintessential Nashville insider. He has co-written or produced 39 songs that reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Airplay or Hot Country Songs charts; Country Aircheck, which tracks radio airplay, puts his total at 43; and, depending on how you count Canadian, European and other charts, the number passes 50 — plus, of course, many more hits that topped out short of No. 1. He revived and is co-president of the historic label Monument Records, a joint venture with Sony. He has produced albums by Musgraves, Hunt, Pearce, Walker Hayes, Midland and Old Dominion, among others. He has won three Grammys, 19 N.S.A.I. “I Wish I’d Written” awards and an armful of honors from the Academy of Country Music and the Country Music Association. He has more C.M.A. song-of-the-year nominations than any other songwriter in history.But while McAnally may be a high-end craftsman operating deep within Nashville’s music-industrial complex, he also sees himself as an insurgent who has put himself in position to work subtle, far-reaching changes on an industry that has historically been hostile to what he represents. For most of the past 15 years, McAnally has been known as one of the very few out gay men in a position of creative influence in mainstream country music. Attentive listeners can discern in his body of work a gradual effort to rewrite the genre’s DNA to encourage mutation in its famously hidebound assumptions about sex and gender. It’s not that the industry doesn’t know about the full range of human sexual behavior; rather, part of its brand has been to act as if it doesn’t want to know about large sections of that range. Most country music fans may simply assume that the many romantic songs McAnally has written refer to loved ones of the opposite sex, especially when sung by singers they assume to be straight. But, as he likes to point out, those songs work just as well for same-sex attraction. The whiskey-sweet lips in “I Drank Alone” could belong to a man or a woman, and he would rather not force the listener to choose. When I asked him how conscious he was of trying to transform country’s gender politics, he said: “Oh, it’s conscious, but it’s also just who I am. I think part of it is being gay. I don’t like speaking in the masculine or the feminine. I feel like it corners things, compartmentalizes.” As far back as McAnally can remember, he has thought in songs. He hears fragments and nuggets of song in the speech and lives of family, friends, colleagues, strangers and characters in the Southern memoirs and biographies he likes to read. His mother’s turns of phrase, for instance, have helped inspire the choruses in hits like “Merry Go ’Round” (“Mama’s hooked on Mary Kay/Brother’s hooked on maryjane/And Daddy’s hooked on Mary two doors down”) and Miranda Lambert’s “Mama’s Broken Heart” (“Go and fix your makeup, girl, it’s just a breakup/Run and hide your crazy and start actin’ like a lady”). When McAnally was a little boy in Mineral Wells, Texas, he would pace around the perimeter of the parking lot at his grandmother’s clothing store, making up lyrics in his head about people he knew, superimposing the words onto the melodies of songs he had heard at home, in church or during rides in his father’s Jeep, when the playlist skewed to the classic country of Merle Haggard and George Strait.That primal songwriting scene in the parking lot serves as a reminder that new songs come, at least in part, from old songs. Standard country music templates like the heartbreak tale or the evocation of small-town life stood ready to hand when someone said something that suggested the germ of a song. Think of a song as an ancient technology for imposing form and meaning on experience, a device for filtering the chaotic noise of inner life and the world around us so it can be translated into meaningful signal. Or think of a song as a container into which you can pour a distilled feeling that others can then imbibe by playing or singing or listening to it.The signature feeling in McAnally’s songs — even “I Drank Alone,” a story of love found — is a yearning, restless quality he described to me as “that sense of unrequited ‘almost’: it’s almost right, you’re almost there, but you can’t quite. …” Musgraves told me, “Shane and I always love finding the melancholy aspect inside of the greater feelings of happiness and love.” Or, as his friend and frequent songwriting collaborator Brandy Clark puts it, “He’s just a little bit addicted to heartbreak.” The unrequited almost running through McAnally’s songs makes an ideal fit with the cathartic blend of sadness and joy that comes factory-installed in country music, a hurt-obsessed genre rich in dark songs about love and jaunty songs about sorrow. McAnally cites a past toxic romance as a continuing inspiration, but when we talked about his own experience, he kept coming back to his father, “a certain ultimate concept of a Texas man.” He went on: “He and his two brothers, they played football, there were stories about how wild they were. He was a badass, and they were small-town kings.” McAnally’s parents, high school sweethearts, had a volatile relationship. “It lasted 12 years, and they got divorced and remarried in the middle of it — very George Jones,” a reference to the towering marital melodrama between Jones and Tammy Wynette, owners of two of the greatest heartache-drenched voices of all time. Classic country music themes like hard work, prison (he recalls that his father served a four-year term that ended the marriage for good) and abandonment also figure in McAnally’s family story; a gingerly respectful cordiality now prevails between son and father. “I wanted to be like him,” he told me. “That was the great out-of-reach thing I aspired to, and, being gay, thinking of it as being a sissy, that kept me in the closet for a long time.” In our conversations McAnally pointed to Dolly Parton’s “Here You Come Again” and the Eddy Arnold-Ray Charles ballad of hopeless longing “You Don’t Know Me” as touchstone songs for him. Both are nominally about romance, but the feelings they express extend well beyond. “Continuing to reach out for someone who’s just not quite available,” McAnally said. “That’s my dad.”McAnally wasn’t out yet when he sang and wrote his way from Mineral Wells to Nashville in the 1990s and took his shot at an onstage singing career. When stardom eluded him, he moved to Los Angeles for a few years, where he heard more than his share of last calls and wrote a lot of songs, some of which were picked up by well-known singers. In 2007, he returned to Nashville as a battle-tested songwriter, and he also came out as a gay man in an industry that had always insisted on the closet. Now, at 48, he’s two years sober and raising 10-year-old twins with his husband, Michael McAnally Baum, who is the president of SMACKSongs.If these days McAnally is no longer regarded as a lone exception, you might credit his prominent example — Nashville’s mayor presided at his nuptials with Baum in 2017 — for helping embolden other gay men and women associated with country to come out, a growing list that includes T.J. Osborne of the Brothers Osborne, Lily Rose, Orville Peck, Lil Nas X, Brandi Carlile and Brandy Clark. But McAnally says: “I don’t think we’ve actually come that far in terms of major commercial figures. Baby steps are huge, but they’re baby steps.” He notes that most of the names on the out list are identified with Americana, pop or behind-the-scenes songwriting.“I’m stuck in the habit of ‘what Nashville thinks,’” he says, by which he means that he measures progress in terms of onstage stars in the industry’s commercial mainstream. “T.J. is such an important part of the long-term story, because he’s trying to show his queerness and his allyship to any sort of queer person, but he’s half of a duo, and they’re not in competition with the Jason Aldeans and Luke Bryans of the world because they’re left of center. And Lily Rose seems totally authentic, and she’s getting close to a big hit, but she hasn’t had one yet. I do see that people are fighting for it, though, and that matters.”At times he has felt that he had something extra to prove. “When gay songwriters come up to me and they’re like, ‘You inspire me,’ I say, ‘You just have to be better and outwork them,’” McAnally says. “I was like, ‘I can out-bro you, I can out-country you,’ which comes from this fear of being stereotyped. Like, ‘Well, he’s gay, so he probably can’t write songs that Luke Bryan or George Strait would want to sing.’”Thinking constantly about what others want to sing and what the industry would allow them to sing has taken a toll on McAnally, a feelingful guy prone to intense self-examination. He believes that it’s at the root of his voice problems. After a lifetime of being able to sing whatever he felt like singing, in the last couple of years he has lost