![]() Then, about half way through, the narrative escalates in a gorgeous transition from the Superdome to imagery of Beyonce leading a line of women in sheer white dresses, which look both ancient and futuristic, as they walk across swampy waters and through the weeds. Later, while exiting the section marked “Apathy,” she adopts a Kente country look that helps ready us for Beyoncé going cowgirl in a song with her Texas twang (and pulling it off, of course). ![]() She lets her intuition loose and then smashes windows with a baseball bat, acting gloriously unhinged. Then, in a cheeky gesture, Beyonce stands on what looks like the steps of the Metropolitan museum (the setting for real life tabloid drama involving Beyonce, her husband Jay-Z, her sister Solange and a mystery other woman) and she wails, “Are you cheating on me?” as water gushes from the building. In “Intuition,” the women she will later lead are glimpsed in fragments, the movement is underwater and the message is opaque. The sections of the narrative are labeled: Intuition, Denial, Apathy, Reformation, Forgiveness, Hope, Redemption. (This has the inverse effect of the recent Harmony Korine-directed Rihanna video for “Needed Me,” with its circa-2002 slow-motion booty rolls, which seemed very much “music video” in nature, and served as a reminder that Spring Breakers was little more than that sort of throwback.)Īnd the form and style of Lemonade is also its narrative, of Beyonce moving from isolation to strength through uniting with black women, and leading them. The enunciation of her words in these poems, as well as silences and some naturalistic but haunting sound design, make us stop and take these images seriously. And rather than having different directors each responsible for a video, as in Beyonce, here each of the seven directors’ work is edited smoothly into one whole, with spoken word by Somali-British poet Warsan Shire in between songs. Beyonce utilizes Khalik Allah (director of 2015 doc Field Niggas) as a 2nd unit director (credited also as cinematographer) capturing Super 8 interviews with real people that are weaved in throughout. Lemonade is a feature film, but one that pushes the form a few steps further than fiction/documentary “hybrid” films. “F**k you, I’ll build anew,” Beyonce seems to say with this daring and necessary work. What’s most revolutionary and cathartic about Lemonade, though, is that it dares to make a new canon, finding references in the unphotographed past and future simultaneously, a land of no men. Visual references are from an (unfortunately) secret canon of women, black women directors like Kasi Lemmons ( Eve’s Bayou) and Julie Dash ( Daughters of the Dust).īeyonce’s ‘Lemonade’: Model Winnie Harlow Shares the On-Set Ambiance It cuts back all the macho gristle leaving only a strong matriarchal line. The imagery for “Partition” was especially classic Hollywood, and an oh-so-rare opportunity to glimpse a black woman as the lead in a film noir. ![]() Beyonce was like an old-fashioned movie star. The treat of that was seeing the variety of roles she could play, like a Greta Garbo or Elizabeth Taylor acting out many scenarios yet always maintaining her own persona. Her last visual album, 2013’s Beyonce, was a collection of videos, one for each song on the album, some of which she also co-directed. It shows the personal journey she’s been on, a sort of awakening, and remarkably brings the viewer on that same journey. This is a movie made by a black woman, starring black women, and for black women, especially for herself and her daughter Blue. “The most disrespected person in America is the black woman,” Malcolm X says early in the film in archival footage. And, as she gets more personal, she gets more political. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |