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			"Watermelon Woman" Reviews Cheryl Dunye Goes in Search of Stereotypes in 'Watermelon Woman' by Richard von Busack, From MetroActive The Watermelon Woman Refreshes by Peter Keough Watermelon Woman serves up “history”, a campy Sarah Schulman and lots of good dish by Erin Gill

		"The Watermelon Woman sports numerous cameos, including one by Camille Paglia, overacting shamelessly as a Swarthmore professor with some half-baked ideas about the spirituality represented by the fruit of the watermelon vine."	Cheryl Dunye goes in search of stereotypes in 'Watermelon Woman' from MetroActive By Richard von Busack A CLEAN, BRIGHT and unsentimental first film by Cheryl Dunye, The Watermelon Woman does everything a no- budget debut ought to do. It explores a particular small topic and expands upon it until it encompasses the life and times of the filmmaker. In this mockumentary, Dunne plays herself, a black lesbian from the hip part of Philadelphia, armed with a camera and in search of a topic. Watching movies from the video store where she works, Dunye catches a glimpse of Fae Richards, known as the "Watermelon Woman," a bit performer who used to play mammy parts in low-budget Hollywood movies like Plantation Memories (1937). Researching Richards, who was from Philly, Dunye meets obstacles. Archives such as "The Center for Lesbian Information and Technology" (C.L.I.T. for short) don't want to help her; and Richards' surviving friends would like to have that painful chapter in the history of African Americans in films closed. Worst of all, Dunye faces the gradual suspicion of her best friend, the attitudinal Tamara (Valarie Walker). Tamara's temper worsens when Dunye starts dating a young white lesbian named Diana (Guinevere Turner of Go Fish). The Watermelon Woman sports numerous cameos, including one by Camille Paglia, overacting shamelessly as a Swarthmore professor with some half-baked ideas about the spirituality represented by the fruit of the watermelon vine. Brian Freeman, of the hilarious improv troupe the Pomo Afro Homos, appears as a collector of black-film memorabilia. Uncredited but also funny is the would-be singer who performs a grisly karaoke version of the old Minnie Ripperton hit "Lovin' You"--she can't emit Ripperton's porpoise squeak on the chorus, so she just moans like a toothache patient instead. Dunye approaches her meaty subject from a fresh angle. The research process questions Dunye's place in the world as she negotiates the concentric circles of who is a sister (a lesbian) and who is a "sister" (a black woman). Alone at the end of the movie, Dunye provides a biography for the imaginary, shadowy Richards. But what Dunye also discovers is that despite how free and uncloseted she is in her life, the same inexplicable prejudices that kept the Watermelon Woman playing maids and mammies are still bedeviling her--and finally, that these prejudices are the most tangible part of the past she's trying to unearth.
			The Watermelon Woman (Unrated; 80 min.), directed and written by Cheryl Dunye, photographed by Michelle Crenshaw and starring Dunye, Guinevere Turner and Valarie Walker. Web exclusive to the July 24-30, 1997 issue of Metro. Copyright © Metro Publishing Inc.
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		"Dunye has the eye and ear for eccentric types and dicy dialogue that Spike Lee had when he was making films that were urgent and funny -- perhaps her film should be subtitled She's Got To Film It."	The Watermelon Woman Refreshes from the Boston Phoenix by Peter Keough Had Fae Richards, a/k/a "The Watermelon Woman," really existed, Cheryl Dunye, the first African-American lesbian feature filmmaker, would probably still have had to invent her. That is, in fact, what she has done in her saucy, daring, insidiously smart debut, The Watermelon Woman. Pointed and playful, it's a whimsically deconstructive pseudo-documentary pastiche on sexuality, identity, and the creation of history. Dunye (who, long-limbed, lithe, and with close-cropped hair, looks disarmingly like a young and comely Oscar Robertson) plays herself, an aspiring filmmaker named Cheryl who's seeking a subject to film that will help her define her identity, reclaim a viable self-image from the stereotypes of Hollywood, and get her out of her dead-end job as a clerk in a Philadelphia video store (a revisionist dig at the Quentin Tarantino/Kevin Smith school of filmmaking). So she "discovers" Richards playing a mammy in a forgotten old film called Plantation Memories. As it turns out, the film is not so much forgotten as fictitious. Memories and Richards, as Dunye unabashedly acknowledges in an epilogue, are fictions (all the "vintage" footage is lushly and convincingly faked by Dunye with the collaboration of photographer Zoe Leonard). No matter: Cheryl sets out on a detective journey to document the background and fate of the haunting, mysterious actress. That in so doing she fabricates the truth and reinvents herself is characteristic of the Watermelon Woman's self-reflexive subversiveness. Partly funded by a $31,500 NEA grant, Watermelon has been decried in a congressional appropriations meeting, and castigated by Senator Jesse Helms as "flotsam floating down a sewer." Of course, it's not Dunye's assault on the official, white, patriarchal version of truth that Helms and other self-appointed moral watchdogs are disputing -- no, it's her brief but sensual coupling with Diana (Guinevere Turner), the lovely white woman who comes into the video store and asks Cheryl whether to rent Cleopatra Jones or Personal Best. The tasteful and cheeky amour annoys not only redneck politicos but Cheryl's pal