Ava DuVernay’s Visionary Filmmaking Is Reshaping Hollywood

DuVernay makes films that defy convention. Her films often seek to invert the tradition of the dehumanization of black people and the black body in the media. In the larger culture where the standard depiction of black people involves the exploitation of suffering, she wields the power of the image to jar her viewer into empathizing with suffering. She does this to devastating effect in 13th, her documentary on racial injustices in the criminal justice system. The film shows one clip after another of black men and women who have been killed by police violence, so the audience is witness to one black person dying, and then another, and then another, even as a girlfriend sits in the passenger seat, documenting and crying, as a child whimpers in the back seat, shocked. The effect is immediate. By bracketing these images with testimony from academics, respected purveyors of truth, as they explain the horrors of police violence, the dehumanization of black people that enables multiple systems to fail us again and again, the costs of that dehumanization become clear. The viewer weeps at the torrent of human tragedy on the screen. There is no denial of police brutality, no room to posit, “But all lives matter.”

Yet DuVernay also encourages the viewer to appreciate the beauty of the black body and the vitality of black life through filming the black body with love. “Queen Sugar” opens with closeups of a woman’s arms and legs and hair, a woman we will later know as Nova, but the way the camera closely tracks her seems like a caress. This is beauty, we understand: this skin that shines, this hair that winds in a tangled fall. It’s true: DuVernay loves her characters. When asked about the subjects of her work, she says, “I’m not a director for hire. I choose what I do. Anything that I’m embracing is something that I’m involved in from the ground up. I do love everything that I’m doing, and I love the stories that I’m telling.”

We viewers understand this when we see Nova lovingly lit, when we see Charley framed by the landscape she’s fighting so hard to understand, when we see Ralph Angel’s face break when he’s standing in the fields he’s fighting so hard to hold on to. We see this refrain again in the credits of 13th, when photographs flash across the screen of black people, young and old, women and men and children smiling, hugging, riding horses and cooking.

“We are used to regarding ourselves in film as one-dimensional, one thing. That’s not true. We know we can be many things at once,” DuVernay says. “There are layers of dimension, of being, in one life, in one body. The goal is to show the different dimensions of us.”

At the close of 13th, the photographs, many of her family and friends, are a celebration of how complicated humanity can be. A fountain of black joy in the face of oppression. This is Ava DuVernay’s vision. This is her voice. She says: Here are people who love. Here are people who feel joy and tenderness and kindness. And in the end: Here are people who are.