This essay looks at the design and materiality of African masks in the short oral history film Take Your Bags to reflect on how Camille Billops and James Hatch mine them as conveyors of historical memory and instruments of storytelling.

How might we begin to understand the role of Black experimental films as a medium for documenting Black cultural stories? How do Black experimental filmmakers use media to archive collective memory, preserving Black history and interrogating our legacy of slavery? And how does the work of Camille Billops and James Hatch facilitate this process?

In an interview with Film Quarterly, Black film scholar Michael Boyce Gillespie describes how Billops and Hatch have informed his thinking on Blackness and seditious form, or “what happens when a film appears to be classically structured but in truth productively devises an epistemological unraveling.”1 While Gillespie centers his conversation on film specifically, his larger reconceptualization of Blackness also encourages filmmakers and viewers to acknowledge and valorize Black experimental filmmakers, archives, and artifacts, positioning them as essential contributors to our understanding of history and culture. Furthermore, Gillespie writes, “My goal is to keep doing the work of thinking about Black visual and expressive culture, the work to understand how the art of Blackness continues to defy, challenge, and enliven our sense of art, history, and culture.”2 The transition from film to design and materiality I explore in this essay is significant in that it adds potentially underrecognized layers of depth and complexity to the storytelling process, enhancing the visual elements and aesthetics within each area.

With this in mind, we can review how what Gillespie calls “the art of Blackness,” inclusive of history and cultural movements, is captured and layered in the short film Take Your Bags (1998), as viewers are presented with a series of semiotic signifiers of slavery’s legacy in contemporary moments. Camille Billops is an auteur filmmaker, and her practice as a Black experimental filmmaker intertwines narrative techniques such as oral history and interview while drawing on her expertise in printmaking and ceramics. Her films continually weave Black history, visual culture, and slavery through her conceptual visual practice.

Through acts of semiotic symbolism, Take Your Bags emerges as a poignant cinematic journey, engaging with design criticism, visual culture, and material culture, and entwined with the narrative of collective memory and cultural geographies. Throughout the film Billops weaves a tapestry of historical resonance and contemporary relevance. For instance, the cargo bag is encumbered by the weight of African objects referencing the past while simultaneously speaking to the present Black American legacy. In Take Your Bags, Billops has positioned herself as a Black memory worker, using her art to excavate and illuminate the African and Black experience, overlaid by a compelling narrative. Her character’s dialogue allows the viewer to understand better the relationship between past Black identity and the current American panorama. Therefore, viewers can connect the past with the present through storytelling, visualizing the experiences of those taken from their homeland and brought to a faraway place.

In 1925 Alain Locke, cultural critic, oversaw a special issue of Survey Graphic Magazine, devoted to Harlem, Mecca of what he would call the New Negro, which was published in March 1, 1925. It featured an essay by Arthur Schomburg, “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” in which he states, “The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future. Though it’s orthodox to think of America as the one country where it is unnecessary to have a past, what is a luxury for the nation as a whole becomes the prime social necessity for the Negro. History must restore what slavery took away, for it is the social damage of slavery that the present generations must repair and offset.”3 Furthermore, Schomburg states, “First, that the Negro has been throughout the centuries of controversary an active collaborator, and often a pioneer, in the struggle for his own freedom and advancement.”4 Schomburg’s construction of the Negro past parallels Billops’s film narrative in the way it marries the past with the future.

In a voice-over description that she first characterizes as “my take on slavery,” Billops tells us about transporting people from one geographical location to another. As each person boards the voyage transporter, the welcoming officer pleasantly greets each person, saying, “Take your baby ma’am, I’ll hold your bag.” This is with the expectation that your bag will be returned at the end of the voyage. The bags held important cultural objects, memories, and medicines. These included their life experiences, languages spoken from Wolof, Fulani, Yoruba, Duala, plus maps from their homelands. These objects have maintained or even increased their value over time. They have no finite time span. While such artifacts initially started with little monetary value, they hold immense value today. This value is cultural and historical as well.5

Figure 1.

