NEW YORK, NY.- Even when Hollywood saw little use for Black performers other than as mammies and butlers, the musical genre, a storytelling mode composed of magical realist fantasy and hoofing artistry, provided space for Cab Calloway, Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge to manifest their glamorous glow. Through rapturous songs, sung in resplendent gowns and tailored tuxedos, the promise of Black liberation was heard.
The genres possibility for emancipation is showcased in the latest film version of The Color Purple, whose origin derives from a story of perseverance and sisterhood that first found acclaim in 1983, when its author, Alice Walker, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Within two years of Walkers success, Steven Spielberg directed an acclaimed big-screen adaptation of her novel. By 2005, a staged musical of The Color Purple appeared on Broadway. Now, Ghanaian filmmaker Blitz Bazawule is shouldering the books legacy, directing a cinematic adaptation of the Broadway musical.
Bazawules Color Purple aims to grant Celie (Fantasia Barrino-Taylor) the kind of interiority that makes visible her resiliency against abject trauma. Raped during childhood by the man she thought to be her father, then separated from her children the results of his assault Celie is forced into marriage with the abusive Mister (Colman Domingo). Her sister, Nettie (Halle Bailey), bids goodbye, departing to Africa. Misters son Harpo (Corey Hawkins) and his wife, Sofia (Danielle Brooks), become Celies only friends. But a chance at real love arrives when the sultry singer Shug Avery (Taraji P. Henson), Misters old flame, returns to town. Shug and Celies developing physical attraction, along with Netties letters, allows Celie to create grand worlds in her head.
Celies boundless imagination mirrors the continued influence of what Bazawule called the universal Black cadence, how an ordinary shuffle or a game of patty cake can become a song. That practice imbues The Color Purple with an inventiveness to empower Celies story, positioning the arts as an important language for resistance and a necessary tool for Black people to be more than vessels for trauma.
I think music gives Celie the kind of agency weve never seen her have before, Bazawule said during an interview at the Mandarin Oriental in New York.
Early Black musicals like Porgy and Bess and Swing! are examined in Arthur Knights book Disintegrating the Musical: Black Performance and American Musical Film. His analysis is drawn from W.E.B. DuBois belief that music is an essential element of Black identity. The control of that gift, therefore, is crucial, and the musical as a locus for song, fashion and romance becomes a strategy against the oppression faced by Black people across America.
By visualizing Celies inner thoughts and her yearning for independence, Bazawule not only retools the genres language of resistance. He also provides audiences with an integral Black film syllabus.
Our work is only understood most clearly when its part of a continuum that is built. Its a language, Bazawule said. But you have to know the language to understand what were doing.
Bazawules influences on the film are varied, including more contemporary musicals like Idlewild and Dreamgirls, the drama The Last Temptation of Christ, and studio-era musicals like Hallelujah and Cabin in the Sky. The 1932 musical short Pie, Pie Blackbird is another reference.
The larger-than-life sets used in Aubrey Scottos jazz short, A Rhapsody in Black and Blue (also 1932), come to mind during a moment of romantic whimsy shared by Celie and Shug. When Celie sings Dear God Shug, she imagines her and Shug on a giant, spinning gramophone. Rather than wholly relying on computer-generated effects, production designer Paul D. Austerberry sought to marry fantasy with reality by constructing an actual 22-foot diameter record and an enormous needle arm.
The tension rises during the films lustful juke joint scene. For this sequence, not only does Shug arrive in grand style on a barge floating across a swamp but costume designer Francine Jamison-Tanchuck also fashioned Shugs red dress to mirror the allure of Dorothy Dandridge in Carmen Jones.
I wanted Shug to look sexy, Jamison-Tanchuck said.
In a nod to the diverse rhythms in the Black diaspora, choreographer Fatima Robinson orchestrated the scenes varied dancers, bedecked in dazzling suits and luscious dresses, to use Daggering, a sizzling Jamaican dance.
I wanted to create moves where we touch each other and we hold each other, said Robinson. Its something I feel, as Black people, we dont see enough.
Celies imaginative bid for freedom peaks when she and Shug abscond to the Capitol Theater in Macon, Georgia, where they watch The Flying Ace (1926). As they view the film, Celies mind conceives of a lavish art deco ballroom recalling the 1943 musical Stormy Weather, which starred Horne. Theres an orchestra dressed in white tail tuxedos (a reference to Calloway), but instead of the highflying Nicholas Brothers splitting down the steps, Celie and Shug descend toward each other. While the scene takes place in Celies mind, its fantastical setting doesnt render her feelings or Shugs reciprocation any less real. The power of the musical genre is in its ability to make any person, no matter her background, the captain of her world.
For Bazawule, who remembers selling CDs on the street to afford tickets to art house theaters in New York, Celies cinematic escape from oppression has deep personal resonance.
I figured if Shug could bring Celie into that world, it would open her mind, he said.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.