Still Standing: A Conversation with Ayoka Chenzira
Ayoka Chenzira embodies the ideal of a director with a wide range. Her films call to mind a quote by the great science-fiction author Octavia Butler, another Black woman who took it upon herself to imagine new worlds: “Every story I create creates me. I write to create myself.”
In the process of constantly challenging herself to explore new forms over the course of her career, Chenzira has amassed a body of work that consists of documentaries, stop-motion animation, and a narrative feature. Her journey began in her mother’s beauty parlor, where she was surrounded by the beauty of women from different walks of life. These childhood experiences instilled in her a desire to tell the stories of this community. After enrolling at NYU Film School in the 1970s, she found herself swept up in the Black independent film scene of New York City, which placed her in the midst of legendary women like historian and curator Pearl Bowser and filmmakers Julie Dash and Kathleen Collins, the latter of whom became a mentor to Chenzira.
In this conversation, which accompanies a collection of her films now playing on the Criterion Channel, we talk about Chenzira’s creative influences, the pride she takes in supporting the next generation of Black women filmmakers through her work as an educator, and her adventurous forays into multimedia projects and science fiction.
What led you to be a filmmaker? Did you have a rich interior life as a child? Were you into the arts?
I grew up with a mother who was in some ways rather conservative and in other ways very eccentric. I am who I am because I had this really strong female figure in my life. My mother loved movies—loved, loved, loved, loved the movies. As a child, I was probably taken to a lot of age-inappropriate movies because there was no babysitter. She just brought me along. My mother was the owner of a beauty parlor. And she also made beautiful, one-of-a-kind clothes, none of which I appreciated. In the movies, I think that she had an opportunity not just to see the story but to see other things that she was interested in, like costuming and hairstyles. She would buy Vogue, Butterick, and McCall’s Patterns, and then redesign them.
I know you have some background in dance and other art forms. Do you think that the same thing that drew your mother to the movies is what drew you to them—that you can combine all these different art forms in the work you’re making?
Very, very much so. I was an African American child who actually had a parent who loved the arts and was very supportive. Very few Americans want their children to be artists, and very few African Americans want their children to be artists, even though there is a deep love for things like music and film, etc. I had been trained in a lot of different art forms as a child. I got all the dance lessons, the piano lessons, the cello lessons, but there is something about film and storytelling that allows you to put a lot of art forms into one discipline. And growing up in my mother’s beauty parlor, I had a first-hand experience of listening to women tell stories.
So when you decided to go to school, you went to film school?
I did. I went to NYU. I always knew I was going to go to college. I heard this from the time I was really little. Didn’t know what it was, but I knew. So, you know, when I got accepted into NYU, I got a big trunk of clothes, a pack of birth control pills, and off I went.
What was it like studying film at Tisch? Was it Tisch then?
Tisch was still in the process of being built. I went to New York University Film School. There were four Black students. Two or three of us were African American, and one student was from Haiti. And it was what it was. It was the ’70s, so Black exploitation films were very popular. And those films weren’t something that I was interested in. As students, we were supposed to work on one another’s films, and nobody wanted to work on mine, which was fine with me because, you know, there was a parallel universe where I was meeting Black filmmakers in New York making their first independent films or going to workshops or grassroots community organizations to learn filmmaking. But I had come from a parent with such a strong personality that I wasn’t deterred by other people not wanting to work on my films. It was a very white, very male environment, but one where there was a lot of play and experimentation. Not everybody was trying to go to Hollywood. And so there was a kind of communal support in terms of getting out there and making your own independent film.
I wanted to ask you about that parallel community outside of NYU. I know you were out there with the likes of Kathleen Collins, Pearl Bowser, Julie Dash—I could keep listing names. I’m curious if you could tell me what that time was like and what they were like.
So, you know when you’re in something, you don’t always realize what you’re in. I now have what I would call the arrogance of hindsight. And so maybe I’m making things up. But I would say it was extraordinary that there was Kathleen Collins, Michelle Parkerson, Monica Freeman, Al Santana, Ronald Gray. There were just a lot of people around who were making work and figuring it out, some with formal training and some self-taught.
It’s also a time in New York when you have a lot of foreign films being shown. There was a theater on Broadway that would show independent films, and closer to NYU, there was the Saint Marks Theater, where you could go and see a film for a dollar if you were a student. People were also reading a lot, so it wasn’t just filmmakers talking to filmmakers. It was filmmakers talking to writers, activists, and grassroots community organizers. It was a time when you had places like Third World Newsreel, the Black Filmmaker Foundation, and Women Make Movies, institutions being formed that were supporting the work. You had the women’s movement, and African American women in particular were beginning to critique the world in a very different way and support the work of Black women artists. You have a convergence of a lot of different interests and disciplines that I think made the time very exciting and welcoming and energetic. It’s what I remember.
