Compensation: Archiving the Spirit

In this way, Compensation is a story about love as well as a loving rendering of people, places, and experiences that we can no longer directly access. We see this most clearly in Davis’s use of The Railroad Porter—a film that she actually undertook to recreate, making Compensation an archive, as well, of Black film itself. William Foster’s original 1912 film—likely the first made by an African American director, and one that featured an all-Black cast and a crucial figure from African American history, the Pullman porter—no longer survives in any form. And while the majority of silent films have been lost, not having been preserved, how much truer is that reality for Black filmmakers and Black-cast films, which were already understood to be less significant than their white counterparts at the time of their production? Indeed, it is only because the Black press covered The Railroad Porter—itself a form of archiving—that we have knowledge of its plot and other formal elements. What’s more, Davis presents both the film and the response of a Black audience, allowing the viewer to vicariously feel what the Black moviegoing experience might have been like in 1912. It not only brings the past to life but also affirms contemporary Black moviegoing practices as rooted in history and culture. Though at first this may not appear to be a radical intervention, it is indicative of Davis’s ideological approach throughout Compensation and her other work: politics and style, message and medium, are so intricately interwoven that there is no line of demarcation where one ends and the other begins.

Some films document a time, a place, a character. Compensation captures the feeling of experience. Though mostly shot in 1993, the film premiered in 1999, before showing at the Sundance Film Festival the following year, but it wasn’t until 2025 that Compensation received a proper theatrical release. As seen today, even the contemporary scenes with Malaika and Nico function as an archival record of a city that has changed dramatically in the intervening years. In one scene, as Malaika teaches Nico how to sign, the film cuts away to a lakefront Chicago vista that includes the Johnson Publishing Company building. Sold in 2010 and then again in 2017, this cultural symbol of African American lifestyle and achievement is now an apartment building, and its iconic sign—featuring the names of two legendary periodicals, Ebony and Jet—a decorative feature on the residents’ roof-deck. Elsewhere in the film, Nico teaching a group of children the word butterfly in American Sign Language transitions into a scene of Malaika and her friend Bill (Christopher Smith) doing a nineties dance known as the butterfly. I had forgotten about the butterfly for decades, and yet viewing the film recently, this brief moment unlocked long-forgotten memories from my own adolescence. Compensation’s intertitle about the Chicago Defender prompted decades-old recollections of visiting the newspaper’s headquarters with my elementary-school classmates on a field trip. These scenes are time capsules of moments, of experiences, that simply do not exist anymore, conjuring memories as real and yet as ephemeral as the scent of the barbecued turkey legs that I can almost smell while watching Malindy and Arthur stroll by the vendor stalls at the Taste of Chicago, an annual event that once marked the high point of the city’s summer activities. This is how we come to know and understand history and our place within it: not by didactic lessons but by living it. With so much talk in recent years about the racialized nature of the camera’s gaze and strident pushes to articulate a “Black gaze” in cinema, Davis’s film serves as a crucial reminder that filmmakers have long established subjectivity and immersiveness through the emotional connections formed via cultural memory, rather than through the camera alone.

Indeed, one of Compensation’s most affective gestures is that it asks us to rethink how we experience the world with one another. The film’s two love stories are predicated on the conceit that language itself must be developed in the process of loving and caring for one another. Compensation makes clear to us that all communication is structured by matters both personal and systemic and is more than merely an issue of individual ability. Malindy cannot hear and cannot communicate orally, but the film reminds us that she was also not “seen” or “heard” in the white school for the Deaf that she briefly attended. Likewise, Arthur cannot read, a vestige of racist practices originating in slavery that forbade teaching African Americans to read and write, the legacy of which can be found in the under-resourced school systems that persist to this day. Unable to converse as fluidly with each other as they can with their respective Deaf and hearing communities, the lovers in Compensation show, in their determination to communicate, an ethos of love that is realized in the doing.

Compensation is undergirded by a spirit of community and collaboration—a commitment to doing—that forms the core of all of Davis’s films. As one of the younger members within a cohort of filmmakers that would eventually become known as the LA Rebellion, Davis developed her technical skills alongside her understanding of the crucial importance of cooperation, especially when structures do not deliver, as they so often do not for Black and women filmmakers. For Davis’s first narrative project, Crocodile Conspiracy (1986), the story of a middle-aged woman who goes against her children’s wishes when she sojourns to Cuba, Charles Burnett served as director of photography while Julie Dash did the makeup (Davis pays tribute to Dash’s 1991 Daughters of the Dust in Compensation, staging Malindy and her friend on the beach adorned in white dresses, a nod to the earlier film’s iconic characters and production design). For many of her films—including her most recent work, Pandemic Bread (2023), which focuses on a Filipina interpreter and an African doctor connected by an elderly patient in the ICU during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic—Davis has brought on her own students as crew.

Indeed, Davis’s repeated use of the same actors in her films speaks both to the way that she builds community and to the symbiotic relationships that she develops with those around her. Doris-Owanda Johnson—who appears in Davis’s short films Cycles (1989) and A Powerful Thang, both inspired by Johnson’s journals—provides vocals on Compensation’s “African Prayer Song,” which marks Nico’s acceptance of the spiritual power of his love for Malaika, as well as on Pandemic Bread’s rendition of the Haitian folk song “Fèy-O.” And Davis has often referred to John Earl Jelks—who before Compensation appeared in Crocodile Conspiracy and A Powerful Thang—as her muse. Perhaps the truest sense of Davis’s dedication to collaboration with her actors, though, is captured by her casting of Michelle A. Banks. Compensation had been originally conceived as the love story of two pairs of hearing persons, but Davis and Chéry’s chance outing to a theatrical performance introduced them to Banks, who is Deaf, at which point Davis decided to redesign the entire film around her.

This openness to collaboration and alteration speaks to Davis’s artistic philosophy and stands in direct contrast to the popular conception of the auteur: a (usually male) filmmaker with a singular and unwavering vision that is carried from start to finish. Such an approach—the generosity with which she shares her films with her casts, crews, and audiences—reveals Davis’s confidence as an artist.

This generosity can likewise be seen in the improvements that Davis has made in the restored version of Compensation, including the addition of stereo sound, as originally designed, and new, more dynamic open captions, to allow Deaf and Hard of Hearing viewers to feel more fully immersed in, and engaged by, the film. In referring to the new version as a “rejuvenation” rather than a “restoration,” Davis conveys the idea that the film has finally reached its full potential, rather than recaptured a faded glory. If I might, I’d like to add another term to describe this release of Compensation: revival. Indeed, the notion of reviving a thing suggests imbuing it with new energy and new life, and I would argue that this is the cornerstone of Compensation’s triumph: the camera transforms still photographs into moving images, nonextant films play again for audiences both past and present, a version of a city long past comes alive again. With this film’s revival comes the refreshing notion that movies are not artifacts, but rather living things that can breathe and evolve alongside the communities that hold them dear.