A Tendency Toward Dirty Laundry: Camille Billops and James Hatch’s Unflinchingly Personal Cinema

Suzanne, Suzanne (1982) documents the corrosive effects of silenced suffering beneath the mask of middle-class respectability. The film focuses on Suzanne, Billops’s niece, and her mother, Billie, whose relationship has been frayed by their shared but unaddressed endurance of abuse at the hands of the late family patriarch, Brownie. Among the household’s unspoken fractures is Suzanne’s heroin addiction, which she appears to be managing. Carried along by the devastating insights of Suzanne’s own self-reflection, the documentary doesn’t pathologize her, instead exposing how her drug habit emerged from and was sustained by a broader network of inherited trauma and lack of care, both within the family and through social institutions. The archival materials threaded through Suzanne, Suzanne—posed photographs of the family, home movies of them milling around at home and heading out in their Sunday clothes—have a surface gloss of enshrined “normalcy.” In Billops and Hatch’s cinema of exposure, however, these keepsakes never prescribe a happy family life, their legibility disrupted by the insertion into the patchwork of confessional reframings and revelations of what these pristine family portraits concealed. They come to echo with the voices of Suzanne describing her father’s beatings and Billie admitting that Brownie’s last breath was her sigh of relief.

Even as she dismisses the false promises of middle-class normality, Billops treasures moments of effervescent intimacy among the women of the family. In one scene, Billie and Suzanne prepare for a three-generation fashion show with Suzanne’s grandmother, Alma. Billie does Alma’s hair at the kitchen table while Suzanne irons by the stove, recalling the photographer Carrie Mae Weems’s documentation of the ways that the multifunctionality of the kitchen creates an intimate space for Black women’s social life. The keystone of the film is a staged encounter between Billie and Suzanne, set within a theatrical mise-en-scène of stark chiaroscuro lighting. They begin by facing away from each other, as Suzanne asks a series of eviscerating questions that her mother alternately answers and evades. The scene eventually dissolves into an embrace and a genuine, unadorned emotional outpouring, puncturing the shared silence between these women without forcing a facile conclusion to their strained relationship. Though Suzanne, Suzanne brings uncomfortable truths about Billops’s family to light, it doesn’t frame this “dirty laundry” as a source of shame. Rather, it examines the hypocrisy of assumptions that would make a moral failure out of those who are unable to adhere to the middle-class nuclear family model—and shows how that very model can uphold the corrosions of patriarchy, enabling abuse by stifling communication and sacrificing care for the sake of appearances.

As much as she was cinematically invested in excavating the dynamics of this family model, in her own life, Billops chose an unapologetic rupture with motherhood. Before her partnership with Hatch began, she had given birth to a daughter named Christa. But in 1961, when Christa was four years old, Billops gave her up for adoption. “I decided I didn’t want to be anyone’s mother. I wanted to go back to the place that I considered the crossroads,” Billops said plainly in the interview with hooks. Making a choice that she would come to see retroactively as a feminist statement, Billops decided to grant herself a rewind, a demand for singular priority in her own life. Part of her allure as an artist, and in fact her ability to be one, derived from the way she exercised a degree of self-interest, something disproportionately denied to and demonized in Black women. Casting aside any notions of maternal self-sacrificing, Billops’s politicized refusal to cede herself or her art was an act of bravery, but it came at a cost. Neither a self-exoneration nor an apology, Finding Christa (1991), the film that she and Hatch made about her reunion with her daughter, provides matter-of-fact but sometimes chilling insights into the consequences of Billops’s decision.

Assembled from a variety of sources—family interviews, home-movie footage, theatrical interludes, and photographs—Finding Christa offers portraits of three women: Christa, now an adult; Billops herself; and Margaret Liebig, Christa’s adoptive mother. When we meet her as an adult, Christa is also in the midst of a process of artistic self-constitution, obliquely mirroring the “crossroads” that the younger Billops once faced. “I look strong on the outside,” Christa says in voice-over as Billops shows her practicing martial arts, “but inside I was that four-year-old little girl, scared, alone.” She appears as a softer iteration of Billops: stubborn and creative, but more naive, a dreamer propelled by a self-conscious desire for her “life songs”—compositions that she says she writes and performs “from the heart, from the soul”—to be heard. Her singing and songwriting long supported and encouraged by Liebig, she is now given another, if fraught, stage by Billops—whose support of Christa involves a measure of control, strictly arranging an uneven artistic collaboration, while carefully withholding the recuperation of a maternal bond. Liebig emerges from the film as a force of warmth and insight, a tempered answer to Billops’s sometimes impatient and cutting tones. This contrast is a matter of editing as much as temperament: as Billops said in the bell hooks interview, “I am not a bitch, and they are not saints. I cut the film.” Even as she built her films around acts of exposure, Billops always asserted her authority over the levers of revelation to preserve some enigma of herself. There is a stark difference between the direct mother-daughter confrontation in Suzanne, Suzanne and the slippery circumventions of Billops and Christa’s interactions. Their scenes together are mostly stilted conversations that give the impression of doctored reenactments, along with costumed surrealistic interludes in which they yodel and hold a séance. Even without orchestrating a pretense that this reunion was easy, Billops protected herself from the same collisions and raw vulnerability that she had previously laid bare between her sister and niece.