I know Kathleen Collins was a mentor to you. Is there any specific wisdom she imparted to you that you apply to your filmmaking practice?
Kathleen Collins and I were very close. She was my daughter’s godmother. And when Kathleen was in the process of dying, she did not tell me that. She called me on the phone, and we just started talking about a lot of things, and she knew that I was very interested in film and experimentation—experimentation not only in terms of the form, but doing things with film like heating it up and seeing what that would look like, attaching things to it and seeing if it could go through a projector scanning it. And she was supportive of none of those things [laughs]. But what she did say to me was that if I kept doing this experimental stuff, I wasn’t going to be able to feed her godchild. And so she told me that she was going to go on sabbatical, and she wanted me to take her place at the City College of New York in the film department. And I said sure.
She introduced me to the world of higher education, and I didn’t feel that that was my calling. And I have to say, as a person who has the responsibility of facilitating conversations around teaching and learning and pulling people through to understand the world in particular ways and to show them how other people have thought about the world, I did not know that you learned as much as a teacher as you do as a student. It has just been an extraordinary gift that Kathleen gave to me, introducing me to that world.
That’s beautiful. As you’re making your films, you’re also teaching?
Yes. Always, always. I started teaching in the early 1980s, and I retired last year from Spelman College, where I was a professor and the division chair of the arts and am now professor emerita.
I was struck by the way that you use different forms in all of your works, but especially by how you use animation. What inspired that? I read that Zajota and the Boogie Spirit was the first animated movie to combine frame-by-frame animation on film with video and computer animation.
Yeah, that’s a very good question. The balcony-view answer is that I like to do things that I don’t know how to do. I get tremendous pleasure from it, because I learn. I learn the thing, but I also learn about myself as I am trying to figure out how to make something. In some ways, that process is a conversation with myself, to myself, about myself. My thesis project at NYU was a documentary called Syvilla: They Dance to Her Drum. It’s about a first-generation African American woman dancer and choreographer named Syvilla Fort, whom I also studied dance with. I was in her dance company. She was dying while I was making the film, and there was very little recorded information about her. She was the ballet mistress for the Katherine Dunham Company. She trained a lot of very famous people, including Marlon Brando and James Dean. She was the vital training link between the Katherine Dunham and Alvin Ailey periods of modern dance. And yet there was very little written about her. Most of the knowledge was in the oral tradition.
She was ailing, and there was going to be a large tribute to her at the Majestic Theatre. There was this renewed interest in her. And it just so happened I was making a film about her at the same time, and she passed away on my birthday. For a while, I thought that my calling was going to be to make documentary work about unsung heroes in African American communities. I was devastated when she passed; it was really because we had become so close. I also realized, after I kind of came out of the depression around that loss, that there were so many things that I wanted to say about her. And the way I saw her didn’t fit into the documentary genre. The way documentaries were approached at that time, there was more formality about them. I felt like I needed to find ways to put more of myself into the work. I needed to be able to express myself more and to have more control, and I think that that’s what led me into animation. It was kind of freeing.
First I did Hair Piece, and then I did Zajota and the Boogie Spirit. Hair Piece comes more out of traditional collage animation, frame by frame with paper. I love technology, and so I bought one of the first Apple computers and figured out how to do animation with it. I was on the board of an organization, and there was another man on this board who knew that I was interested in animation, and he worked at one of the postproduction houses in New York. And he said: We just got this new video camera that does frame by frame. Would you like to come and see it? So I went and got this demo and I was just blown away. I was like, oh, this is the answer. And so they let me use it for my project. I was in seventh heaven.
I can imagine that was really exciting. Even outside of animation, I was struck by the use of still images in films like Snowfire.
Snowfire is about my best friend, Eugene Little, who was a modern dancer and a Broadway dancer. He was also my daughter’s godfather. He died of AIDS. To this day, I miss him very, very much.
I am a closet photographer and probably have about forty years of photography work that I’ve never shown anybody. I really wanted to be a cinematographer before I wanted to be a director, and they were not supportive of that at NYU at the time. In fact, the director of the program, the beloved Haig Manoogian, told me that I should be an editor because women are good with their hands. But I’ve always had a love for photography and cinematography, and whenever I got a chance to express myself in those ways, I did it. So Snowfire was a very special piece to me; it was an opportunity to combine animation with photography.
