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Much of world cinema’s lost works have been victims of either technology with poor materials like nitrate film or the ignorance of a limited and often bigoted industry. Thankfully for film fans, it is becoming increasingly difficult for either to deal a death blow to a film’s trajectory.
Social and technological advancements also continue to aid our rediscovery of past great works like Zeinabu irene Davis’s debut feature Compensation, which embarked on its first wide release this past Friday just over 25 years since its festival debut.
Compensation screened at Sundance in 2000, receiving positive notices from critics like Roger Ebert and landed an Independent Spirit nod before falling into obscurity. The film had been something of a myth for film scholars and enthusiasts interested in the LA Rebellion, the late 60s and early 70s film movement at UCLA that spawned a collection of pioneering African and African-American filmmakers. I first saw a grainy, bootlegged version of Compensation in college. But the new copy released nationwide via Janus has been finished in crisp digital 4K with a new 5.1 surround soundtrack. Speaking to us from New York, where she is overseeing the re-issue, Davis described the copy as a “rejuvenation” of the original.
The film follows deaf women, played by Michelle A. Banks, in two different time periods (the 1900s and the 1990s) who falls in love with a hearing man played by John Earl Jelks and they must navigate their relationship which is interwoven across time.
Below, Davis speaks to us about her decades-long journey of bringing Compensation to cinema screens, how the LA Rebellion continues to live on, as she described it, in the work of filmmakers like Nickel Boys director RaMell Ross, and plans for her next feature Stars of the Northern Sky.
DEADLINE: Zeinabu, you’re in New York? You’re not usually a New Yorker, are you?
ZEINANU IRENE DAVIS: No, I live in San Diego. It’s very cold here in New York. But it’s been good. The audiences have been great. We sold out Saturday’s screening and Q&A and we’ve been at near capacity at other screenings. And like the New York Film Festival screening, the audience is not what I expected. I thought it would be more gray-haired people like me, but it’s not that. It’s more young people, which is encouraging because it’s clear young people want to see something different and original. Maybe if you’re going to spend 15 or 20 on a film, you want to see something unusual.
DEADLINE: What audience did you have in mind when you first made the film?
DAVIS: I always wanted the broadest possible audience. The film will have a special appeal to Black People and many others like the deaf and hard-of-hearing audience. There still aren’t many films with a deaf or hard of hearing person of color as lead. Even 25 years later, we still need to do more as an industry to make sure we are more inclusive of different actors and abilities.
What I truly enjoyed when we first finished the film in 2000 was the opportunity to have question-and-answer sessions with deaf and hearing-impaired people because there aren’t many opportunities for us to get together as different communities. I want to make sure that we have those encounters with each other because it makes the world a bit smaller. It gives us a way of communicating with each other. We’re all humans and we all still have pain and sorrow, but we also have joy and resilience. That’s still the message of the film. I’m so pleased that people have been coming up to me after the film to say it made them happy despite some of the outcomes for the characters. I also think the way Compensation deals with uncertainty in romantic relationships resonates with people considering all the current uncertainty in the United States.
DEADLINE: Yeah I understand feeling happy. There’s also a feeling of hope that comes from seeing an alternative or experimental work. The piece gives you new ideas on how you can communicate things.
DAVIS: Yes. You will for sure enjoy some of the new features in the rejuvenation. For example, we expanded the on-screen captions. When we first released the film in 2000, technology would only allow us to have two lines of 31 characters in the center of the screen. But now, because of digital and the aid of another hard-of-hearing filmmaker called Allison O’Donnell, we were able to have multiple captions. So the upper left-hand corner of the screen is mostly captions of the music, and then in the upper right-hand corner is a lot of the sound effects. In scenes where multiple characters are speaking, we have moved the captions closer to the person in the scene so deaf or hard-of-hearing people know who is speaking. As a result, it’s a more inclusive experience for deaf and hard-of-hearing folks but also enriches the experience for hearing people. I hope more filmmakers will start to use these tactics too.
DEADLINE: Technically, how did you approach the rejuvenation process? Had you kept a lot of the original materials?
DAVIS: I’m kind of a pack rat, so I keep everything. Also, because I am a film professor I understand the importance of preserving original materials, so I deposited my original negative at the UCLA Film and Television Archive. UCLA had what’s called the 16 mag track, which was the sound. But I had kept the DAT [Digital Audio Tape] tapes, which is another format to record the sound, but that’s digital, so when we did the new sound, we didn’t have to go back to the mag because it does carry some sound imperfections. But the DAT tape was still clean. We just had to find some legacy machines to play the tapes back. Luckily, the place where I did the work, Crest Audio in LA, still had legacy equipment.
DEADLINE: Can you tell me how this re-release came about? I hear it had something to do with the programmer Ashley Clark.
