The Watermelon Woman
1997 · Cheryl Dunye
A young black lesbian filmmaker probes into the life of The Watermelon Woman, a 1930s black actress who played 'mammy' archetypes.
dir. Cheryl Dunye · 1997
The first feature by an out Black lesbian director in American cinema, made for around $300,000 at the tail end of the New Queer Cinema wave — and one of the wittiest films about the archive ever made. Cheryl Dunye plays 'Cheryl,' a Philadelphia video-store clerk and aspiring filmmaker researching a 1930s Black actress credited only as 'The Watermelon Woman,' while fumbling through a romance with a white customer (Guinevere Turner). The form Dunye invented — she called it the 'Dunyementary' — braids fiction, mock-documentary and video diary, and the archival photographs of her subject were fabricated with artist Zoë Leonard, a project so convincing it later exhibited as art in its own right. The sleight of hand carries the film's argument: Black queer women were written out of film history so thoroughly that recovering them requires invention. Its NEA grant drew fire from a scandalized congressman; a quarter-century later, the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry. The final title card states the method plainly: sometimes you have to create your own history.
Lines of influence
- David Holzman's Diary (1967) — Established the fictional first-person diary film in which the director plays a filmmaker turning the camera on his own life, the exact fake-autobiography conceit Dunye adopts by casting herself as 'Cheryl' shooting her own investigation.
- Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968) — A Black director's self-reflexive meta-documentary that films its own making and folds the crew into the story, prefiguring Dunye's film-within-a-film structure of a Black filmmaker documenting her own production.
- Portrait of Jason (1967) — Puts a Black queer subject alone before the camera performing and narrating the self, the direct-address confessional mode Dunye repurposes for her video-diary pieces to camera.
- Zelig (1983) — Pioneered the seamless fabrication of faux-vintage photographs and newsreels to invent a historical figure, the same forged-archive technique Dunye and Zoe Leonard use to manufacture Fae Richards' photographic record.
- F for Fake (1973) — An essay-film that dramatizes the authorship and authenticity of archives and openly admits its own hoaxing, modeling Dunye's play with the truth-status of the documentary record she assembles.
- Tongues Untied (1989) — Fused video-diary confession, direct address, and documentary into a Black queer first-person form on cheap video, the hybrid low-fi aesthetic and autobiographical voice Dunye builds her feature around.
- Illusions (1982) — Dramatizes the erasure of Black women from Hollywood's history and the labor hidden behind its images, the archive-recovery project Dunye literalizes by inventing a forgotten Black actress.
- Daughters of the Dust (1991) — Established a Black-woman-authored independent cinema of memory and ancestral image-making, the tradition of self-made history Dunye extends into a fabricated lesbian genealogy.
- Sherman's March (1986) — Perfected the wandering first-person documentary where the filmmaker's own romantic life derails the ostensible subject, the autobiographical digression structure Dunye weaves through her research plot.
- Poison (1991) — A founding New Queer Cinema film that splices genre pastiche and documentary registers into a fragmented low-budget form, sharing Dunye's movement-defining collage approach to queer storytelling.
- Swoon (1992) — A New Queer Cinema work that reconstructs a suppressed queer past through stylized period archive and reclaimed historical figures, the same recovery-of-erased-queer-history impulse driving Watermelon Woman.
- Paris Is Burning (1990) — Documentary portraiture of a Black and Latinx queer subculture built from talking-head testimony, the interview-driven ethnographic texture Dunye both borrows and interrogates through fictional 'experts.'
- The Living End (1992) — Exemplifies New Queer Cinema's guerrilla economics—shot cheap, personal, and defiantly queer—the DIY production ethic Dunye shares as she makes a feature on grant money and friends.
- CSA: The Confederate States of America (2004) — A feature-length mockumentary that fabricates a complete fake broadcast archive to critique the racial writing of American history, directly extending Dunye's forged-archive-as-argument method.
- Pariah (2011) — Carries Dunye's Black-lesbian first-person authorship into a new generation of independent film, centering a young Black queer woman's self-definition that Watermelon Woman made visible.
- Framing Agnes (2022) — Recovers a lost queer/trans archive through staged reenactment that openly blurs document and performance, inheriting Dunye's strategy of dramatizing the gaps in the historical record rather than merely filling them.
Appears in courses