Finding Christa was awarded the Grand Jury Documentary prize at Sundance in 1992, and though Billops shared it with Hatch as codirector and coproducer, she was nevertheless the first Black woman to receive this recognition. The film aired on PBS later that year, bringing Billops’s radical openness to a wide audience through public-access television. For Christa, however, the documentary was only a temporary and conditional opening into her mother’s world—Billops jealously barred her daughter from attending the Sundance ceremony and severed all communication in 2013, a few years before Christa passed away. Hooks described the film as “disturbing on a number of levels” and “very violent and very violating of the daughter,”  though she clearly admired and appreciated the way that Billops’s treatment of the irresolvable and knotted contradictions of assumed kinship confounded neat moral readings. From their inception, documentaries have been shadowed by a potentially exploitative attitude toward those being observed—and while a Black woman’s autobiographical and experimental adaption of the genre is a radical departure from its colonial origins, we might consider that those inequitable power structures are difficult to overcome entirely. Like Suzanne, Suzanne, Finding Christa is a carefully crafted but also complex and uncontainable documentation of frayed and twisted but still-enduring family ties, a collective portrait in which no one is judged but everyone is questioned. Together, the two films function as an accumulative personal archive: the baby who appears with Billie at beginning of Suzanne, Suzanne is Christa herself. Billops and Hatch used materials like these home movies to recode the visual traces of her familial relations. They strove to uncover the buried difficulties, betrayals, and sorrows that coexisted with the joy and tenderness captured in those idealized images.

Though Billops turned her attention toward her male relatives in the final entry in the Family Trilogy, 2002’s A String of Pearls, her cinematic work with Hatch was most insistently drawn to taboo subjects in women’s lives. Catalyzed by Billops’s aunt, who in her eighties had taken a lover half her age, Older Women and Love (1987) is a charming quasi-ethnographic study of women’s sexual independence, particularly that of older women relative to their younger lovers. If the Family Trilogy pursues an undermining of the traditional nuclear-family structure, this film explores alternative architectures of social life. Older Women and Love combines a series of interview clips—a nurse speaking about the long span of psychosexual desires, an elderly woman declaring the joy of sex without frills, a young man delivering a minimanifesto on the advantages of dating up—with seemingly fly-on-the-wall footage of a party at the Billops-Hatch residence, where we are invited to eavesdrop on scenes of buoyant gossip about tactics of romantic pursuit and the nature of masculinity. One interview, with actor Ilka Payan and her husband, Gilberto Reyes, reveals that Billops’s manner as a documentarian might have at times been intrusive, imposing a demand for frankness that not everyone could meet: one of her questions prompts Payan to call for a brusque end to the interview in a moment of unscripted annoyance.

While all of Billops and Hatch’s work contains these breaches of nonfiction-filmmaking decorum, The KKK Boutique Ain’t Just Rednecks (1994) is the film that breaks most emphatically with traditional documentary form. Sitting in a field of sunflowers, the couple introduce it as a “docu-fantasy,” taking Dante’s descent into the stations of hell as a template to stage an irreverent scenario in which a group of visitors move through a fantastical series of spaces mapping racial prejudice. The stations include a game show called “May I Touch Her There,” about the racialized and gendered notions of property and ownership, as well as areas labeled “The Vault of Memory” and “The Room of Racial Slurs.” Alienating and captivating in equal measure, these episodes of campy immersion resemble filmed interactive theater, as the participants (drawn from the filmmakers’ friends and family, including Christa) are ushered from one flamboyantly conceptualized room of props to another. Talking-head interview clips are interspersed throughout the film, offering sobering doses of individual histories and experiences to temper the stretches of theatrical performance, which are at times undeniably outrageous, if not offensive. Casting themselves in the guiding roles of Virgil and Dante, Billops and Hatch approach racism in the U.S. with a whimsical impiety and recognition of their own implication.