the ability to sing in full voice or even hold a note. He can knock around musical ideas in a songwriting session, but any attempt to stretch his voice, even to make himself heard in conversation in a loud room, can cause it to seize up.Shane McAnally sees himself as an insurgent in Nashville — one of the few out gay men with creative influence.Kristine Potter for The New York TimesThe diagnosis is muscular tension dysphonia, a vocal cousin of the yips, the twisties and other such sudden inexplicable crises that can render a seasoned athlete unable to perform. “What happened to Simone Biles is what made me decide to get help,” he told me. “They tell me there’s nothing wrong with my body that they can find, so it’s mental, spiritual, but it feels physical.” Dysphonia troubles many singers — his vocal therapist told him that she counted nine other artists with whom she had worked when she saw him on a C.M.A. awards telecast — and its onset can be mysterious, often causing profound doubts to set in. It’s hard not to feel that your body’s trying to tell you something by refusing to do what has always come naturally.As McAnally tells the story of his career, the music he made in his youth as a would-be Nashville star was less than authentic because he was closeted, then he came out and wrote more authentic songs for himself to sing that, it turned out, others wanted to sing. But hitting the jackpot as a songwriter ushered in another phase of unrequited almost. “My material voice has diminished as my metaphorical voice has diminished,” he says, tracing the roots of the affliction to the moment he realized he could win praise and riches by writing songs for others to sing. “You become a box-checker,” he says. “Especially if you’ve had a lot of hits, you can’t help but imitate what’s worked before. If you’re always saying, ‘Would Luke Bryan say this?’ you have compromised yourself.” Yes, his success has taken him deep into the machinery of Nashville’s establishment, but the words he uses to describe his situation there — boxed-in, claustrophobic, smothered — are the same ones he uses to describe the panic that comes over him when he feels that his voice is going to fail and make him look foolish.McAnally has been spending more time away from Nashville of late — in New York, traveling in Africa with his family, pricing houses with his husband in California — and that seems to revive his voice. These days he finds that sometimes, under certain conditions, he can sing. “There will be an hour when my voice feels all right,” he told me, “and I can do it where it’s quiet, nobody in the studio but me and the engineer, the right reverb and vocal sound in my headphone, and I feel very safe and very much in control of my singing.” He has been using such moments to record songs for a self-funded solo album he plans to put out this year. They’re quiet, introspective songs written from his own hard-won, middle-aged perspective, a point of view of little interest to country-music stars. “ ‘Too young for the old, too old for the young,’” he said, quoting from a song on the album. “They don’t want to say that.”Saying that, singing that, speaking as himself, may be a remedy. He expresses confidence that his voice will recover. “I’m closer to it every day,” he said. “My physical voice has some spiritual link to finding my own voice. And I know that when I finally get to say it the way I want to say it, my voice will be there.”If Nashville is the problem as well as the promised land, where does McAnally go from there? Warner Bros. is currently developing a TV series he created that is based on his life, and maybe there’s a book or two in his future. But right now there’s his current big non-Nashville — or get-out-of-Nashville — songwriting project, the one that has been taking him to New York: “Shucked,” a musical he co-wrote with Brandy Clark that will open on Broadway on April 4 (previews begin March 8). “The musical is this great source of inspiration,” he said, “because it’s something else entirely different.” Writing show tunes allows him to use a greater variety of chords and different emotional colors than he does in country songs, he told me, and also requires him to do some things he isn’t used to doing, like writing songs that tell only part of a story.“Shucked” is a fable about Maizy, a girl from a rustic hamlet cut off from the world by fields of corn, and a crisis that obliges her to journey to the big city to save her fellow provincials. The songs mostly have a traditional Broadway feel, including one in which Maizy glories in the cosmopolitan wonders of Tampa, though a couple of rousing numbers for supporting characters display the expertise of veteran country hitmakers. The book — by Robert Horn, who wrote the Broadway musicals “Tootsie” and “13” — is full of broad, frequently ribald yuks that try to tiptoe between lovingly evoking small-town sensibilities and exploiting crude stereotypes.That’s where “Shucked” displays its origins in “Hee Haw,” the TV variety show that ran for 23 seasons fueled by a blend of cornpone humor and high-test country music. More than a decade ago, the keepers of the “Hee Haw” franchise approached McAnally about adapting the show for the stage, a connection that has mostly disappeared into the musical’s developmental back story, but it persists in the way “Shucked” goofs on country ways, a deceptively delicate layering of irony and shtick. McAnally says that he was also inspired by “The Book of Mormon” to write songs with the simple objective of having fun, rather than the endless descent into heartbreak that he pursues at his day job.At that day job, meanwhile, McAnally is still writing and producing songs for other singers. “I have more songs in the pipeline than ever, and six songs I wrote or produced in the Top 50,” he told me in early February. “I work more efficiently when I’m away from Nashville.” His ongoing revision of country’s gender politics also continues to advance, one heartbroken or party-hearty line at a time. Sometimes it’s McAnally who writes the line that says something that hasn’t been said before on country radio, and sometimes he’s the collaborator giving someone else permission to write or sing such a line. Progress might show up as a little surprise that tests taboo with a light touch, like the singalong chorus of Musgraves’s “Follow Your Arrow”: “So make lots of noise/Kiss lots of boys/Or kiss lots of girls if that’s something you’re into/And if the straight and narrow gets a little too straight/Roll up a joint, or don’t/And follow your arrow wherever it points.”Country radio, which still exercises outsize influence on what becomes a hit, wouldn’t play the song. And yet, “Follow Your Arrow” is one of the lowest-charting songs ever to win C.M.A.’s song of the year, which McAnally takes as a sign that the industry recognized the change it made in what mainstream country music could say. McAnally is known for songs, like “Follow Your Arrow” or Ashley McBryde’s hard-bitten “One Night Standards,” that open up new dimensions of agency for female narrators and for songs that open up new dimensions of vulnerability for male ones. Kenny Chesney told me by email that he was eager to record the angsty “Somewhere With You,” which became a No. 1 hit for him, because it was “unlike anything out there, anything I’d heard in terms of the intensity of the emotion or the way the song moved.”When popular genres change, they do so almost imperceptibly at first, then all at once. Like writing a haiku about cherry blossoms or a Western about a laconic hero with good aim, writing a barroom weeper or a cheatin’ song means walking the line between doing it right and making it new. A commercially successful country song must nail obligatory elements of the form so that music-industry insiders and fans hear it as something they’re already inclined to like, but it also must rearrange familiar elements to refresh the formula. If enough bits of genetic information are rewritten in that process, though any individual change may be tiny, after a while you might suddenly notice that the songs on country radio are about inviting your gender-unspecified object of affection to climb into your hybrid pickup so you can drive down a dirt road to the unfracked watering hole, where bathers of all identities and preferences are welcome.Carlo Rotella is a professor of English at Boston College and the author of “The World Is Always Coming to an End: Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood.” Kristine Potter is an artist and an educator. She was a 2018 Guggenheim fellow in photography. She is an assistant professor at Middle Tennessee State University. Her monograph “Dark Waters” will be published by Aperture this spring. More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      How the Oscars and Grammys Thrive on the Lie of Meritocracy