Still from Take Your Bags (1998). Courtesy of Third World Newsreel.

Figure 1.

Still from Take Your Bags (1998). Courtesy of Third World Newsreel.

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Semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure framed visual theory by focusing on language and linguistics; however, one can still apply semiotics to African masks as a signifier. Both African masks and bags are physical objects that, through their framework as signifiers, communicate aesthetic value and signify the cultural codes, spiritual practices, and societal norms based on the cosmology of various African groups. Today, these objects represent antiquity and are viewed in museums or as pictorial references for collages. In the works of artists like Picasso, there are references to African art and visual culture. De Saussure would describe the bag and African masks as part of the visual communication system. Therefore, de Saussure’s theorization and research in semiotics provides meaning-making as a value study for the study of signs, symbols, and language, which is fundamental to the understanding and appreciation of visual narratives in design and visual arts, film, theater, and performance. Each object is derived from cultural geography and social and cultural context. The visual cultural geography of Black material culture in the film is brimming with deep roots, considering the visual perception and historical legacy of Atlantic slave transportation of Black bodies.

Exploring the bag’s role, I reconstruct it as both a simple object and a profound symbol saturated with the history of lost lives, cultural erasure, and displacement. The bag represents Black Americans’ collective trauma and resilience. It embodies the relentless tide of sacrifices and struggles that they have made in America. This representation in the film is particularly meaningful if the viewer considers that the bag carries narratives of pain, perseverance, and the undying spirit of a people who have continually fought for their place and recognition in a society that has been built, in many ways, on their backs. Using the bag as a central signifier, the film’s multifaceted narrative presents a voyage between cultural geographies that represent crossing landscapes from Africa to North and South America. Through the image of the bag, Take Your Bags delves into the exploration of racialized Black spaces. The narrative, perhaps itself a bag, contains signifiers as it navigates the interplay of historical stereotypes while examining contemporary societal norms and highlights the film’s multifaceted nature.

Finally, one of the two main characters is a young boy, Billops’s nephew Keith Erskine, who is about three years old in this film. He wears a red turtleneck and holds a red toy car in his hand. The characters are set against a bright red panel backdrop, while glowing light radiates out on one side. This film evokes a dual symbolism where Billops juxtaposes the innocence of childhood with the overarching context of a more complex and often sinister reality. The mise-en-scène further suggests a stark reminder of the innocence lost and the premature burdens placed on Black youth throughout America’s history. Each visual metaphor Billops curates is part of a giant puzzle that, when assembled, reveals the richness and complexity of Black life. By showing the bags and objects in the film, Billops puts them back into our hands as viewers. We the audience are like her young nephew, being reintroduced to our own histories and re-forming our cultural ties in the diaspora through the everyday objects our ancestors once touched and used.

Take Your Bags is a visual essay articulating the nuances of Black existence. Furthermore, as a Black experimental film, it serves as a sequential canvas, visualizing a multiplicity of stories of Black spaces while offering a counternarrative to white mainstream misrepresentations, and an affirmation of Black identity and experience. The film stands as an educational artifact, a layered and material, though metaphorical, bag of America’s Black memories, traumas, triumphs, and stories. Seen today decades after its initial release, Take Your Bags is a beacon for the continued struggle for recognition and social justice in Black America.

1.

Regina Longo, “The Art of Film Blackness: A Conversation with Michael Boyce Gillespie on Film Blackness and the Idea of Black Film,” Film Quarterly 70, no. 1 (2016): 112–17. www.jstor.org/stable/26413749.

2.

Longo, “The Art of Film Blackness.”

3.

Longo, “The Art of Film Blackness.”

4.

Arthur Schomburg, “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” The Survey Graphic: Harlem, Mecca of the New Negro 23, no. 11 (March 1925): 670–72. University of Minnesota Libraries, Social Welfare History Archives, accessed September 27, 2024. https://umedia.lib.umn.edu/item/p16022coll336:2133.

5.

David Crow, “Junk and Culture,” in Visible Signs: An Introduction to Semiotics (New York: Ava Publishing, 2003), 150.