You have to have a certain sense of defiance in you so you don’t self-destruct. They can’t stop the creative thing in you.1

—Camille Billops

Figure 1.

Camille Billops and James Hatch: A photo for their unfinished film, Mama and Papa Lala. Photo credit: Steven M. Adams.

Figure 1.

Camille Billops and James Hatch: A photo for their unfinished film, Mama and Papa Lala. Photo credit: Steven M. Adams.

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Miriam J. Petty:

This special issue has been a long time in the making. It was catalyzed in large part by the partnerships, friendships, and alliances that so many of us experience as essential lifeblood when working as marginalized and minoritized persons in the academy. Meeting Camille Billops and James Hatch in my graduate school days at Emory University (in Atlanta, Georgia) was one of my first opportunities to see the importance of these connections in the varied cultural worlds the two of them inhabited together. They modeled its value through their partnership with each other, with the ways they sought to honor their teachers, elders, and mentors, to support and engage their peers and reciprocally confirm each other’s sanity, and to encourage their students and acolytes like me. They paid intentional attention to community at all of these levels through their film works, their work on their archives and documentation in their journal Artist and Influence, their teaching, and their programming and curricular development with museums, libraries, schools, and universities.

With this principle of critical, collegial, and collaborative community in mind, I hoped from the outset that my friend and colleague Terri Francis would be a willing partner in this endeavor. Her scholarly expertise in documentary and experimental film, her intervention and advocacy in film preservation, including her role in the rediscovery, restoration, and exhibition of Kathleen Collins’s 1982 drama Losing Ground, and her experience in curating and directing the Black Film Center & Archive at Indiana University, all made her participation seem tailor-made for this endeavor. Terri and I met during the same graduate school years in which I was coming to know James and Camille. As grad students and early career faculty, Terri and I served together as cochairs of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Black Caucus and programmed events and screenings with Black filmmakers like Bill Greaves and Zeinabu Irene Davis.

Terri Francis:

I first heard of Camille Billops in my first year of graduate school when I was in Elizabeth Alexander’s Contemporary Black American Culture class. That would have been 1994 or 1995, a couple of years after Finding Christa premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and won the Grand Jury Prize. I did not have much experience with films or Black films academically then, although looking back I think that studying literature and seeing Spike Lee films prepared me for Billops’s work. I did not take them personally but I took them seriously. For me Billops-Hatch is really Billops. I understand that it’s a partnership and the significance of James Hatch’s role. But my sense is that his role was to be part of things but not at the visual center of how the work would be imagined. He was so important to these productions, yet I confess that I cannot help but feel interrupted in my Camille thoughts when I come across his name. I am a thousand times more compelled by her words, her self-creation, her voice—everything about her, especially her qualities that were not entirely consumable, tidy, or heroic. I think it’s the mustache! Along with Josephine Baker, Camille Billops has long represented a rare creative force in my mind. I did not know her at all personally; we never met. Her persona and the presence that came through in her films and interviews struck me, and did so in complex and confounding ways. Yet she nonetheless offered me a fascinating immersive experience, a kind of silence between languages maybe—that is, a buzzing, fulsome silence between film and literature, academia and art-making, truth and fiction, self and image.

Other than Professor Alexander's class, I had never had the opportunity to pursue any research or writing on Billops until after her death when Another Gaze asked me to write a reflection on her work. News of her passing returned her to my thinking, intensely, as a muse and a teacher through the work she left behind. And so I am grateful that your invitation, Miriam, gave me an expanded opportunity to sink in to Billops’s work in an even more profound way. And in doing so I came to expand my thinking to include the collaboration of Billops and Hatch. They make each other possible. James Hatch played an absolutely catalytic role in Camille’s life and career. Billops is still a powerful thinking angel for me, but being able to work with you in ushering in a new generation of scholarship has felt truly meaningful.