      by

      Despite all the markers of excellence, contenders like Danielle Deadwyler, Viola Davis and Beyoncé weren’t recognized for the highest honors. Niche awards don’t suffice.I didn’t see it coming, but maybe I should have.That refrain has been popping into my head repeatedly since learning that neither Viola Davis (“The Woman King”) nor Danielle Deadwyler (“Till”) was nominated for the best actress Oscar and that Andrea Riseborough and Ana de Armas had emerged as this year’s spoilers.It came to mind again on Sunday night when the Grammys awarded Harry Styles’s “Harry’s House” album of the year, not Beyoncé’s “Renaissance.” Though she made history that night as the most Grammy-winning artist of all time, this was Beyoncé’s fourth shutout from the industry’s most coveted category and another stark reminder that the last Black woman to take home that award was Lauryn Hill — 24 years ago. This time the message was loud and clear: Beyoncé, one of the most prolific and transformative artists of the 21st century, can win only in niche categories. Her music — a continually evolving and genre-defying sound — still can’t be seen as the standard-bearer for the universal.The music and movie industries differ in many ways, but their prizes are similarly determined by the predominantly older white male members of the movie and recording academies. Though both organizations have made concerted efforts in recent years to diversify their voting bodies in terms of age, race and gender, Black women artists, despite their ingenuity, influence and, in Beyoncé’s case, unparalleled innovation, continue to be denied their highest honors.This trend is no indication of the quality of their work but rather a reflection of something else: the false myth of meritocracy upon which these institutions, their ceremonies and their gatekeepers thrive.It is true that Black women, dating to Hattie McDaniel for “Gone With the Wind” (1939), have won the Academy Award for best supporting actress. And while it took a half-century for Whoopi Goldberg to receive an Oscar in the same category (for “Ghost”), over the past 20 years, seven Black women have won in this category, including Davis, and this year, Angela Bassett is a front-runner as well.Viola Davis in “The Woman King.” Because of the film’s critical and commercial reception, Oscar watchers thought she would be nominated. Instead, she was snubbed. Sony PicturesBut, in a way, this is an example of rewarding the niche. What’s being honored is a character whose function is in service to a film’s plot and protagonist. She is neither a movie’s emotional center nor primarily responsible for propelling its narrative. Such heavy lifting is why I think it made sense for Michelle Williams, whom many considered a lock for an Oscar for best supporting actress for “The Fabelmans,” to campaign as a lead instead. “Although I haven’t seen the movie,” she told The New York Times, “the scenes that I read, the scenes that I prepped, the scenes that we shot, the scenes that I’m told are still in the movie, are akin to me with experiences that I have had playing roles considered lead.”Interviews With the Oscar NomineesKerry Condon: An ardent animal lover, the supporting actress Oscar nominee for “The Banshees of Inisherin” said that she channeled grief from her dog’s death into her performance.Michelle Yeoh: The “Everything Everywhere All at Once” star, nominated for best actress, said she was “bursting with joy” but “a little sad” that previous Asian actresses hadn’t been recognized.Angela Bassett: The actress nearly missed the announcement because of troubles with her TV. She tuned in just in time to find out that she was nominated for her supporting role in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.”Austin Butler: In discussing his best actor nomination, the “Elvis” star said that he wished Lisa Marie Presley, who died on Jan. 12, had been able to celebrate the moment with him.In the past, academy voters might have said there weren’t enough Black women in leading roles to consider. But “Till” and “The Woman King” disprove that. So we’re left with other, more traditionally meritocratic arguments about who deserves to be nominated for best actress — the quality of the individual performance, the critical response to a film, and a decent budget to market and campaign for Oscar consideration. Yet this year, even those measures suddenly seemed to be thrown out the window.Instead, in the case of Andrea Riseborough’s surprising nod for “To Leslie,” we saw a new Oscar strategy playing out before our eyes. A groundswell of fellow actors, including A-listers like Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet and even Cate Blanchett, who would go on to be nominated herself, publicly endorsed Riseborough’s performance on social media, at screenings and even at a prize ceremony. Since only 218 of the 1,302 members of the academy’s acting branch needed to rank a candidate first to secure a nomination, in time, that momentum translated into a nomination upset. That, in turn, led to a backlash, a review by the academy to make sure none of its campaign guidelines had been violated, and a backlash to the backlash, with Christina Ricci and Riseborough’s “To Leslie” co-star Marc Maron calling out the academy for its investigation. “So it’s only the films and actors that can afford the campaigns that deserve recognition?” Ricci wrote in a now-deleted Instagram post. “Feels elitist and exclusive and frankly very backward to me.”What fascinated me, however, was that what was being framed as a grass-roots campaign to circumvent studio marketing machines revealed another inside game. A racially homogeneous network of white Hollywood stars appeared to vote in a small but significant enough bloc to ensure their candidate was nominated.And while that explains how an Oscar campaign can be both nontraditional and elitist, it also underscores the other obstacles that Black actresses, in particular, and actresses of color in general, have to surmount just to be nominated, let alone win. Gina Prince-Bythewood’s “The Woman King” was so critically praised for its filmmaking and masterly performances and was such a commercially successful film that Davis was expected (at the very least) to garner her third nomination in the best actress category.Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe in “Blonde.” The film was widely panned.NetflixIn contrast, Andrew Dominik’s “Blonde,” starring de Armas, was so heavily panned for its brutal and sexist depiction of Marilyn Monroe that I assumed the prerelease chatter about her performance would have dampened by the time Oscar voting began. For more than any other film with a best actress contender this year, “Blonde” raises the question: Shouldn’t a protagonist have depth or multidimensionality for that actor’s performance to be noteworthy? As conceived by Dominik, Monroe merely flits from injury to injury, all in the service of making her downfall inevitable.Such representations reveal another pattern: Oscar voters continue to reward women’s emotional excess more than their restraint. In most films with best actress nominations this year, women’s anger as outbursts is a common thread. “Tár” and even “To Leslie” examines the dangerous consequences of such fury; “The Fabelmans” positions it as a maternal and artistic contradiction for Williams’s character; and “Everything Everywhere All at Once” brilliantly explores it as both a response to IRS bureaucratic inefficacy and intergenerational tensions between a Chinese immigrant mother and her queer, Asian American daughter. “Blonde” is again an exception, for de Armas’s Monroe expresses no external rage but sinks into depression and self-loathing, never directing her frustration at the many men who abuse her.Within that cinematic context, I wondered if it was possible to applaud Deadwyler for playing a character like Mamie Till-Mobley. Unlike the main characters of the other films, Till-Mobley, in real life, had to repress her rational rage over the gruesome murder of her son, Emmett, to find justice and protect his legacy. Onscreen, Deadwyler captured that paradox by portraying Till-Mobley’s constantly shifting self and her struggle to privately grieve her son’s death while simultaneously being asked to speak on behalf of a burgeoning civil rights movement. If words like “nuanced,” “subtle,” “circumspect” or “introspective” garner leading men Oscar attention (how else do we explain Colin Farrell’s nod?), female protagonists are often lauded for falling apart.Deadwyler and Whoopi Goldberg in “Till.” The lead’s repressed rage stands in contrast with the emotional outbursts of the nominated performances.Lynsey Weatherspoon/Orion Pictures, via Associated PressBut even that assumes that all women’s emotions are treated equally, when the truth is that rage itself is racially coded. Both “Till” and “The Woman King” depict Black women’s rage as an individual emotion and a collective dissent, a combination that deviates from many on-screen representations of female anger as a downward spiral and self-destructive.Commenting on such differential treatment, the “Till” director Chinonye Chukwu critiqued Hollywood on Instagram for its “unabashed misogyny towards Black women” after the academy snubbed her film. Likewise, in an essay for The Hollywood Reporter, Prince-Bythewood asked, “What is this inability of Academy voters to see Black women, and their humanity, and their heroism, as relatable to themselves?”It’s been over 20 years since Halle Berry won the best actress Oscar for her “Monster’s Ball” performance as a Black mother who grieves the loss of her son through alcohol and sex. The fact that she remains the only Black woman to have won this award is ridiculous. “I do feel completely heartbroken that there’s no other woman standing next to me in 20 years,” Berry reflected in the run-up to the Oscars last year. “I thought, like everybody else, that night meant a lot of things would change.”The difference between then and now is that there are far more Black women directors and complex Black women characters on the big screen than ever before. Maybe, next year, the academy members will get behind one of those actors. Then again, maybe I should know better. More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      How the R&B Innovator Kelela Unlocked a New Level

