::: THE SPIRIT OF INDEPENDENCE :::

THREE AFRICAN AMERICAN

MASTERS OF THE INDEPENDENT

FILM MOVEMENT

June Givanni

‘When I was at UCLA, we worked on each other’s films for

years. That’s how we learned. We just stayed at the university

all night long, one film after another. And this was a reaction

against certain kinds of films that were being made then. It

was storyboarded, written, and planned for a very long

time. It was something I wanted to do that was totally anti-

Hollywood, even to the point where the plot was invisible

and try to do a story where it looked like a documentary to

some extent and make a picture out of reality in a sense, a

narrative from events that happened in real life. And let those

things speak for themselves, instead of my commenting

on it. So I was very much aware of that.’ (Charles Burnett)

With

Daughters of the Dust

, I decided I was not going to stay

with the usual approach of Western narrative.  Instead, my

narrative structure is based on the way an African griot

would recount a story’s history, would recount a tale based

on African deities, West African deities like Ogun, Osum,

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Yemoja’  (Julie Dash)