MP:

I actually first met Camille and Jim when I was a graduate student in American Studies at Emory University around 1999. At that time I was also working as an assistant to Randall Burkett, the curator for African American Special Collections in Emory’s Library, and he introduced me to Camille, Jim, and “the Loft” on a trip to New York early that year.2 This was at the very beginning of the many conversations and negotiations that would result in the placement of much of the vast Hatch-Billops Collection—of papers, media, art, books, slides, and the rich trove of audio and video interviews associated with their journal Artist and Influence—with Emory for preservation and stewardship. It was a very lucky and auspicious time for me to be in the mix with all of them, and Randall’s generous introduction led to my cherished friendship with Camille and Jim. I did some research for my dissertation at the Hatch-Billops Collection, then Camille participated in a film series on Black documentary filmmakers I organized while I was still in PhD candidacy at Emory, then I joined Emory’s Hatch-Billops Advisory Board soon after I graduated, and then I mounted a retrospective of their movies, “Mama and Papa Lala: 30 Years of Hatch-Billops Films” at Emory in 2014. Being close enough to visit the loft on a regular basis was one of the highlights of the time I spent living and working in New Jersey in the early 2000s. While I know what you mean, Terri, about Camille’s commanding personality, being around them together also meant getting to experience firsthand Jim’s power as what I used to call “the silent e.” He could be slyly hilarious in ways that were all the funnier for their unexpectedness. And while he rarely insisted on talking loud or first, he always contributed a generous, supportive, and subtle presence. In that way, he embodied a kind of Black feminist praxis that was all about a man making space rather than taking up space.

TF:

One of the elements of our “A Certain Defiance” issue I am especially proud of is our selection of primary source material. The stunning photographs from your collection allow us to see Jim and Camille in situ but also with you and your son, Saul, as family and friends-as-family, embodying the sociality so keenly necessary for intellectual work, as you describe here. The image that we chose to open our introduction is particularly remarkable because it shows Jim and Camille holding photographs of themselves that double and become reflexive through the masks. It captures their practice perfectly, I feel, as being sincere and personal but absolutely adorned and formed through a rigorous aesthetic sensibility.

The films I consider in my work are inspired in every way by my early experiences with Older Women and Love (1987), Finding Christa (1992), and A String of Pearls (2002). They constitute an alternative media arts culture that challenges the conventions of the mainstream storytelling. To the extent that self-fashioning and making a scene is such a central creative focus in Black art, being a spectacle and being in on that look can be central. This is where I think of someone like Camille Billops as an artist whose own body and life gave her her material. As independent filmmakers Billops’s and Hatch’s process exemplifies US alternative and innovative means of producing, distributing, and thinking about, not only their own work but cinema and the arts as a whole. They were theorists and historians, capturing art-making of their time. So often the value of Black film appears limited to its role in the imagination of white audiences, yet Billops unapologetically foregrounded her own creative decisions, personal motivations, and desire to tell stories through moving images frequently and passionately.

Figure 2.

James V. Hatch with Saul W. Petty-Adams (ten months old) and Miriam Petty at the loft, July 17, 2011. Photo credit: Steven M. Adams.

Figure 2.

James V. Hatch with Saul W. Petty-Adams (ten months old) and Miriam Petty at the loft, July 17, 2011. Photo credit: Steven M. Adams.

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MP:

Very true. The artistic and political intervention modeled by Camille and Jim throughout their lives together relied on a regular practice of facing the uncomfortable truths and the comforting lies that regularly govern our worldviews in the United States. For instance, they were a mixed-race couple who actively refused palatable myths about interracial unions automatically easing racial tension via intimacy. Instead, their works together exemplify a concerted reckoning with identity, and especially with the historical messiness of power, race, and gender. As a scholar and champion of Black theater history, James mobilized his privilege as a cis-het white man to make buried histories visible, and to elevate and support the careers of Black scholars and artists, including Camille herself. His own gentle personhood was unthreatened by a long life among and in support of people of color. Jim’s disinvestment in the currency of whiteness is perfectly exemplified in a moment from The KKK Boutique Ain’t Just Rednecks (1994) in which he is dressed up on-screen (by Camille and her sister Billie) as Mammy. Camille provides the context for this “Dressing Mammy” scene’s ceremony in a blunt voice-over, proclaiming “Black people didn’t make Mammy, white people did. So we want to give the bitch back.” Effectively shrouded beneath grotesque, intersecting icons of white supremacy, Jim takes the weight of their signification in this moment of The KKK Boutique’s racial morality play.

