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I consider my films forward movements, each one on a step to the next one.
-AVA DUVERNAY
It's fair to say that Ava DuVernay is among the vanguard of a new generation of African American filmmakers who are the busily undeterred catalyst for what may very well be a black film renaissance in the making. This claim is substantiated by an extraordinary and compelling corpus of creative work and, arguably more important, DuVernay's mission and "call to action." The "call" constitutes an actionable strategy intended, as she emphatically puts it, "to further and foster the black cinematic image in an organized and consistent way, and to not have to defer and ask permission to traffic our films: to be self-determining."
Like others African American filmmakers, including pioneers of past generations, DuVernay subscribes to the ethos that art serves a social purpose, debunks demeaning and normative assumptions about black people, and renders black humanity in all manner of genres and complexity. Situating DuVernay historically extends to the early 1900s, when "race movies" were first exhibited in segregated theaters, and to the 1960s and 1970s, when black independent cinema heralded a new realism in the documentary work of William Greaves, Madeline Anderson, and St. Claire Bourne, among others. No less important were the largely narrative works of fiction by that motley group of filmmakers-in-training who comprised the L.A. School (aka L.A. Rebellion), including Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, Billy Woodberry, and Haile Gerima, or the filmic experiments by prominent figures in the Black Arts Movement such as Larry Neal and Amiri Baraka. In her or his own way, each filmmaker counseled a social advocacy role for film on behalf of black self-empowerment. DuVernay continues in this advocacy, practicing the ongoing precept and tradition in the long history and struggle for black representation (fig. 1).
Two core themes distinguish her creative work. First, like Julie Dash, DuVernay's sustained interrogation engages with black women's agency and subjectivity. Second, she foregrounds the family as site and source of resilience, memory, cultural transmission, generational continuity and dissonance, and as purveyor of all things affirming of black identity. In this way her work especially resonates with L.A. filmmakers Dash (Four Women, 1975; Daughters of the Dust, 1992), Burnett (Several Friends, 1969; Killer of...