Something I noticed in Snowfire, MOTV (My Own TV), and Alma’s Rainbow is the way you represent the diversity of the diaspora. The films feature some Caribbean folks as well as some Black Americans. Can you speak to that representation?
My mother was the sole proprietor of her beauty parlor. It was one of those places that had mahogany furniture and tea. It was a beautiful space for women to come to. I tried to represent some of that in Alma’s Rainbow. The women who came to my mother’s beauty parlor were mostly African American professionals, teachers, court stenographers, or nurses. But there were also some women from the Caribbean; there were also a couple of Irish women, a couple of Jewish women. When I got to New York City from Philly to attend NYU Film School, and later, when I ended up in Brooklyn, I started to see more cultural diversity than I had been exposed to. Everything from the fruits, the vegetables, the clothes, the language. It was all there. My first husband was from Jamaica, so I was very immersed in Caribbean culture. Also there was the dance form that I was studying, which was called the Dunham Dance Technique. Katherine Dunham was not only a dancer and choreographer, she was an anthropologist, much like Maya Deren. She created this dance technique that pulled from West Africa and the Caribbean, and blended those styles with modern dance techniques. So, yes, those worlds often show up in my work in some way.
Speaking of your mother’s beauty parlor, what was the genesis of Alma’s Rainbow? How did you come up with the idea for the film?
You asked a question earlier about how you decide what stories are going to look like. Alma’s Rainbow just felt like a longer dramatic piece. My daughter, HaJ, had a lot of girlfriends when she was little, and there was tension between them and their mothers, particularly as they were getting closer to puberty. And I also experienced that with my mother—women start to get tense when their daughters get to be a certain age and boys start hanging around the corner. I was aware of this tension and just wanted to have some conversation around that, because women often forget that they were once girls and once teenagers. They take on this role of mother, as opposed to the role of person. You know what I mean by that? And much of that is shaped by your experience with your own mother, or sometimes by media images of what a mother is supposed to look like. I’ve found that with a lot of women, once they cross over into motherhood, the world looks different to them, and they forget these other dimensions of themselves. That’s why, in Alma’s Rainbow, the mother’s sexuality is explored.
I saw that you had workshopped the film at Sundance with Tisha Campbell, Rosalind Cash, and Anna Maria Horsford. Can you speak on the process of developing it in that environment?
Sundance was new. When I went to the Sundance Feature Film Program, it was maybe only one or two years old. The first Black filmmaker who went to Sundance was Euzhan Palcy, and I was in the second.
Sundance at that time worked with a pool of actors who I think would go every summer, and directors could develop their stories with them. But they didn’t have a pool of African American women or men. And so they asked me if I knew any actors I would like to bring. I asked for Rosalind and Anna. I did not know Tisha. They found Tisha. That’s how the four of us got up to the mountain in Sundance. And it was a very fun and welcoming experience. Long hours spent thinking about the script, writing. And it’s a very supportive environment that’s about play, experimentation, and trying to find your voice, where you get to choose scenes to film to see if they work or not.
What was it like working with Ronald Gray, your cinematographer? You mentioned earlier that you guys were in the same New York film circles.
Ronald worked a lot with Kathleen. He lensed her films. Not only did we work together but we started an organization together, along with Al Santana and some other people, called Black and Hispanic Images, where we did some lobbying and raised like half a million. Ronald comes out of the film program at the City College of New York, as did Julie Dash and another filmmaker, Robert Gardner. He was actually a student of Kathleen’s. Ronald is fun and funny and eccentric and quirky and opinionated and a visionary and smart and specific. And wonderfully arrogant and both patient and impatient. He’s absolutely wonderful to work with because he’s so knowledgeable about story and imagery.
It shows in the work. It’s a really gorgeous film.
The Black exploitation films that were popular when I was at NYU never looked beautiful to me. They never looked like they were made with a lot of care. And I grew up in a world where, however much or little money you had, being clean and beautiful was really important. And to this day the idea of beauty is still something important to me. It’s a gift to the world. I said to Ronald, this film has to be beautiful. When the premiere of the remastered version showed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, I hadn’t seen the film in a long time, and I certainly hadn’t seen it projected in a long time. And it’s beautiful. Ronald helped to make that happen. And Sidney Innis’s costume work is just exquisite. The house we filmed in—which was owned by Peggy Toone and her husband, the artist Lloyd Toone—was already beautiful, and then Peggy brought in these objects to make it even more beautiful. And the hair and makeup people. I mean, it’s just all working together. They knew exactly what I was talking about in terms of how the idea of beauty functions in African American communities, regardless of income.