DAVIS: Ashley Clark is an amazing curator and programmer. In 2019, he was working at the Brooklyn Academy of Music where he programmed a series on Black films of the 90s. That’s when Richard Brody at the New Yorker wrote about Daughters of the Dust, Sankofa, and Compensation. Richard has been the biggest champion of the film. He’s always writing about it. He’s called it one of the greatest American independent films. Ashley later transitioned to Criterion, which, for good reasons, had been criticized for hardly carrying any people of color in its catalog. Ashley and the team have been able to rectify that situation. I’m grateful that that has taken place. It’s now just more inclusive of American cinema. So that was the big thing, just the exposure of being on the Criterion Channel, which allowed people to remember the film. And then we had the restoration and now the re-release. This is also an anniversary year for the film. It’s 25 years since it was released.
Although some of my actors, including my biological brother Kevin Davis, tease me that it’s actually been 30 years. I shot the film in the 1990s but didn’t finish it until 2000. That’s one of the things we LA Rebellion filmmakers do. We use our families in our films. With Charles Burnett, you see his sister Angela Burnett. We make sure to include everyday people in their communities.
DEADLINE: It’s great to hear you talking about the LA Rebellion in the present tense. We often think of it as a historic period in American cinema, but in many ways, the spirit has never been more present. You can see it in the work of people like RaMell Ross and Khalil Joseph who had new films this year.
DAVIS: I claim them. People like RaMell Ross and Khalil Joseph looked at our work and emulated some of that in their work. Some of the compositions in Nickel Boys particularly remind me of something Charles Burnett or Billy Woodberry would do, and even another LA Rebellion filmmaker who doesn’t get as much love, but Ben Caldwell because Ben was more experimental. He had an animation background and designed his own film lenses. I do think they are deeply influenced, and that’s why I say the LA Rebellion continues. It just morphs into other filmmakers and people. Also, I think it’s important to talk about how we deal with time. That’s one of the beautiful things about film. You can play with form. In Compensation, I jump back and forth between the early 1900s and the later 1900s. You can manipulate time with cinema in ways that you can’t in other art forms. I appreciate that, and I think that that’s one of the tools we as Black Filmmakers can use to develop new forms to talk about our experiences.
I’m also thinking about the great filmmaker we just lost, Souleymane Cissé, an African giant. I mean, look at Yeelen or Baara, and how he manipulates time in those two films. Those masterworks that he left us. It’s incredible. We’ve always been interested in notions of how we represent time. If you go to Arthur Jafa’s theories or ideas about how black people move, we don’t move at 24 frames per second. So the incorporation of slow motion or slightly blurred motion is an interesting thing for us to keep on developing.
DEADLINE: It’s so true. Arthur Jafa once said something about how there may be a distinction between being a Black filmmaker working in cinema and working in Black cinema. The difference is that Black Cinema is an experimentation of the form because our experiences are distinctly different from those of others and the mechanics of filmmaking, which have been entrenched in racism. So that experimentation we’re describing is really just us being us.
DAVIS: Exactly. Black people had a significant role in the development of early American cinema, and unfortunately, that history has been ignored. With Compensation, we specifically tried to pull out some of that history. At film school, we were bludgeoned with Birth of a Nation. Professors would always talk about how great it was technically, but never spoke about how damaging it was in terms of its glorification of the KKK. We wanted to rectify some of those histories by bringing in things like the Railroad Porter — the film within the film in Compensation. That was a real film made by a Black filmmaker called William Foster. It’s not fiction.
Foster was an African American filmmaker who made films as early as 1911 in Chicago, and the Railroad Porter was one of those films. We tried to see if we could find that film and incorporate it into Compensation. But it’s lost or was maybe destroyed because it was most likely on nitrate film. There was a description of the film synopsis in the local Black paper called the Chicago Defender, and because that description was there, I could do a recreation of the events. The only thing I did differently from the original synopsis is that the girl didn’t have a gun, but this is a Zeinabu Davis film, so the girl has a gun too.
DEADLINE: Compensation is opening wide this week in the U.S. Do you have plans for an international release?
DAVIS: Yes, we have some preliminary plans in place for the UK. So hoping maybe in the summer months. There’s a festival and some other locations we can go to. I would really like to engage with audiences in London.
DEADLINE: Do you have plans to make another feature film?
DAVIS: Yeah, one of the reasons I want to come to the UK is for my new film. It’s called Stars of the Northern Sky and follows the lives of three enslaved women of the North. People often think slavery only happened in the American South but no it happened in the North too. I’m looking at Marie Joseph Angelique from Montreal. A Black woman who supposedly burned down Montreal in 1731. Then, Sojourner Truth, who is known for traveling around much of upstate New York and across a lot of the North And Mid-West. She is credited with the Ain’t I A Woman speech that brought attention to the idea of Black freedom and Women’s rights. The connection to the UK is Phyllis Wheatley, a Black woman who came to the UK where she met a countess who gave her the funds to publish the book she would be known for. The book was also the first piece of writing from an African American woman to be published in English in 1773. Phyllis walked on the streets of London and there is a plaque to commemorate her in the city.
