Compensation

I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with LA Rebellion, a radical filmmaking movement of the 60s that shaped Afrofuturism in films. Filmmakers like Alile Sharon Larkin,Billy Woodberry, Jamaa Fanaka, Larry Clark, Charles Burnett, Ben Caldwell, Julie Dash, Haile Gerima, Carroll Parrott Blue and Barbara McCullough created huge impact with their anything-goes political & radical films.

I've seen few critics ignoring Zeinabu Irene Davis's contribution in comparison with others. I have wondered it might be due to her late start. For me, her feature debut Compensation (1999) is one of the finest key works to emerge from the movement followed by Haile Gerima's Bush Mama (1979). Zeinabu Irene Davis's "Compensation" is nothing short of poetic. From beginning to end this movie flows so smoothly, yet feels so complex. The chemistry between the characters is beautifully rendered and visualized.

Coming to the plot, it is Inspired by a 1906 poem from early African American writer, Paul Laurence Dunbar, the film narrates the life of a deaf African American woman in the early 1900s and it parallels with another living in the 1990s. It stars Michelle A. Banks and John Earl Jelks each playing a dual role. The story is told through two sequential lines interspersed in the style of early 20th century pictures. I read that Davis made changes in the story when she got to know that the actress happened to be Deaf in real life.

This film could have been a bad experience all around. But i'm glad that the narrative didn't linger more on the feminist side or to a watered-down metaphor for racism. But Davis manages not to give in or fall for it. She has that sensitivity and empathizes in the visual language and the psychology of the characters is offered as the plot progresses. Davis delineates her characters with an existential development that presents them incomplete with realism. This film achieves something that very few films I've ever seen has done with a small cast filled with emotions. A must see!

This was one of the more interesting and thought-provoking (if not completely successful) films that I saw at Sundance 2000. A (mostly) silent film wherein two stories are told simultaneously (a la _Intolerance_): one at the turn of the century and the other in the present day. The parallel stories examine relationships of young black couples where the female is deaf and the male is hearing. _Compensation_ thus explores relatively uncharted territory: cultural differences between the hearing and the hearing impaired. But not only does the wife/husband team of director Zeinabu Davis & writer Marc Chéry examine deaf/hearing socio-cultural issues, they further enrich (and complicate) the discussion by including issues of race and the AIDS epidemic (paralleled by consumption in the story set at the turn of the century) in the conversation. It's a wonderfully rich and complex film.

The only criticism I would aim at _Compensation_ is the _Intolerance_-like narrative structure. It didn't really work for D.W. Griffith to tell multiple stories in completely unrelated time periods and locations connected primarily by thematic material. While the technique works better here (partly because it's only two stories instead of four), it still feels a little forced. The two stories SO closely parallel each other that at times I felt like saying (as I did with _Intolerance_): "Okay, already! I get the point! You don't have to pound it into my head twice!" (Perhaps if you really liked _Intolerance_ you will like this aspect of the film more than I did.)

Aside from the narrative and thematic aspects of _Compensation_ the filmmaking is quite experimental, although not in any avant-garde sense of the word. Davis has created a (mostly) silent film for the deaf and hearing alike. In the few scenes where sync sound is used the film's dialogue is subtitled. It is probably one of the first modern films (since the advent of sync-sound) whose implicit design is intended to communicate equally with both deaf and hearing audiences.

Davis and Chéry are to be commended for creating a beautiful film. Ironically, _Compensation_ makes an important step forward in the development of the film medium by taking a step backward into film history and re-examining the nature of the medium and the many ways in which it can be used to communicate.