I know you direct television now. And so I was wondering about the difference between helming features and helming television.
I’m going to answer the question in two ways. From a visual standpoint: with film—and when I say film, I’m talking about projected work on a screen—there is a lot more latitude to play. There’s the foreground, the midground, and the background. There’s more thought you can put into depth of field. In a lot of television work, you don’t have that. In my film work, I’m used to being everything: the writer, the director, the producer. Can I look in your closet and see your wardrobe? I’m also raising the money.
But in television, there’s a hierarchy; I’m walking into somebody else’s vision. The story is already there, and some things have already been designed. There are a lot of people who have to buy into what’s happening on the screen. There are a lot of approvals. Even a costume change, depending upon the show, needs approval from the studios. And so with directing television, you’re looking to see how you can raise the story up off the page in a way that also protects the brand.
Even with the hierarchy, I really enjoy directing for television. I love the collaboration, and that everyone shows up wanting to do their best and trades ideas to problem-solve and sometimes create something new. It’s a world where you have to be nimble. The time pressure forces me to think on my feet and make adjustments.
You mentioned retiring from higher education. I’m very interested in what it feels like to raise the next generation of filmmakers as an educator, especially at an institution like Spelman.
At Spelman College, I started a few new programs. By the time I left, I had worked with President Mary Schmidt Campbell and the arts faculty to begin to reimagine the arts at Spelman. Part of that reimagining process was bringing in documentary filmmaking and photography as degree-bearing programs. Documentary filmmaking has been more successful than we ever imagined. I mean, the program literally grew overnight, and we had to hurry up and purchase more equipment.
Seeing these young women with cameras in their hands coming up with ideas for stories that they want to tell, I just grin every day. I remember being one of four people of color at a major institution. Now I’m looking at these women graduating, talking, and sharing their experiences. And there’s a whole bunch of them. It’s very exciting. Spelman College is the only HBCU that has a documentary filmmaking major and minor.
Spelman is in the process of building the Mary Schmidt Campbell Center for Innovation in the Arts that will bring together all of the arts programs under one roof, and it will be the building that first welcomes its community and visitors. I helped design the building, and I raised money for the documentary wing where there will be a production studio that will bear my name at the request of the generous donor Jonathan Logan. I’m glad to have made a lasting contribution. Since I’m sharing, Bowie State University’s first stop-motion animation studio also bears my name. What an honor!
That’s huge! We were talking about going from being one of four to being in a room where we’re the majority. It’s all of us, right? You opened that door! I’m curious about what you’re working on now. Any dream projects? What does the future look like for you as a filmmaker?
Some of the things I can’t talk about just yet. We’ve just come out of the strike. So the machine’s wheels are slowly beginning to turn. I will continue to direct more films and episodic television projects. Right now, I am starting to catalog my forty-year photography collection and to create a database for it. There was a period in the late ’90s and early 2000s when I was really bored with cinema. A lot of it looked alike to me; it sounded alike. I didn’t feel so motivated about creating cinema anymore. I decided to go to school to figure out a new kind of cinematic practice and how the computer might be centered in it.
I was one of five students accepted at Georgia Tech’s new digital-media program. So I went and got a PhD and learned more about the computer as an expressive medium. My dissertation was on haptic cinema. I would build these sculptures with video monitors embedded in them and control the imagery. Or do what are called interactive tabletops [a table or surface that displays content and allows for user input by means of an interaction paradigm]. I did a short biography of my mother where I dressed an interactive tabletop as though it was her bedroom vanity, with objects on it, and projected photographs. And if you move the objects over to the right photographs, the objects would talk to you about my mother’s history, and their relationship with one another. The objects would also argue because each of them thought that it was her favorite. And there were short videos that also played. So right now, I’m getting a chance to play, and to develop new story ideas within this other universe.
What? That’s amazing!
My film HERadventure, which I made with my daughter in 2014, is an interactive film. It’s science fiction, about these women from another planet. In the first ten minutes, you can’t control it, but after two of the women fall to earth and get separated, you can take over with gameplay. We showed it at South by Southwest. So that’s another world that I play in, and I often laugh because my film friends don’t go to anything that’s related to my tech world. But it’s another example of how I find different ways to tell stories.
I think when you’re making work, at least in my generation—I think it’s different now—you’re not so much thinking about awards and prizes. But you do recognize patterns, and you do recognize that major distributors have no interest in your work. I was laughing because some of those companies are out of business now, and I’m still standing. There is an interest for the first time in work created by African American women directors, and I’m glad I’ve lived long enough to see it happen. Because, you know, it’s not just about the films themselves—it’s also about the world of ideas.