Though there are snippets of the film that betray a shallow conception of racism as an issue of individual animus that operates the same across fundamentally uneven racial categorizations, KKK Boutique nevertheless also captures its structural, pervasive nature and formative effects on the psyche. Billops and Hatch conceived of it as a psychoanalytic procedure to reveal what is repressed in American society. They intended the film, as they wrote in an accompanying statement, as an antidote to the dominant U.S. political and cultural attitudes toward “discrimination on the basis of race [that sought] to ignore it, deny it, suppress it, to contain it, tolerate it, legislate it, mock it, exploit it.” Even measured against other reckonings with racism, Billops and Hatch’s is notable for its refusal to hide the “dirty laundry” of Black representation, delving into topics often papered over by more sanitized, mainstream approaches. A series of frank interviews on the subject of colorism—prejudice against darker-skinned individuals within a particular ethnic group—addresses a deadly aspect of white supremacy that is perhaps even more muffled in popular discourse today than it was in the 1990s.

A consideration of erasures and silences was central to Billops’s work, informing the way that Take Your Bags (1998) links the loss of cultural memory that was inflicted on enslaved Africans to the contemporary predicament of their descendants. This economical short film begins with a shadow-play image, in which we see bags being passed from a pair of hands to another pair above, followed by a baby. With a visual metaphor, Billops echoes the scholar Cedric J. Robinson’s reminder in Black Marxism that the African peoples packed into slave ships also carried with them “cultures, critical mixes and admixtures of language and thought, of cosmology and metaphysics, of habits, beliefs, and morality.” The bags being passed up represent all that Africans brought with them, things that, in Billops’s words, “would sustain them throughout the journey and beyond.” But, as Billops tells the small boy sitting next to her, the violent systems that took Africans across the Atlantic also tried to separate them from their cultural sustenance, with practices being violently suppressed and physical objects stolen outright. Billops folds her metaphor into a statement on art history and the looting of Black cultural production, indicating that the contents of the missing bags reappeared in the paintings of Matisse and Picasso, with an ironic suggestion that the two must have self-generated their African-inspired art. An efficient gloss on the violence of imperial expropriation, Take Your Bags is a meditation on the spiritual, intellectual, and artistic pillage—the stealing of “dreams and memories”—that accompanied the theft of people.

The Hatch-Billops Collection might be seen as an attempt to find and house the legacies of the stolen bags. Begun in the revolutionary year 1968 and collected over decades in their Manhattan loft, this vast store of African American culture, now mostly held at Emory University, comprises thousands of books, photographs, scripts, audio files, slides, and posters, as well as a reference library. Their collection uniquely attests to the lives and work of Black theater practitioners, visual artists, poets, musicians, writers, choreographers, and unclassifiable cultural workers. Formally, this archival impulse can be traced throughout their films, which undertake the similar work of gathering and cataloguing the personal histories of the Billops family through their home movies and photographic snapshots.

As her inclusion in the recent touring exhibition We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women 1965–85 attests, Billops was part of a generation of Black women artists who answered the artistic establishment’s dismissal of their work by generating their own spaces. Crucial to the ethics and political orientation that grounded the Collection was a rejection of the exclusionary metrics of established Eurocentric history, an unrelenting belief, as articulated by Billops, that “you can make history, everybody can.” From 1981 to 1999, Billops and Hatch produced Artist and Influence: The Journal of Black American Cultural History, an annual publication featuring interviews with predominantly (but not exclusively) Black artists shut out by mainstream institutions. Billops noted that fame wasn’t a criterion for inclusion; they weren’t interested in courting celebrity but in destabilizing its hierarchies: “we encouraged people to document themselves, to empower themselves, because many times people who are in power won’t let you in [. . .] That’s why what we tried to have was an open house.” She meant this literally as well—Billops and Hatch constantly opened their home as a site for salons and all manner of planned and spontaneous gatherings, an act of hospitality that turned their domestic space into a communal one.

What Billops said others had named as a tendency toward dirty laundry, I would also call a form of lawless hospitability—an overwhelmingly generous invitation, heedless of their guest’s prestige or social standing. Her cinematic work with Hatch claimed documentary-making as a method for weaving their social fabric; together they delved into always-autobiographical investigations of family structures and cultural belonging, infusing their films with the artistic vibrancy and motley community that shaped their shared world. Their works are a reminder that broad resonance in artworks can often emerge from the very personal, where the specifics of what is revealed are not necessarily as crucial as creating the possibility for generous exchange and mutual exposure. I imagine that as hosts they invited you into their home before anything was actually ready, pulling you into the unvarnished chaos of preparation, launching volleys of gossip and questions before you even had a chance to sit down, making some guests feel slightly uncomfortable and others feel entirely welcomed.

A series of Billops and Hatch’s films is now playing on the Criterion Channel.