      by

      In mid-January, Kelela Mizanekristos emailed over the document she shares with everyone who plans to work with her. It’s a syllabus for the university of her mind, a guide to help the 39-year-old R&B musician’s collaborators understand the foundation on which she builds her art: her experiences, good, bad and in-between, as a queer Black woman.There are readings (“Decolonizing Love in a World Rigged for Black Women’s Loneliness,” by Shaadi Devereaux), audiobook recommendations (“Minor Feelings,” by Cathy Park Hong), films (“The Last Angel of History”) and websites (make techno black again).“You can’t be advocating for me properly unless you do some homework,” she said, adding an expletive, over lunch at Sisters Restaurant in Brooklyn a few weeks earlier.Six years have passed since Mizanekristos, who records simply as Kelela, released her debut album of intimate, intricate R&B, “Take Me Apart.” Fans have been clamoring for a follow-up, but Kelela has been taking her time and doing the work — researching, digesting, synthesizing, curing, living — accumulating experiences to write about, and finding the knowledge to process them.“I’m committed to understanding what’s at the bottom of things, and so I’m always wanting to engage in what’s really going on,” she said, half a Lambrusco in her hand. (Later, she admitted, “I’m a nerd.”) Dressed in black track pants and a Telfar sweatshirt, Kelela bloomed and drooped like a flower over our conversation, her hoodie alternately moving up and down to match her passionate and more contemplative moments.The result of those years of deep thinking is “Raven,” out Feb. 10. Building off the spacey synth beats from her previous work, Kelela’s second album explores textures and tempos that burrow deep into the listener’s core. Its single “Happy Ending,” a bass-heavy Euro-pop dance track, sounds like a missive from the future, or perhaps a soundtrack for an alluring life on Mars. The whole project is connected by an underlying vibe: “I really want to be sexy in a nuanced way,” she said. “We want our sexy moments to feel one of a kind, that’s why it feels sexy — because you don’t think that it’s run of the mill.”Conscious of — and often feeling isolated by — the dearth of Black women leading in the dance world, Kelela makes music she wants everyone to move to, but for certain groups to really feel. “She doesn’t even have to be saying a word, but you feel her,” said Asma Maroof, a longtime friend and collaborator. “Not many girls can do that. It doesn’t need to be spelled out.”KELELA WAS BORN in Washington, D.C., and grew up in nearby Gaithersburg, Md. Her parents immigrated from Ethiopia in the 1970s, and she still felt close to their culture, largely because her family rebuked the assimilation narratives of immigration.“My mom’s side was not buying that,” she said with a laugh. “They were just like, ‘You’re going to learn Amharic. If you want something from me right now, ask in Amharic.’”Her parents never married and instead co-parented from separate apartments in the same building. By the time Kelela was ready for kindergarten, she and her mother moved to the suburbs in hopes of finding a better school.Her mother’s record collection skewed jazzy, leading Kelela to discover the smooth vocalists Natalie Cole and Sarah Vaughan. At her father’s, she fell in love with Tracy Chapman’s first album when she was only 5. That same year, he took her to see “Sarafina!,” the South African musical set during the Soweto student uprising of 1976, introducing her to the powerful, political music of Miriam Makeba.“Even now, when I’m writing lyrics, I’m not, like, ‘This album is gonna be about this,’” Kelela said. “I am trying to fill in the blanks of the phrasing riddle that I’ve created.” Gioncarlo Valentine for The New York TimesAt school, she took violin lessons and sang in the choir. While at home she indulged her love of pop goddesses like Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey, to fit in with her classmates, she listened to emo and punk. Over time, via file-sharing services like Napster, she was able to discover new genres, like grime.College proved unsatisfying and Kelela didn’t finish her degree, but during that time she decided to pursue music seriously. She was struck by the work of Amel Larrieux and began singing jazz standards at open-mic nights.Jazz started to feel too restrictive, all that emphasis on the standards. By chance, she met Yukimi Nagano, the lead singer of the Swedish band Little Dragon, who inspired her to start writing her own songs. Kelela began spending time in Mount Pleasant, a D.C. neighborhood with a strong punk scene, and formed the indie soul-rock band Dizzy Spells with Tim George, a guitarist.True inspiration came when she started to make music on her laptop: ripping a song she liked from Myspace, recording a verse over it and sending it back to producers in the hopes they could start working together. Eventually, she quit her job as a telemarketer and moved to Los Angeles to devote herself to music full-time.One of her demos ended up in the hands of Teengirl Fantasy, the dance-electronic duo Nick Weiss and Logan Takahashi, and the three collaborated on the airy, percussive track “EFX.” From there, she met Ashland Mines, a D.J. and producer who performs under the name Total Freedom, who made a fateful introduction, connecting Kelela to producers from Fade to Mind and Night Slugs, two indie labels at the center of underground dance music.The rocket ship took off: Their collaborations resulted in “Cut 4 Me,” a glitchy, moody mixtape that mashed up make-out jams, booty-shakers and crooned love songs, all flecked with enough grime and synths to build a new kind of R&B. Finally, at 30, Kelela had arrived. She picked up famous fans like Björk and Solange and fielded offers from major record labels, ultimately signing with the indie Warp because it offered the most artistic freedom.Her next project, “Hallucinogen” from 2015, expanded her palette further, adding collaborations with DJ Dahi, a hip-hop producer, and Arca, an experimental artist and producer with a vast sense of what electronic music can be. Intensely personal, the roughly 20-minute EP featured the work of 12 producers alongside Kelela as she explored the wounds of romantic and existential heartbreak. “Take Me Apart,” her first full album, teamed her with Romy Madley Croft from the xx and the pop producer Ariel Rechtshaid alongside Night Slugs’ Jam City and Bok Bok, and others, as Kelela reveled in the space between the fringes and the mainstream.“RAVEN” IS ONCE again a feat of elaborate collaboration, featuring contributions from 15 producers, including Yo van Lenz, LSDXOXO and Florian T M Zeisig. Maroof, who was also involved, said work in the studio evolved in layers: Kelela would tinker with an idea, Maroof would add to it, then additional producers like Bambii or Kaytranada would sprinkle more on top.“Looking back on it, you’re like, how did we do that?” Maroof said.Racism, sexism and misogyny have always been at the forefront of Kelela’s mind, but not always reflected in her music. As she was building up to “Raven,” her primary goal was expanding the canon of Black female emotional art. The album delves into the existential heartbreak of a marginalized identity: betrayal from inside the house. “White supremacy isn’t just operating through white people,” Kelela said. “And patriarchal women can do the most damaging things to your spirit because you let your guard down.”Setting and breaking boundaries was a priority, after decades of learning how to establish them. The social justice uprisings of the summer of 2020, spurred by the murder of George Floyd, resulted in an atmosphere in which the singer’s community, particularly white people, were anxious and clamoring to have the hard conversations.On songs like the sparse, ethereal “Holier,” she declares that Black women can depend most on themselves, and in our conversation she cited the writer Amber J. Phillips’s “choose the Blackest option” — a conscious choice to avoid the sanitized, commercialized delivery of Blackness often employed to help those still becoming comfortable with race.Kelela said she supposed there are three or four musicians, whom she didn’t name, who really uphold the theory. “Everyone else is like, ‘I gotta make this coin,’” she said. “It feels like so few people are willing to put something on the line at all.”She had other plans, focusing on lyrics that “help Black femmes heal,” she said. “It’s gotta be a lyric that Black and brown women and nonbinary people, marginalized people, can scream in their cars on the way to work a job that they actually don’t want to do.”Kelela said “Raven” is connected by an underlying vibe: “I really want to be sexy in a nuanced way.”Gioncarlo Valentine for The New York TimesKelela’s lyrics arrive rhythm first, the words coming later. She compared her writing style to how her mother and her friends would try to approximate English when they were growing up in Ethiopia — trying to speak in a language you don’t yet know, wading through the feelings anyway.She avoided listening to any of the initial tracks before entering the studio, to maintain the purity of her impulses, and recorded her improvisations. “Even now, when I’m writing lyrics, I’m not, like, this album is gonna be about this,” she said. “I am trying to fill in the blanks of the phrasing riddle that I’ve created.” Playing her improvisations back, she asked herself what it sounded like she was saying: “What is real for me? What’s the relationship to the feeling that I have about the sound? And how does that relate to anything that I’m actually experiencing?”Water, as a theme, runs through the album in various permutations: lust, ebbing as slowly as a waning ice cube; isolation as vast as the sea; anticipation dotted on the brow like sweat. The album’s first and last songs, “Washed Away” and “Far Away,” flow into each other, giving the album the effect of a full sonic circle. “I want to convey, melodically, this wonder and discovery,” Kelela said. “I’m finding my way, as you are when you’re here for the first time.”Maroof, who collaborated on the record from Zurich, praised “the sonic world” that Kelela builds with each album. “She can bring all sorts of different sounds together,” she said, “and you can even hear how they mix, as one fluid thing as an album, and in that way you have a deeper understanding of the music.”The issues Kelela sought to explore on the record — justice, safety, the value of Black life — are ones she’s been grappling with for years. The difference now is the conversation is leaping from the Google doc to her listeners’ ears.She doesn’t want anyone to think that her work was in response to anything but her own experiences, though she appreciated the tangible changes that were brought forth. “I’ve been wanting to engage critically about all these things within my friend groups,” she said, “and there wasn’t a culture to support that.”Though those appetites lessened, in recent years, she’s noticed a newfound ability for people from marginalized communities to be able to draw boundaries and voice their social discomfort — her included. Black people “were able to be like, ‘I don’t like that anymore,’” she said. “And for those Black people, it had lasting effects.” More

