Favorites Of 1991

[oscar jubis]

Favorite English-Language Films of 1991

1. DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST (Julie Dash)
2. MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO (Gus Van Sant)
-- NAKED LUNCH (David Cronenberg)
4. AMERICAN DREAM (Barbara Kopple)
-- DEAD AGAIN (Kenneth Branagh)
6. CHAMELEON STREET (Wendell B. Harris)
-- EDWARD II (Derek Jarman)
-- THE HOURS AND THE TIMES (Christopher Munch)
-- THELMA AND LOUISE (Ridley Scott)
10. BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (Gary Trousdale)
-- DEFENDING YOUR LIFE (Albert Brooks)

DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST by UCLA alumna Julie Dash is my favorite English-language movie of 1991. The film was re-released last year on the occasion of its 25th Anniversary of winning at Sundance for Best Cinematography. More recently, it was selected for the National Registry of films to preserve for posterity.I was resistant to the "mosaic structure" of the film and perhaps influenced by Jonathan Rosenbaum's comment, within an otherwise favorable review, that Dash's debut "doesn't make much use of drama or narrative" when in fact, it has the audacity to have not one but two voice-over narrators and one has yet to be born but can be heard and sometimes she appears out of the blue, wearing a ribbon in her hair, indigo, the same color as her grandmother's hands, permanently marked by the dye she processed in a plantation.
I've had an opportunity to watch the film in its restored version several times now and each experience uncovers some new delight. It's an ensemble film that reveals a lost culture and rescues it from oblivion. It concerns the decision to join mainstream America by the members of a community of Africans and their descendants who live on islands off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina in 1902. The film makes no commercial concessions, and it's quite authentic, except for the use of a synthesizer in the movie score. DAUGHTERS OF THE DUST is a Masterpiece.