Now See This



	Davis rules: Compensation director Zeinabu irene Davis.

Zeinabu irene Davis uses silent film techniques to tell two deaf women’s stories.

by Sam Adams

Zeinabu irene Davis has a simple answer when asked if she thought twice before making a movie with a black, female, deaf protagonist, a combination which by the rules of commercial film might be seen as a bit of a triple bind.

"I’m from Philadelphia," she quips, "so I’m kinda hardheaded. I don’t know any Philadelphians that take the easy route."

A quick look at her c.v. confirms that taking the easy route has never been high on Davis’ to-do list. After growing up in West Oak Lane and graduating from Brown — in the same class as indie über-producer Christine Vachon — Davis (she likes the "i" in her middle name small) embarked on a dual career as an academic and short-filmmaker in a time when outlets for short films were rapidly drying up. In the 17 years Davis has been making films, she’s turned out shorts on subjects ranging from menstruation (A Period Piece) to slavery (Mother of the River).

Compensation, her first feature, intercuts the stories of Melindy and Malaika Brown, two deaf women who live in Chicago at opposite ends of the 20th century. (Both characters are played by deaf actress Michelle Banks.) Structured visually as a silent film — although the soundtrack includes spoken dialogue (with subtitles) and sound effects — the film pays tribute to the history of both motion pictures and African America, taking as much joy in recreating the black Chicago neighborhoods of the 1900s as in lifting from Griffith and Eisenstein.

Although the 16mm Compensation was produced on a much smaller budget than movies like Malcolm X or Devil in a Blue Dress, it’s obvious Davis took as much pleasure as those films’ directors in filming a slice of black history. (In its pointed focus on cinema, it recalls Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman, another film by a black female Philadelphian.) "That was one of the most fun parts of the process for us," she recalls. "I just love researching and going back to uncover — or recover — stuff. It was frustrating, too because I love silent cinema — I could watch silent cinema every day and be satisfied — but there’s very few silent films remaining, and ever fewer that are African-American. So in a lot of ways, I felt like I was on a reconnaissance mission."

Where history didn’t comply, Davis filled in the gaps. She knew she wanted a scene with Malindy (Banks) and her suitor Arthur (John Earl Jelks) watching a film called The Railroad Porter, which was produced by a Chicagoan named William Foster, one of the first black film producers. She had newspaper descriptions of the film’s plot, but was never able to find a surviving copy, so she made her own. The result is a hilarious burlesque on silent comic shorts, a piece of surreal slapstick in which a couple having tea in a garden are menaced by a figure who, for no apparent reason, pulls out a gun and starts chasing one of them around the table. Then the man being chased pulls out a gun, and soon the woman has joined the chase as well.

Davis does confess to monkeying ever so slightly with history, though. "I added a little bit of Zeinabu, a little feminist twist," she admits. "In the original, the woman doesn’t have a gun, but she does in my version."

Though it might seem odd for a black filmmaker to enjoy herself recreating a time in which segregation was the law, Davis consciously focuses on the thriving culture that developed around those restrictions, the same way she subtly injects Afrocentricity into the present-day scenes. "There is this evil in American society of segregation at that time, but there’s still this vibrancy to the culture and music that’s infectious," she explains. "It just pulls you as you become involved with it and immersed in it. If I could make historical fiction the rest of my career, I would not be unhappy."

The film takes its title from a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar that was written while he was dying of tuberculosis, and though you wouldn’t know it to look at the finished film, it was with the theme of illness that Davis and her husband and screenwriter, Marc Arthur Chéry, began. As it is now, illness only intrudes into Compensation’s last third, in the form of tuberculosis in the period setting and HIV in the present. Instead, the film focuses more on the difficulties of forging romantic relationships between hearing and deaf men and women. (Jelks plays the suitor in the present as well as the past.)

The part of Malindy (and her present-day counterpart, Malaika) was not initially conceived as a deaf role. It wasn’t until Davis and Chéry, in Chicago to sit on a grant panel, went to see a black deaf performance of Waiting for Godot with Banks in the lead that they began to re-envision their script. Though Davis says Banks’ casting changed "not at all" the movie’s approach to the theme of illness, Banks had a profound effect on the movie’s soundtrack, teaching Davis that "deaf people’s world is not necessarily silent. Michelle can feel a lot of sound, so I used a lot of heavy bass in the contemporary scenes. She also talks very much about being aware of her breath, so we tried to incorporate that into the audio design."

Davis also began to dig into the association of deaf actors with the silent cinema, learning that both of silent great Lon Chaney’s parents were deaf actors, and they trained actors for the screen. "It was learning that history and how it influenced the style and the features and the expressions," she explains.

Although some deaf viewers have complained of being bored by the film’s frequent montage sequences — an issue Davis plans to rectify on the home video version by including sound effects in the captioning — she says the response to the film by and large has been extremely positive, and she’s happiest when a mixed audience — hearing and deaf — is able to see the film at the same time.

"I love when there are deaf and hearing people together in the audience," reflects, "and I really try to make sure that happens. In real life, we don’t have a lot of opportunities to interact with each other, and this film brings people together."

Compensation will screen Tues., May 2, 7:30 p.m. and Fri., May 5, 7:15 p.m. at the Ritz at the Bourse, 4th & Ranstead Sts. Zeinabu irene Davis, Marc Arthur Chéry and Michelle Banks in attendance on May 5.