Camille also refused raced and gendered norms of all kinds throughout her life. Most (in)famous among these refusals was her decision to give her daughter Christa up for adoption at the age of four, an impossible and unspeakable decision that was itself overdetermined by the curtailed and circumscribed status of Black women in 1950s and 1960s America. Reflecting on her decision three decades later, Camille said, “I didn’t see myself as abandoning her. I saw what I did as a responsible act.”3 Several contributors to this issue address the film Finding Christa, which brings Camille and Jim’s unflinching honesty as filmmakers to this choice and its aftermath. Yet Camille’s fierce commitment to self-determination was consistent throughout her lifetime. Her self-making as an artist, intuitively described as “self-possession” in Michelle Prettyman’s essay in this collection, is one instructive example. Her profuse sartorial style, seemingly designed to please herself first and foremost, is another; it included her intricately cornrowed and beaded hair; her giant hats; her earrings and layered necklaces of turquoise and jasper; her small mustache that she did not bleach, wax, or trim. And finally Camille’s acumen as not only an artist, but as an art broker and an archivist, who sold her own art to collectors (many of whom she also taught in the art of collecting), who coaxed emerging artists into making more of their work in sustainable and sustaining ways, and who rescued art destined for the literal dumpster for restoration, preservation, and exhibition; all of these kinds of work required space beyond that typically reserved for Black women.

The preservationist impulse is all the more meaningful to me since my own scholarship tends toward the historical and historiographical, and routinely depends on archives that are aggressively incomplete when it comes to the subjects I wish to understand and explore. My book on Black stardom in 1930s Hollywood obliged me to turn to alternative and speculative archives in the form of fiction and autobiography, and to follow “dotted lines” between Black character actors like Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and Lincoln “Stepin Fetchit” Perry, and their respective white patrons/costars, Shirley Temple and Will Rogers. As importantly, my formal, informal, professional, and personal connections and communities make it more humanly possible to navigate and fill the gaps and omissions that are baked into our cultural past and present.

TF:

I especially admire Billops and Hatch as archivists. Billops’s role in shaping and encouraging Black film criticism while producing her own work is a model of the ideal artist-scholar. Billops was an early contributor to the Black Film Center & Archive while she and Hatch built the Hatch-Billops Archives, their loft home, studio, performance, and community space at 491 Broadway in Soho. Their extensive collection is now partially housed at Emory University as the Camille Billops and James V. Hatch Archives. Thanks to Andy Uhrich, curator of Film and Media for WashU Libraries, I was able to see a rare, perhaps unedited, interview Billops did with Blackside, Inc. It reminded me of what I love so much about the BFCA’s materials from Camille. Although they are not about her, in her selections and commentary, we can see the world through her eyes. In the interview she is astute and detailed in her assessment of artists like Romare Bearden. She read so widely and, in the video, she unpretentiously marks out entire new lines of inquiry and debunks conventional thought in art history and cultural theory.4

Our opening epigraph and this issue’s title both reference defiance, and I want to be sure we make space for remembrance of that quality in Camille, as a person, an artist, archivist, educator, and scholar who moved among other artists, archivists, scholars, and educators. We offer a number of primary sources across our introduction and in this special issue. They are unique in their materiality, having not been published anywhere before but also in the Black memory work they do to bring a sense of intimacy and a ludic sensibility to the collection. For instance, in an email to us, pioneering filmmaker and professor Portia Cobbs shared her memory of Camille. She said:

It happened at the 1992 summer Flaherty [Film Seminar] as we settled back in the room and on stage for the discussion following the screening of Finding Christa. [Camille] brought a super soaker water gun that she'd filled and as she slowly slid it under her chair, she scanned the room to make eye contact with everyone in the audience. The other remark that she made at a screening of Suzanne, Suzanne in Berkeley, was about self-preservation as an artist: “Discover yourself…look out the window! They're not coming!” When I shared that this weekend some heard it as a negative remark that countered what the conference was accomplishing. It was meant to say…one has to continue to do their work and sometimes without help.5

Jim and Camille’s archiving was definitely part of their cultural defiance! Not only are they an inspiration for how they worked and lived but we have their legacy as a pathway to knowledge about our own history.