    • 100 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      Book Review: ‘Reckoning,’ by V (formerly Eve Ensler)

      by

      Writing now as V, the creator of “The Vagina Monologues” tackles racism, colonialism and sexual violence in a raw and free-associative collection.RECKONING, by V (formerly Eve Ensler)Way before #MeToo — not that it’s a contest — there was Eve Ensler, shouting all the way up into the cheap seats. Her breakthrough 1996 play, “The Vagina Monologues,” eventually performed by a rotating cast of celebrities, amplified stories of rape and abuse and helped de-taboo the female anatomy. Two years after that success she founded V-Day, which has raised piles of money to fight violence against women and girls around the world: Galentine, with gravitas.The writer identifies so strongly with the letter “V” that she has taken it as her new name, she announces in a characteristically raw and free-associative memoir, “Reckoning.” This is a gesture that seems — like most of what she has done in a long career — both performative and potent. “V” stands for “vagina,” “V” stands for “victory,” “V” stands for “peace” (we’ll forget about the canned vegetable drink and the old NBC series about aliens wearing human masks), and for Generation Y on social media, a “V” hand signal has become as popular as the thumbs up was for boomers, the former Ensler’s generation. “I am older now,” she laments. “Irrelevant in the cult/ure of youth, followers and TikTok.”“When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple,” the English poet Jenny Joseph wrote (to her eventual consternation), and on the back cover of “Reckoning” its rechristened author stands in a fuchsia caftan, raising arms in a V-shape to a rainbowed, sunsetted sky. A little cornball maybe, like a motivational desk calendar in a mall gift shop, but having survived incest, alcoholism, uterine cancer and the occasional mixed review, V, who will turn 70 in May, just Does. Not. Care. She has plenty of fuchsia left to give.For those familiar with Ensler’s work, much of “Reckoning” will feel like a jagged replay of her core stories; amply represented are transcripts of speeches she’s delivered at the conferences and forums where she’s become an honored guest, or pieces previously published in places like The Guardian. She processed her experience fighting cancer in a previous, more humorous memoir, “In the Body of the World” (2013), which was also made into a stage show, and the post-9/11 world in “Insecure at Last” (2006).Now she is examining a term that has become ubiquitous to the point of cliché in American discourse since the murder of George Floyd. For V, as before, the political is intensely personal.Her father’s horrific molestations, which began when she was 5, are further detailed; in what is perhaps the consummate therapy exercise, she expands on the apology she wrote on his behalf in another book. She reveals more of her mother’s complicity by indifference — “I needed her milky breasts. I got cigarette smoke instead” — and her posthumous bequeathal of a musty brown envelope (“Does pain have a smell?” V wonders) with a picture inside of the author as a baby, mysteriously bruised and bloodied. “I spent an entire childhood ducking, fists permanently raised like a boxer, quick but never fast enough, darting, panicked, frenetic, unbearably anxious,” she remembers. “My body was never my body.”In apparent refutation of the patriarchy V wants passionately to upend, “Reckoning” obeys no conventional chronology or form. It’s collaged together with concepts — the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, for example, is linked to birds falling from the skies in 2020 — and exhibits a woman drawn inexorably, as if in repetition compulsion, to sites of even worse suffering than her youth. It’s a kind of Choose Your Own Abomination, from Covid to the concentration camp of Theresienstadt to Congo, where the author has done humanitarian work and tells of murdered infants and children, repeated rape and even forced cannibalism.“How do I convey these stories of atrocities without your shutting down, quickly turning the page or feeling too disturbed?” she wonders in an essay that was originally written for Glamour. Contemplating the ISIS sex market, she imagines “crates of AK-47s, falling from the skies” and “breasted warriors rising in armies for life.”I think V underestimates herself; the jump-cut style she’s refined for decades is actually perfectly suited to people who get their news from TikTok, and her rhythmic singling out of particular words — which she calls “trains traveling through a lush countryside”— presaged hashtag activism.Along the long highway of her argument here, that readers should wake the heck up to injustice and suffering, poems pop up, like little rest stops. “Think of your luxuries, your cell phones/as corpses,” she writes of the mass rapes that occur near coltan mines, which are tapped to manufacture electronic devices. In a section that graphically recalls how AIDS ravaged friends and colleagues, she promises Richard Royal, a collaborator on a magazine called Central Park, that she will not write a poem about the budding trees; he hated pathetic fallacy and echoed Adorno that there is no poetry since Auschwitz. So after his death, in winking homage, she versifies instead his medical woes.“One is always failing at writing,” V acknowledges, in a sentiment any writer understands. And indeed “Reckoning” is, if not a failure, kind of a bloody mess, but defiantly, provocatively, maybe intentionally so. It exhorts readers to confront the worst and ugliest, pleads for progress and peace, and provokes admiration for its resilient, activist author. V shall overcome, someday.RECKONING | By V (formerly Eve Ensler) | Illustrated | 272 pp. | Bloomsbury | $28 More

