Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Watermelon Woman
1997 · Cheryl Dunye · The Watermelon Woman on Sightlines
A 1930s picture is playing on a video-store TV, and one of the actresses in it is better than the film deserves. She has a mammy role, which is barely a role. She is doing something with it anyway. The credits come up and there is no name for her. The card says: The Watermelon Woman.
Cheryl, who works the counter, rewinds.
That is the engine of Cheryl Dunye's first feature, and for most of its length the film behaves like the research documentary it is imitating. Interviews. Library trips. A stack of stills. A video diary shot in her apartment, where Cheryl reports progress to the camera and keeps getting sidetracked by a white customer (Guinevere Turner) who is the worst available person to fall for. It is a comedy. It cost about $300,000. It is also the first American feature directed by an out Black lesbian, and it is quietly building toward the sentence on its last title card: sometimes you have to create your own history.
Fae Richards was not found. She was made. Dunye and the artist Zoë Leonard built her photographic record from nothing — shot it, aged it, gave her a face, a lover, a career — and the forgery was good enough that it later left the film and hung in galleries as an artwork on its own.
You can call that a hoax and admire the nerve. That reading is available and it is too small, because it turns the fabrication into a trick played on the audience instead of the only method the subject allowed. Deleuze has a more useful name for what Dunye is doing, and the name does real work: the powers of the false.
The distinction he cares about is this. A liar still believes in the truth. Lying is a way of paying respect to a true version by hiding from it. A forger works differently: the forger makes a thing that then has to be dealt with, an object that takes its place among the documents and starts behaving like one. Deleuze found this in Orson Welles, and above all in F for Fake, where Welles narrates a film about art forgers while openly forging the film, and where the forger is never one crook but a chain — the painter, the dealer, the expert, the biographer, the man telling you about them. The truth-teller is just the last link who has not confessed yet. Dunye knows that move; F for Fake is in her film's bloodstream, as is Zelig, which had already shown that you could manufacture vintage photographs no eye would challenge. What she adds is a motive. Welles forges to prove authorship is a racket. Dunye forges because the racket already ran, decades ago, and took her subject out with it.
Which brings the second concept, the most political one Deleuze has: the people are missing. His claim is that modern political cinema cannot speak to a people that already exists and is waiting. It has to work in the gap where a people should be and help invent one. Usually that stays abstract. Here it is a filing problem. The archive holds a woman's face and withholds her name; the credit is a slur where a person should be; the record was kept by people who did not think she needed keeping. Cheryl's search fails not because she is a bad researcher but because there is no bottom to the hole. So Dunye fills it. The invention is not a substitute for the history. It is the honest shape the history has left.
And she puts herself inside it. Dunye plays 'Cheryl' — the director cast as the researcher, the author and the character in one body. Deleuze calls this free indirect discourse, the camera seeing with a character and seeing the character seeing at the same time, author and figure speaking through each other without either one winning. Dunye collapses it as far as it will go. The craft debt is precise: David Holzman's Diary invented the fake first-person diary film in which a director plays a filmmaker pointing the camera at his own life, and Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One put a Black director inside his own documentary, filming the making of the thing you are watching. Dunye takes both and makes the search and the film the same object. There is no finished documentary about Fae Richards to arrive at. The searching is the movie.
The diary pieces to camera are not dialogue, and they are not confession either. Deleuze's term is the speech act — a testimonial voice, a person caught in the act of legending, telling a story about themselves that is also making them. He called it fabulation, and he meant it as the opposite of lying: a real person inventing a self on camera that the record would not otherwise contain. Dunye inherits this delivery directly from Portrait of Jason, which parked a Black queer man alone in front of a camera to perform and narrate himself for hours, and from Tongues Untied, which fused diary, direct address and documentary into a Black queer first-person form on cheap video. Dunye is legending Fae and legending herself in the same gesture, and she is funny while she does it, which is part of why it works.
Then there are the photographs. Deleuze describes a kind of image that composes its object and then replaces it — a description that erases what it was describing and stands there in its place. The Fae Richards archive is that concept made literal, and it went further than the concept does. The photographs composed a woman who was not there, replaced her so thoroughly that the film's viewers went looking for her, and then walked out of the movie and into exhibition as art. They are not images you watch go by. They are images you read: dates, borders, who is standing next to whom, what a caption does and does not say. The image stops being self-evident and asks to be deciphered.
What this did to filmmaking is now so common it is hard to see. The autofiction feature that is its own research, shot cheap and first-person, with the maker onscreen and the truth-status left deliberately live — Dunye did not invent every part of it, but she is the one who made it load-bearing rather than decorative. The forged archive is not a gag here, as in Zelig, and not a confidence game, as in Welles. It is a repair.
A congressman went after the film's NEA grant. Twenty-five years later the Library of Congress put it in the National Film Registry, which means a photograph that Zoë Leonard made in the 1990s now sits, by way of a movie, inside the permanent record of American film. The archive that lost Fae Richards has absorbed her forgery.
Which leaves the question Dunye hands you on the way out, and it is not rhetorical. If the only way to get her into the record was to make her up, what else in the record got there the same way? Watch an old picture again. When the credits run and somebody's name is a nickname, or a type, or nothing at all, you will find you are already doing Cheryl's work.
Concepts in play
- powers of the false (puissances du faux) — The archival photographs of Fae Richards were fabricated from scratch by Dunye and Zoë Leonard and presented as a recovered documentary record; the film's truth-status is left undecidable as its organizing creative principle, not as a twist.
- the forger (le faussaire) — Dunye plays a filmmaker assembling an archive she is simultaneously manufacturing — the same chain-of-forgers structure Deleuze reads in F for Fake, which the film takes as a direct craft ancestor for its play with the truth-status of the documentary record.
- the people are missing — The 1930s actress is credited only as 'The Watermelon Woman'; Black queer women were written out of film history so thoroughly that, as the film argues and its last title card states, recovering them requires invention.
- free indirect discourse (political) — Cheryl Dunye casts herself as 'Cheryl,' fusing director and character in one body — the fake-autobiography conceit inherited from David Holzman's Diary and the film-within-a-film self-documentation of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One.
- fabulation (story-telling / legending) — The video-diary sections catch Cheryl in the act of inventing both Fae Richards and herself; the final title card — sometimes you have to create your own history — states legending as method.
- acte de parole (the legending voice) — The direct-address pieces to camera are testimony rather than dialogue, a mode Dunye repurposes from Portrait of Jason's Black queer subject performing and narrating the self, and from Tongues Untied's video-diary confession.
- crystalline description — The forged photographs compose Fae Richards and then stand in for her so completely that the Fae Richards Photo Archive left the film and was exhibited as art in its own right — the description outliving and replacing its absent object.
- the lectosign (the readable image) — The fabricated stills are offered as documents to be deciphered — dates, credits, who appears beside whom — rather than as images with sensory-motor self-evidence; the Dunyementary makes reading the archive the film's central action.