and co-worker Tamara (Valarie Walker, in a prickly updating of the outspoken maid in many a Mae West and Jean Harlow movie). Castigating Cheryl for spurning her own race for a "wanna-be black girlfriend," Tamara embodies black and gay pride but also represents the politically correct intolerance Dunye critiques in her hilarious but discerning portrayal of her lifestyle and community. As Cheryl travels about Pennsylvania hunting down leads about the Watermelon Woman -- Richards, too, it turns out, is of the "Sapphic Sisterhood" and was the longtime companion of Martha Page, the "director" of Memories -- she also uncovers truths about her friends, lovers and fellow lesbians, many of whom are tartly lampooned and deflated. Dunye has the eye and ear for eccentric types and dicy dialogue that Spike Lee had when he was making films that were urgent and funny -- perhaps her film should be subtitled She's Got To Film It. Although some of The Watermelon Woman can come across as caustic -- Tamara's eyerolling disdain for every white woman on the screen is only partly redeemed by her acrid wit -- its message is ultimately tolerance, freedom, and the imperative of self-expression, whether through sexual exploration or the powers of the imagination. If the past cannot be recovered, Dunye suggests, it must be invented, if necessary from the detritus of culturally imposed stereotypes -- a process that transforms those stereotypes into empowering images. Perhaps that's what Camille Paglia, one of several talking-head "experts" interviewed in the film, is chattering about in her (inadvertently?) funny segment. She unleashes a manic stream of consciousness about political correctness and African-American stereotypes, noting among other insights that the image of a black boy eating watermelon is positive because watermelons are the color of the Italian flag. Be that as it may, seldom have cultural analysis and sexual/racial politics been so entertaining. Far from retreating into a niche, Dunye has united gay, African, and women's filmmaking into a work that is exhilarating and universal. Copyright © 1997 The Phoenix Media/Communication Group. All rights reserved.
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		"There was a period when we wanted a distributor for first run. We really wanted to sign with Miramax or October and it didn’t happen and there were a lot of tears."		Cheryl Dunye’s Watermelon Woman serves up “history”, a campy Sarah Schulman and lots of good dish from Queers Online by Erin Gill “The process of building up to the Watermelon Woman was about complete empowerment,” says US filmmaker Cheryl Dunye. “[I was] in front and behind the camera, producing, everything. But by the time I was finishing it, there were so many other people involved, I felt kind of disempowered.” Dunye is one of the States’ best known lesbian independent filmmakers, and her first feature, Watermelon Woman, won several festival awards, including the Teddy Bear award at the Berlin Film Festival in 1996. Watermelon Woman is about lesbian inter-racial lust; how lesbians pass judgement on each other; and, most importantly, about black lesbian history. A desire to explore black lesbian experience in the earlier part of the century led Dunye to re-create, in documentary style, how she wished it to be. The result is a “mockumentary.” Although Dunye is seen as a truly independent filmmaker, she admits “there was a period when we wanted a distributor for first run. We really wanted to sign with Miramax or October and it didn’t happen and there were a lot of tears.” With mainstream dalliances over, for now, Dunye is keen to focus on cross-disciplinary collaboration. In fact, joint efforts provide Watermelon Woman with its radical edge: “I think it’s important that we work with talents in the queer community, that people usually keep separate, in their little artists’ islands.” The film’s most successful collaboration is also its quietest: Dunye worked with photographer Zoe Leonard to produce the “archival” images of black lesbians. The pictures, and the way they are held up to the camera in a look-at-this fashion, make the faked history so compelling some audience members believe the whole story is true. Dunye also makes good use of cameos, which are numerous and very funny (including Sarah Schulman and Jocelyn Taylor, among others). Camille Paglia, as herself, is particularly successful. She confuses and offends, and at every screening that Dunye attends, someone asks: “Does Paglia know she’s being an idiot?” “Camille is Camille,” says Dunye. “She wanted to bust into new territory. There are many lesbians -- corporate lesbians -- who do worse than Camille, and nobody says anything about them. “When we were looking for funding, the year after the film was done, we sent the tape to a couple of New York feminists, business people. They phoned back and said, ‘We can’t fund this film because Camille Paglia’s in it.’ That’s the kind of essentialism that has destroyed lesbian feminism in America.” Watermelon Woman is well worth watching, if not for the “history,” then for the Dunye and Guin Turner sex scene, because you’ll never see one again: The two have since fallen out. “The thing that still bugs me, every time I see the film, is why didn’t I put in more scenes of my mother [Dunye’s mother’s one appearance is fab] and fewer scenes with Guin Turner? My mom’s a much better actress than her.”
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		Cheryl Dunye Director - Screenwriter US   -   Temple University, 9C Annenberg Hall, Philadelphia, PA 19144   NL   -   Vondelstraat 49 Amsterdam 1054 GJ   -   PH: 31206169822 e-mail: info@cheryldunye.com ©2000-2005 Cheryl Dunye