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Gangsta Boo, Memphis Rapper Formerly With Three 6 Mafia, Dies at 43

      by

      Born Lola Chantrelle Mitchell, she was one of the first female rappers to build off the gangster rap image and sound that took off in the 1990s.Lola Chantrelle Mitchell, the Memphis rapper and former member of Three 6 Mafia who, as Gangsta Boo, helped define the genre in the South with her confident flows and forged a path for other female artists, died on Sunday in Memphis. She was 43.She was found dead on Sunday afternoon in a neighborhood west of Memphis International Airport, the Memphis Police Department said in a statement on Monday. “There were no immediate signs of foul play,” the police said, adding that the investigation into her death was ongoing.With clever lyrics that could be flirtatious and playful or forceful and proud, Gangsta Boo quickly established herself in the 1990s as a rising rap star who hailed from and flourished in the South. As a teenager, she joined Three 6 Mafia, an underground rap group that would go on to become one of the most influential of its era.In 1995, Gangsta Boo and the other members of the group, Juicy J and DJ Paul, released their debut album, “Mystic Stylez,” a nightmarish addition to the booming rap scene at the time. The album, part of the subgenre of rap known as horrorcore, captivated listeners with its dark references to death and murders, its eerie beats and its ominous vocals. Gangsta Boo referred to herself on the album as “the devil’s daughter,” capturing the supernatural tone of the project.Three years later, Gangsta Boo released her first solo album, “Enquiring Minds.” It featured one of her best-known hits, in which a teasing line provided both its title and a sticky and memorable hook: “Where Dem Dollas At!?”While the single hinted at a superficial sentiment, Gangsta Boo said in an interview with the website HipHop DX in 2014 that it also touched on the pressures of motherhood and raising a child.“How can you have a baby by a dude that has nothing? I feel the same,” she said. “I feel like that even more now. That’s why I don’t have kids. It’s got to be the right one and the right moment.”Lola Chantrelle Mitchell was born on Aug. 7, 1979, in Memphis. Her father, Cedric, was a postal worker, and her mother, Veronica (Lee) Mitchell, was a homemaker. She once described the world of her youth as “rough.”“I got a hood in me because I had a lot of hood friends,” she said in an interview with All Urban Central in June 2022. Her neighborhood in Memphis was called Whitehaven, but she and her friends nicknamed it Blackhaven because the area’s residents were predominantly Black.She graduated from Hillcrest High School in Memphis. While young, she met Paul Duane Beauregard, better known as DJ Paul. The two soon bonded over their love of music.Impressed by her lyricism, DJ Paul asked if she wanted to join his crew, Three 6 Mafia. She did. At 16, Gangsta Boo made her first significant leap in the music industry.“It just happened like that overnight,” she told All Urban Central, adding, “We took off kind of fast.”Gangsta Boo collaborated with Three 6 Mafia on several albums but left the group in the early 2000s to pursue a solo career.When asked why she left, she said in an interview with MTV in 2001: “There’s no problem. Sometimes people grow apart, and basically that’s what it is. There’s no drama, no beef. It’s still the same. I just kind of grew apart, and I’m not doing things that they’re doing. I’m not cursing in my music no more. We just grew apart like a marriage.”That same year, Gangsta Boo renamed herself Lady Boo — because, she said, she was not “living the gangster lifestyle” and wanted to align herself more closely with God. However, her website still referred to her as Gangsta Boo at her death.The makeup of Three 6 Mafia evolved over the years. In 2006, after Gangsta Boo’s departure, the group won an Oscar for best original song with “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp,” from the film “Hustle & Flow.”Later in her career, Gangsta Boo collaborated with numerous rappers, especially those with roots in the South.She told Billboard last year that “as far as female hip-hop and rap, I think it’s in a good space.”“They say, ‘Gangsta Boo walked so a lot of people can run,’” she added.Gangsta Boo is survived by her mother and two brothers, Eric and Tarik.As she aged, Gangsta Boo reflected on having been one of the first female rappers to build off the gangster rap image and sound that took off in the 1990s, singing about smoking, payback and villainous intentions — themes typically reserved for men.“A lot of guys in Memphis was like ‘Gangsta Pat,’ ‘Gangsta Black’ — gangsta this, gangsta that,” she told All Urban Central.But toward the end of her life, the moniker had taken on an enhanced meaning.“It’s more, you know, just enjoying my life as a legendary gangster,” she said.Livia Albeck-Ripka More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Tshala Muana, Congolese Singer With Danceable Messages, Dies at 64

      by

      A superstar in Africa, she sang in the language of her tribe and often addressed social concerns, insisting on women’s strength and decrying abuse. Tshala Muana, a Congolese singer who brought a supple voice and sensual dance moves to songs about women’s dignity and social issues, died on Dec. 10 in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. She was 64.Her death, in a hospital, was announced on Facebook by her producer and companion, Claude Mashala. He did not cite a cause, but Ms. Muana had a stroke in 2020 and had diabetes and hypertension.Unlike other internationally successful Congolese performers, Ms. Muana sang most of her songs in Tshiluba, the native language of her Kasai tribe, rather than in French or Lingala, the Congolese lingua franca. Her songs often addressed social concerns, insisting on women’s strength and decrying abuse; she also promoted condom use to fight the spread of AIDS in Africa.She was praised as the “queen” of mutuashi, a traditional Kasai rhythm and hip-pumping dance which she updated in her hits and carried to concert stages worldwide. In the early 2000s, Ms. Muana was elected to Congo’s parliament along with another top musician, Tabu Ley. She championed issues involving women, children and the poor and became widely known as Mamu Nationale, “Mother of the Nation.”Elisabeth Tshala Muana Muidikay was born on March 13, 1958, in Élisabethville, in what was then the Belgian Congo; the city is now Lubumbashi, the second largest city in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She was the second of 10 children of Amadeus Muidikayi and Alphonsine Bambiwa Tumba. Her father, a soldier, died during civil warfare in Congo when she was 6 years old.Ms. Muana had an arranged marriage as a teenager, but she left it after the death of an infant daughter. She moved to Kinshasa, where she became a dancer and backup singer in the band led by the singer M’Pongo Love.In 1980 she left her homeland, which by then had been renamed Zaire, and traveled through West Africa. She settled in Ivory Coast, where she started her solo career, and recorded her first single, “Amina,” in Paris in 1982. She moved to Paris around the time she recorded her first album, “Kami,” there in 1984.By the time she returned to Zaire in the mid-1980s, she had established herself as a hitmaker in Africa. In 1987, she had a pan-African hit with “Karibou Yangu,” whose lyrics were in Swahili.She moved to Paris again in 1990 and remained there until the end of the dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997 before returning to what was now the Democratic Republic of Congo.Ms. Muana maintained a long and prolific career, releasing nearly two dozen albums and performing in Africa, Europe and the United States. The percolating grooves of her songs fused mutuashi rhythms with salsa, Congolese soukous and other African and Caribbean rhythms, deploying synthesizers and horns alongside traditional percussion. One of her most highly regarded albums, “Mutuashi,” was released in the United States in 1996.Her songs often carried messages of ethical uplift and social criticism, at times veiled in metaphor. At her concerts, which brought her to stadiums across Africa, she was renowned for dancing that fans considered sexy and detractors considered vulgar. In 2003 she shared the Kora All Africa Music Award for best female central African artist with another Congolese singer, M’bilia Bel.In November 2020, Ms. Muana released her last single, “Ingratitude,” a song chiding someone for disloyalty to a mentor. She was arrested and imprisoned, apparently because Congo’s president, Félix Tshisekedi, believed the song was criticizing him for breaking away from Joseph Kabila, Congo’s former president, whom Ms. Muana had supported. She was released within a day, and Mr. Mashala, her producer and companion, said at the time that the song was aimed more generally at a lifetime of betrayals by people and corporations. Ms. Muana had no children. Information on survivors other than Mr. Mashala was not immediately available.Although Ms. Muana championed her Kasai roots, she strongly supported multicultural unity for her strife-torn country.“In Congo there is no love for each other, no one has the country at heart,” she told The Observer, a Ugandan newspaper, in 2009. “We were elected to Parliament to represent our cultures and musicians, but the primary assignment was teaching love.” More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Reclaiming Place in Animation History for Bessie Mae Kelley