MP:

With their individual and collective archival impulses in mind, as a whole, the Hatch-Billops Collection was designed to redress the gaps created by American racism and anti-Blackness in particular. Incorporated and chartered in 1975 under the New York State Board of Regents as a not-for-profit research library, Jim and Camille articulated an eloquent and powerful mission statement consisting of “three major purposes”:

  1. To collect and preserve primary and secondary resource materials in the Black Cultural Arts

  2. To provide tools and access to these materials for artists and scholars, as well as the general public

  3. To develop programs in the arts that use the resources of the Collection

Their sustained attention to Black aesthetic, cultural, historical, and communal matters and approaches was always expansive rather than exclusive. This sensibility is evident in their films, perhaps most explicitly in The KKK Boutique Ain’t Just Rednecks with its intraracial and global insights into racism and sexism, and even in Take Your Bags, with its diasporic understanding and critique of the pillaging of African creativity and humanity. But they were also unapologetic and unrepentant in their centering and championing of Black artistry in explicit defiance of American anti-Blackness—long before that term became fashionable or even widely circulated. We cannot possibly capture the profound variety and interdisciplinary of their work across time in this special issue, but we and some of our authors do gesture toward it in ways that are tantalizing and provocative.

The six scholarly essays featured here provide new commentary and analysis of all six of the films that Billops and Hatch made together between 1982 and 2002, namely, Suzanne, Suzanne (1982); Older Women and Love (1987); Finding Christa (1991); The KKK Boutique Ain’t Just Rednecks: A DocuFantasy about Everybody’s Racism (1994); Take Your Bags (1998); and A String of Pearls (2002). The authors often return to a constellation of themes and ideas that are inextricable from the Billops-Hatch film canon: the legacies of family; the interplay between the personal and political in art, race, gender, age; intersectionality and its layered effects; the possibilities and limits of experimental aesthetics; the demands, pleasures, and banalities of partnership in life and work; and the consistently interdisciplinary and intermedial tendency of the work itself.

Ryan Nhu’s essay “Break Yourself at Home: The Queer Hospitality of Camille Billops and James V. Hatch,” explores their first film, Suzanne, Suzanne (1982) as well as the second film of their family trilogy, Finding Christa (1991). Nhu offers an explication of the stakes of these volatile, personal films by identifying what he terms the “queer hospitality” at the heart of Billops and Hatch’s cinematic and extracinematic approaches. Nhu writes that “queer hospitality emphasizes the ongoing work of ambivalence and vulnerability in the provision of care,” and persuasively claims this practice as one that helped them challenge and recast the figure and the institution of the family for their viewers. This essay offers welcome insights that go beyond reading Billops and Hatch as “bohemian” or “countercultural,” suggesting productive ideological and ethical lines of connection between their films and contemporary queer theory as well as Black feminist theory.

Relatedly, Michele Prettyman’s essay “Woman, Alone?: Camille Billops, Self-Possession, and Older Women and Love (1987),” stages a poetic reading of the intentional and productive against the grain-ness of Billops and Hatch’s intimate and professional partnership. Billops’s well-known forceful personality, creativity, and style are placed in important historical and cultural context, as Prettyman illuminates her lifelong pursuit of self-invention and independence, goals that she met and expressed in and through her life partnership with James Hatch. The essay also draws productively on the film Older Women and Love as a key text in which Billops’s self-possession can be understood “not simply [as] being led by one’s own impulses and lived experiences, but also by an openness to the fluidity of collaboration, redirection, and alternative modes of making.”

