Streaming movies should be approached with a sense of urgency, because of the danger that a great movie that’s newly available may become unavailable once again. Though the Criterion Channel, which has recently made its ever-admirable programming even more wide-ranging and artistically ambitious, generally reissues movies that have already been released in theatres, its offering of Zeinabu irene Davis’s film “Compensation,” from 1999, could be considered a new release—as far as I can tell, it has screened only at festivals and in special series, and has never been in theatres for a consecutive week-long run. That fact alone renders its streaming availability all the more essential and stands as a vehement reproach to the film industry at large: “Compensation” is one of the greatest American independent films ever made, and its presence on the Criterion site should be a prelude to its canonization (including on DVD/Blu-ray in the Criterion Collection) as an enduring classic.
The title is borrowed from a poem about love and death, by Paul Laurence Dunbar, that serves as the film’s preface and also figures powerfully in the drama. The movie is the story of two Black women who are connected by the echoes of history. Malindy Brown, who migrates from Mississippi to Chicago in the first decade of the twentieth century, is a writer and activist who makes a living working independently as a dressmaker. Malaika Brown, who lives in Chicago in the nineteen-nineties, is a printer and a graphic artist. (Though the movie premièred in 1999, production began in 1993.) Both women are deaf (they are played by the deaf actress Michelle A. Banks), and both meet and fall in love with hearing men—Malaika with Nico Jones, a librarian, Malindy with Arthur Jones, a meatpacking worker and another migrant from Mississippi. In a poignant scene of the latter couple’s first encounter, Malindy writes to Arthur, on a small chalkboard, that she can’t hear, and he responds that he can’t read. (Both meetings take place on the same beach, at the lake; both men are played by John Earl Jelks.)
The movie, intercutting scenes of Malindy’s times and of Malaika’s modern world, is filmed in black-and-white, and connects them tonally as well as thematically. Davis’s dramatization of Malindy’s world is amazingly detailed and rich. In substance, she endows the past with a wealth of well-researched references that bring the Black culture of the time to life. In form, she relies on a technique that had already been rendered banal by Ken Burns but which she turns into a form of spiritual devotion and aesthetic audacity—she gather a treasure trove of historical photographs and films them by moving the camera, to replicate crane and travelling shots, and does so with a feel for place, tone, and texture which conjure the inner life of the past. The dramatic scenes of Malindy’s life—her early days in Mississippi, her friendships, her writing, her advocacy, her graceful relationship with Arthur—mesh with the style and the manner of the photographs through the actors’ poised, composed performances, and also the physical styles of the clothing and settings. A haunting soundtrack blends music, effects, and speech in a way that’s neither entirely naturalistic nor quite unreal, but that hovers above the action with the power of collective memory.
A scene of early cinema, in which Malindy and Arthur attend a nickelodeon show of work by a Black movie company, is matched, with grim irony, by a scene of Malaika and Nico trying to find something to see at a multiplex where none of the offerings are made by Black filmmakers, and debating between “Sleepless in Seattle” and “ Last Action Hero.” Malindy, as a deaf woman, is relatively isolated, whereas for Malaika deaf identity is both a matter of community and of civil rights. For both women, the possibility of an enduring relationship between a deaf woman and a hearing man is in question; Davis films those romances with warmth, tenderness, and humor that reflect (in performances and in images) their spiritual grandeur. Above all, both women’s hard-won romances face the implacable agonies of medical crises emblematic of their respective times, which shadow the women with “the boon of Death,” as Dunbar puts it, in his poem’s conclusion. Cinematically, Davis rises to meet the challenge of portraying the metaphysical dimension of death in life with a lofty and lyrical sequence that brings African art and music into the practical struggles at hand. She doesn’t just add an expressly aesthetic history to the action; rather, she derives and extracts that aesthetic history from the action, like a creative unconscious. Thursday, June 3rd, would have marked the ninety-ninth birthday of the late French director Alain Resnais, whose entire career was devoted to the aesthetic and the politics of memory and history. No American filmmaker has followed in his footsteps as originally or as satisfyingly as Davis in “Compensation.” The film’s lack of a release is only one of its own historical tragedies—the other is that Davis hasn’t had the chance to make another feature film.