      by

      The pioneers of hand-drawn animation were all men — or at least that is what historians (men, almost exclusively) have long told us.Winsor McCay made the influential short “Gertie the Dinosaur” in 1914. Paul Terry (Farmer Al Falfa), Max and Dave Fleischer (Koko the Clown, Betty Boop) and Walter Lantz (Woody Woodpecker) each made well-documented early contributions. Walt Disney hired a team that became mythologized as the Nine Old Men.Earlier this year, however, the animation scholar Mindy Johnson came across an illustration — an old class photo, of a sort, depicting the usual male animators from the early 1920s. In a corner was an unidentified woman with dark hair. Who was she? The owner of the image, another animation historian, “presumed she was a cleaning lady or possibly a secretary,” Johnson said.“I said to him, ‘Did it ever cross your mind that she might also be an animator?’” Johnson recalled. “And he said, ‘No. Not at all.’”But Johnson wondered if it could be Bessie Mae Kelley, whose name she had discovered years earlier in an obscure article about vaudevillians who became animators.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.Rian Johnson:  The “Glass Onion” director explains the streaming plan for his “Knives Out” franchise.As part of an investigation that found Johnson cold-calling people in Minnesota, digging through archives at the University of Iowa and salvaging corroded cans of nitrate film from a San Diego garage, Johnson confirmed her hunch. The woman was Kelley, and she animated and directed alongside many of the men who would later become titans of the art form. According to Johnson’s research, Kelley started her career in 1917 and began to direct and animate shorts that now rank as the earliest-known hand-drawn animated films by a woman.So much for that cleaning lady theory.“History is recorded, preserved, written about and archived from a male perspective, and so nobody had really examined the level of what women did — their contribution was often just passed off as a single sentence, if at all,” Johnson said. “Finally, we have proof that women have been helming animation from the very beginning.”Bessie Mae Kelley directed an animated short with characters from the comic strip “Gasoline Alley.”Manitou ProductionsPreviously, historians had considered Tissa David to be the earliest example of a woman who directed her own hand-drawn work. She was credited on Jean Image’s “Bonjour Paris” in 1953. (The earliest surviving animated film directed and animated by a woman would be Lotte Reiniger’s “The Ornament of the Lovestruck Heart” from 1919. But Reiniger worked in silhouette stop-motion animation, which is very different from the hand-drawn variety.)Johnson will present her findings on Monday at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. The evening event will include the first public screening of two restored, previously unknown short films by Kelley. One is called “Flower Fairies” and was completed in 1921, Johnson said. It involves composite animation (live footage with hand-drawn animation on top). Sweet-natured, human-looking creatures with wings awaken flowers and dance among them. Kelley completed “Flower Fairies” through the Brinner Film Company, a small Chicago studio that became known for newsreels.Mindy Johnson spent five years searching for evidence that a woman animated and directed alongside many of the men who became titans of the art form.via Mindy Johnson“Her forms are glorious, especially when you compare it to something like Walt Disney’s ‘Goddess of Spring,’ which was about 15 years later,” Johnson said. She was referring to a Silly Symphonies short that Disney based on the Greek myth of Persephone. “Goddess of Spring” is viewed as a critical steppingstone for Disney because it was used to develop techniques for the rendering of human forms, with the groundbreaking “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937) as a result.Kelley’s second film had a Christmas theme and was made in 1922. It includes stop-motion animation and finds a girl reading a book beside a crackling fire, a stocking dangling from the mantel. Santa climbs out of the book and sets about his duties.“Mindy has made a significant breakthrough, filling in an important gap in our understanding about the beginnings of this industry and art form,” said Bernardo Rondeau, the Academy Museum’s senior director of film programs. Johnson’s presentation at the museum is part of a series of screenings and talks dedicated to newly preserved and restored films from the Academy Film Archive.The stash of materials that Johnson located in San Diego — in the possession of Kelley’s great-nephew — also included original rice paper drawings used in the creation of the short films; copper prints; a journal and scrapbooks; and photos with notations by Kelley. One of the cans of film included a badly damaged animated short that Kelley directed with characters from “Gasoline Alley,” the comic strip that debuted in 1918.A drawing from “Colonel Heeza Liar,” an early syndicated animation cartoon series that Kelley worked on.Bray Studios, via Manitou ProductionsJohnson also discovered that Kelley helped design and animate a mouse couple from Paul Terry’s influential “Aesop’s Fables” series (1921 to 1933). Johnson noted that Walt Disney spoke about being inspired by the series. (“My ambition was to make cartoons as good as ‘Aesop’s Fables.’”)Johnson, who teaches animation history at California Institute of the Arts and Drexel University, is known for her 2017 book “Ink & Paint: The Women of Walt Disney’s Animation,” a 384-page examination of unsung female artists and writers in the early days of Walt Disney Studios. She is now working on a book and documentary about Kelley — animation’s version, perhaps, of the 2013 film “Finding Vivian Maier,” about a nanny whose previously unknown cache of photographs earned her posthumous recognition as an accomplished street photographer.“I want to help Bess reclaim her legacy,” Johnson said.“It matters, in part because the animation field is still so dominated by men,” she added. “I’ve seen the posture of my female students change when I have told them about Bess. They’re like, yes, I have a place at this table. I have a place at the head of this table.” More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      Julia Reichert, Documentarian of the Working Class, Dies at 76

