Filmmaker’s Unique View of the Black Experience : Movies: Julie Dash’s ‘Daughters of the Dust’ evokes her African heritage ‘with a freshness about what we already know.’

Julie Dash, in her boldly experimental first feature, “Daughters of the Dust,” evokes the West African culture preserved on the islands off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina. Dash has created a film that is more ritual than drama, dealing with the spiritual struggle between women of several generations over whether to preserve or to disavow ancestral beliefs and practices as their family prepares for its exodus to the North.

Dash, who grew up in a New York housing project and has won many prizes for her short films, knows full well that audiences may not be prepared for her unique vision, and that’s fine with her. “I wanted to tell my story in a way that people would never be able to forget it,” said Dash, 40, a woman of warmth and regal bearing. “I grew up on TV, watching things like ‘Roots’--well, I was hardly a baby when I saw that. You can take only so much input, even about slavery and afterward, and you become callous.

“What makes poets good is that they take everyday language and rephrase it so that you never forget it. I wanted to take the African-American experience and rephrase it in such a way that, whether or not you understood the film on the first screening, the visuals would be so haunting it would break through with a freshness about what we already know.”

Dash was speaking in her Sunset Strip hotel suite, where she was staying for the recent opening of “Daughters of the Dust,” a project some 15 years in the making. Dash, who has formidable academic credentials, including filmmaking studies at AFI and UCLA, by 1981 was armed with sufficient grants to commence the extensive research needed to make “Daughters of the Dust.”

Dash herself is of the sea island ancestry depicted in her film on her father’s side, but when she began her project she admitted that all she knew of her heritage was that “my father had a funny accent.” She learned that this was because his people had spoken Gullah, a sea island dialect in which English is expressed in the grammar and intonations of West African languages. The next thing she learned was that instead of being proud of its uniquely rich African heritage, preserved through the relative isolation and freedom of sea island life, the Gullah people, including her own relatives, were ashamed, conditioned to believe the old ways were somehow backward and inferior to the white man’s culture and beliefs. (She said that it has always been proudly emphasized in her family that her father was born “on the mainland, in Charleston”).

From her mother, a native South Carolinian, and her aunts she had to pry out bits of information about traditional customs, such as how a woman could prevent lactation. (“Burn some newspapers in a jar and then place the jar on your breast. It works every time.”) No small part of her excitement about “Daughters of the Dust’s” Los Angeles opening is her curiosity about how her local relatives, including her grandmother, will react to her film. “I could have given my grandmother a cassette, and she’d say, ‘Oh, baby, I’m so proud of you,’ but I want her to see the film with an audience and feel its impact.”

In preparing the film, Dash explained that first of all, “I wanted to rupture everyday realism. Within the first 10 minutes, I wanted the audience to feel as if it was looking at a foreign film--this was very important to me. I wanted to tell the story like an African griot would. A griot is a man hired by families at celebrations--weddings, funerals, reunions--who over a period of several days would recount the family’s history. There would be many breaks--for a meal, for this or that. I wanted to structure the story the way he would tell it.

“Western drama is based on Greek tragedy, but I didn’t think it really applied to this material,” Dash said. “I felt that it was important to have two narrators: one, the unborn child; two, a very old person, the great-grandmother, Nana. Really dicey, but I wanted two different perspectives: the future and the past.”

The irony is that in their bearing Dash’s key personages do seem to possess the stature of figures in Greek drama. In a sense, this is not so surprising because they’re all based on African deities, a fact which has been perceived by some viewers.

Dash was fortunate that in bringing her vision to the screen she had as her cinematographer (and co-producer) her husband, Arthur Jafa, who she said understood instinctively what she wanted--”We’re separated, or whatever, now”--she added, making it sound tentative. She was equally lucky, she said, in having as her composer, John Barnes, who incorporated a variety of music, reflecting various religious strains in the African American experience--African worship ritual, Santeria, Islam, Catholicism and Baptist beliefs in his rich and atmospheric score.

Dash sees herself as part of a generation of independent filmmakers who have emerged over the past decade--people such as “Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, John Sayles and David Lynch, who are changing the face of American movies.” Dash was told time and again by the major studios and the mini-majors that there was no audience for her film, which was ultimately made in conjunction with American Playhouse and has been a box-office success in New York, drawing crossover audiences.

Her next venture, however, will be at Columbia, thanks to her filmmaker friend Neema Barnette’s insistence that as the second of Barnette’s three-picture deal with the studio, she will produce a feature for Dash. It will be an erotic mystery thriller, with an original script by Michael Simanga and with the working title “Crossfire.” “It will take a look at a woman who has choices to make, and I like that,” said Dash. “I may actually first do a ‘New York Stories’ kind of trilogy with Neema. We haven’t decided who would direct the third episode.”

Still, Dash is wary of Hollywood in general: “It’s like dancing with the devil.”