Ruth Feldstein’s essay “Framing ‘Finding Christa’: Black Feminisms and Films,” discusses the fraught issue of motherhood in Billops’s films, highlighting her contemporary Black female filmmakers Alile Sharon Larkin and Ayoka Chenzira. Feldstein explores Finding Christa, arguably Billops’s best-known film, in conversation with Ayoka Chenzira’s 1994 film Alma’s Rainbow and Alile Sharon Larkin’s 1979 film Your Children Come Back to You. With key historical markers of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s as her compelling context (the Moynihan Report, the LA Rebellion, the Reagan-era rise of racialized discourses around “welfare queens” to name a only few), Feldstein observes the distinct ways that this trio of filmmakers navigated motherhood and labor, and depicted multifaceted Black feminisms in their work, all within a cultural and political landscape that routinely stigmatized Black women.

Michele Washington’s essay “Black Memory in Take Your Bags: Experimental Film and the Meaning of Material Objects,” spotlights Billops and Hatch’s recourse to experimental aesthetics as a mode of documentary especially suited for their memory work in their lyrical, eleven-minute short Take Your Bags. As Washington notes, the film’s emphasis on artifacts that carry immeasurable material, cultural, and historical value allows viewers an insight into the layered costs of the thefts enacted by the Middle Passage and the Atlantic slave trade, and emphasizes the filmmakers’ agency in telling a story about art and its significance across time and space.

Joshua Chambers-Letson’s essay “As It Turns Out, What Was Being Staged Was: Racist Theatricality, Racial Reality, and The KKK Boutique Ain’t Just Rednecks” provides an especially welcome analysis of one of Billops and Hatch’s most provocative, yet least theorized films. Chambers-Letson offers a performance-studies-inflected perspective on The KKK Boutique’s descent through the hell of US American racism, as modeled after Dante Alighieri’s classic poem from the Italian renaissance, Inferno. Highlighting the film’s critique of racist theatrical traditions and its engagement with historical performance cultures, the essay provides powerful insight into the influence of Hatch’s theater expertise and the performative circles in which both Hatch and Billops moved throughout their lives.

Finally, Carla Italiano’s essay “Futures Imperfect—Inscriptions of Self and Community in A String of Pearls” offers welcome new scholarship on A String of Pearls, the last film that Billops and Hatch made together, and the third and final installment of the family trilogy begun with Suzanne, Suzanne and Finding Christa. Italiano’s essay reads A String of Pearls as an intentionally feminist observation of masculinity and its discontents. But she also puts the film into generative conversation with Afro-Latin epistemologies and cinema aesthetics, via the work of Afro-Brazilian scholars and creatives like Leda Maria Martins, Conceição Evaristo, and Tila Chitunda. They all share with Billops and Hatch critical and altered approaches to temporality, to knowledge, to writing, and to witnessing.

In addition to these new scholarly works, the special issue proudly features two documents that provide valuable context for a dynamic understanding of Jim and Camille as multifaceted cultural workers. The first is a collective essay coauthored, compiled, and organized by JT Takagi and Roselly Torres of Third World Newsreel in New York City. It includes reflections from Takagi and Torres, as well as Ada Gay Griffin, Michelle Materre, Paula Heredia, George C. Wolfe, Dorothy Thigpen, Louis Massiah, Al Santana, Malkah Manouel, and Dion Hatch. Third World Newsreel was Billops and Hatch’s sole distributing partner from their first film, Suzanne, Suzanne in 1982 until their final film, A String of Pearls, in 2002. In addition to this dynamic essay, we are grateful for the synergy created for this issue by Third World Newsreel’s 2023–24 worldwide retrospective of the six Billops-Hatch films, and for their generous sharing of images and screening copies of the films for this special issue’s authors.