      by

      She took home, to Ohio, a 2019 Oscar for “American Factory,” and in a long career teaching and making films, she paid special attention to working women.Julia Reichert, a filmmaker and educator who made a pioneering feminist documentary, “Growing Up Female,” as an undergraduate student and almost a half-century later won an Academy Award for “American Factory,” a documentary feature about the Chinese takeover of a shuttered automobile plant in Dayton, Ohio, died on Thursday at her home in nearby Yellow Springs, Ohio. She was 76.Steven Bognar, her husband and filmmaking partner, confirmed the death. The cause, diagnosed in 2018, was urothelial cancer, which affects the urethra, bladder and other organs. She learned she had non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in 2006.Ms. Reichert, a longtime professor of motion pictures at Wright State University in Dayton, was in the forefront of a new generation of social documentarians who came out of the New Left and feminist movements of the early 1970s with a belief in film as an organizing tool with a social mission. Her films were close to oral history: Eschewing voice-over narration, they were predicated on interviews in which her mainly working-class subjects spoke for themselves.“Growing Up Female” (1971), which she made with her future husband, James Klein, a classmate at Antioch College in Ohio, was selected by the Library of Congress for the National Film Registry in 2011.Her documentaries “Union Maids” (1976), made with Mr. Klein and Miles Mogelescu, and “Seeing Red” (1983), also made with Mr. Klein, were both nominated for Academy Awards.Both movies mix archival footage with interviews. “Union Maids” profiles three women active in the Chicago labor movement during the Great Depression. “Seeing Red” portrays rank-and-file members of the Communist Party during the 1930s and ’40s.Ms. Reichert was again nominated, in 2010, for the short documentary “The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant,” which she directed with Mr. Bognar, her second husband.“The Last Truck” documented the closing of a an automobile assembly plant in Moraine, Ohio, some of it clandestinely filmed by workers inside the plant. The movie served as a prologue to “American Factory,” which Netflix released in conjunction with Barack and Michelle Obama’s fledgling company Higher Ground Productions, and which won the 2019 documentary-feature Oscar.Reviewing the film in The New York Times, Manohla Dargis called it “complex, stirring, timely and beautifully shaped, spanning continents as it surveys the past, present and possible future of American labor.”The movie is suffused in ambivalence. Having purchased the same plant documented in “The Last Truck,” a Chinese billionaire converts it into an automobile-glass factory and restores lost jobs while confounding American workers with a new set of attitudes.In 2020, Ms. Reichert and Mr. Bognar were invited by the comedian Dave Chappelle to document one of the outdoor stand-up shows he hosted during the Covid pandemic from a cornfield near his home in Yellow Springs. The two-hour feature “Dave Chappelle: Live in Real Life” had its premiere at Radio City Music Hall as part of the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival.Although Ms. Reichert addressed a variety of social issues in the documentaries she directed and produced, her enduring interests were labor history and the lives of working women. Her last film, “9to5: The Story of a Movement,” directed with Mr. Bognar, brought those two concerns together, focusing on the organizing of female office workers beginning in the 1970s.Ms. Reichert with Mr. Bognar and Chad Cannon, who composed the score for “American Factory,” at a screening of the film in Los Angeles in 2019.Araya Diaz/Getty ImagesJulia Bell Reichert was born on June 16, 1946, in Bordentown, N.J., a city on the Delaware River about eight miles southeast of Trenton. She was the second of four children of Louis and Dorothy (Bell) Reichert. Her father was a butcher in a neighborhood supermarket, her mother a homemaker who became a nurse.One of the few students from her high school to go to college, Ms. Reichert was attracted to Antioch because of its cooperative work-study program. Her parents were conservative Republicans, but once she was at Antioch Ms. Reichert’s political orientation shifted left. She canvased for the Democratic president, Lyndon B. Johnson, during the 1964 election and hosted a feminist program, “The Single Girl,” on the campus radio station. She later credited her radio experience with honing her documentary skills.“I came out of radio,” she said in an interview with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Scientists before winning the 2019 Oscar. “So without having to spend any money, I learned a lot about interviewing and editing and mixing music and how to talk — how to tell a story in a time frame.”Ms. Reichert also took a film course at Antioch with the avant-garde filmmaker David Brooks and organized a documentary workshop with Mr. Klein. After making “Growing Up Female,” which was originally intended for consciousness-raising groups, she and Mr. Klein founded a distribution cooperative, New Day Films, which focused on bringing new documentary films to schools, unions and community groups.The couple also collaborated on the documentary “Methadone: An American Way of Dealing,” in addition to “Union Maids” and “Seeing Reds.”Vincent Canby of The Times, who discovered “Union Maids” in early 1977 on a double bill in a limited run at a downtown Manhattan theater, called it “one of the more moving, more cheering theatrical experiences available in New York this weekend.”He was similarly supportive of “Seeing Red,” which was first shown at the 1983 New York Film Festival, and which is arguably the most sympathetic portrayal of American Communists ever put onscreen. Mr. Canby considered it “a fine, tough companion piece to ‘Union Maids.’” Rather than dogma, he wrote, the subject was “American idealism.”Ms. Reichert started a filmmaking program at Wright State University with Mr. Klein. She also directed a quasi-autobiographical feature film, “Emma and Elvis” (1992), written with Mr. Bognar, about a married documentary filmmaker who becomes involved with a young video artist. Although the film received only limited distribution, the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum praised it in The Chicago Reader for “making a filmmaker’s creative/midlife crisis meaningful, engaging and interesting.”Mr. Reichert and Mr. Bognar during the filming of “American Factory.”NetflixMs. Reichert’s most personal film — the first she directed with Mr. Bognar — was “A Lion in the House,” a documentary about children with cancer completed in 2006 after having been in production for close to a decade. It was inspired in part by her adolescent daughter’s struggle with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Her daughter recovered, but after the film was completed Ms. Reichert was herself diagnosed with cancer.“A Lion in the House” won multiple awards, including a Primetime Emmy, the 2006 Sundance Film Festival grand jury documentary award and the 2008 Independent Spirit Award for best documentary.Ms. Reichert’s marriage to Mr. Klein ended in divorce in 1986. She married Mr. Bognar, who survives her, in 1987. She is also survived by her daughter, Lela Klein; three brothers, Louis, Craig and Joseph Reichert; and two grandchildren.Ms. Reichert was very much a regional filmmaker. After graduating from Antioch, she remained in the Dayton area and became a source of inspiration for other Midwestern documentarians, including Michael Moore and Steve James. She also produced a number of films.In an appreciation written for a 2019 retrospective of her work at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, the journalist and author Barbara Ehrenreich recalled that Ms. Reichert had “defied every stereotype I’d had of independent filmmakers.”“She wasn’t rich, and she wasn’t arrogant or egotistical,” wrote Ms. Ehrenreich, the author, of “Nickel and Dimed” (2001), about the working poor in America. (She died in September.) “The daughter of a butcher and a house cleaner turned registered nurse, she dressed and spoke plainly, usually beaming with enthusiasm, and never abandoned her Midwestern roots.”She might have added that virtually all of Ms. Reichert’s films were explicitly collective enterprises.A scene from “American Factory,” depicting workers at an auto-glass factory in Ohio.Netflix, via Everett CollectionIn an email, Mr. Klein wrote that he and Ms. Reichert “came of age with a sense that it was only through community that the type of work we wanted to see being made could happen.”“And Julia really lived her beliefs,” he added.Despite her politics, Ms. Reichert was by her account less interested in ideology than she was in people. In an interview with Cineaste magazine, she called the subjects of “Seeing Red” “some of the most wonderful people you’ll ever want to meet.”“They made a very positive life choice, despite everything they went through,” she said.“American Factory,” which deals with the mutual culture shock experienced by Chinese and American workers and their reconciliation, was Ms. Reichert’s most ethnically and racially diverse film. The movie, she told an interviewer, “tries to be very fair by listening to everyone’s point of view — that of the chairman” — Cao Dewang, the billionaire Chinese entrepreneur who purchased and reopened the factory — “union people, anti-union people, and workers.”Indeed, Mr. Cao, a product of Communist China who teaches American workers the hard realities of global capitalism, is in many respects the film’s protagonist.Although a fully committed artist, Ms. Reichert wore her politics so lightly that almost no one seemed to notice when she concluded her Oscar acceptance speech for “American Factory” by cheerfully citing the best-known phrase from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s “Communist Manifesto.”“We believe that things will get better,” she said, “when the workers of the world unite.”Lyna Bentahar contributed reporting. More