The second piece is a roundtable interview of the advisory board for the Billops-Hatch Archives at Emory University. The current board membership consists of collectors, scholars, artists, activists, and administrators, all of whom were hand-picked by James and Camille to support and develop the uses of their collection of papers, recorded interviews, films, books, and more, all of which were gifted to Emory University in 2002. The Billops-Hatch Archives Board’s connections to James and Camille are primarily around art-making, curating, and collecting, and their recollections provide a window into that world that is unique and historically rich. They also suggest that the emphases that recur throughout their films—on community, accountability, care, and preservation, for example—were equally relevant across James and Camille’s many spheres of influence.

We’re also pleased to include the winning essay from the 2023 graduate student writing competition, cosponsored by the SCMS Gender and Feminisms Caucus. Samantha Silver’s “‘Funnier Than Moms Mabley’: The Stand-up Comedy of Hattie Noel,” considers the artistry of an underrecognized working-class African American woman comedian and does so through a historical study of Noel’s performances in the modalities of animation, film, the blues, and vinyl—a veritable medley of media that reveals the Black feminist politics of stand-up comedy and the dualities of African American humor in contexts of disenfranchisement.

Over the past two decades, despite (or because of?) Billops-Hatch’s uniqueness, scholarly attention to the Billops-Hatch films had slowed substantially. Public acclamation in fora like Michelle Materre’s 2015 Lincoln Center program Tell It Like It Is: Black Independents in New York, 1968–1986, and the announcement of the preservation of the Hatch-Billops archives, via Emory University’s 2016 exhibition Still Raising Hell, have been landmark moments for seeing the films and assessing Billops and Hatch’s broader cultural import.

It is stunning to think that the 1990s were the heyday of Billops-Hatch film criticism, more than thirty years ago. During that groundbreaking decade Billops-Hatch films screened at festivals such as the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), New Directors/New Films series by the Museum of Modern Art at Lincoln Center, the International Film Festival Rotterdam and the Whitney Biennial. Further, Billops collaborated with scholars Ada Griffin and Valerie Smith on the landmark 1991 “Black Film Issue” in Black American Literature Forum, which included white feminist art theorist Barbara Lekatsas’s “Encounters: The Film Odyssey of Camille Billops.” Black feminist author and critic bell hooks published a conversation with Billops in her essential Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies titled “Confession—filming family: An interview with Camille Billops” (1996). Jacqueline Bobo included Monique Guillory’s essay “The Functional Family of Camille Billops” in her crucial 1998 collection Black Women Film and Video Artists. These are foundational works that continue to resonate, yet we are thrilled to bring Billops and Hatch to new audiences and readers.

We invited our colleagues and friends to join us in reigniting research and reflection on the films of Billops and Hatch, and we are humbled by the disciplinary range and richness of the essays they have offered. In many ways this collection feels overdue yet right on time. We each brought our unique areas of expertise and modes of creativity to this project, and it is fitting to present it through a dialogic introduction. We now welcome readers to join us, dive into these pages, and continue the conversation.

Figure 3.

James Hatch and Camille Billops, July 17, 2011. Photo Credit: Steven M. Adams

Figure 3.

James Hatch and Camille Billops, July 17, 2011. Photo Credit: Steven M. Adams

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1.

Lynda Jones, “Dream On, Dreamer,” Village Voice, September 6, 1994, 60. Quoted in “Other Voices,” in Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Women Filmmakers of the African and Asian Diaspora: Decolonizing the Gaze, Locating Subjectivity (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 128–54, at 134.

2.

Now known as the Emory University Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library.

3.

Camille Billops and James V. Hatch, Remarks following a screening of Finding Christa (1992). 38th Annual Flaherty Seminar—Tape 15: August 13, 1992, https://hdl.handle.net/2333.1/0vt4bg72.

4.

Interview with Camille Billops, 1998, Henry Hampton Collection, WashU Libraries, Department of Special Collections, St. Louis, Missouri.

5.

Portia Cobb, email message to Terri Francis, March 7, 2023. Cobb first shared her memory in public remarks she made during the Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts symposium, which took place March 2–4, 2023, in Chicago, Illinois.