The Otherworldliness of Bessie Smith
“Between Sound and Image: The Otherworldliness of Bessie Smith”
In 1929, the “Empress of the Blues” Bessie Smith made her only known film appearance in a short, two-reel film by Dudley Murphy, St. Louis Blues, titled after the W.C. Handy song that Smith had made famous. One prefiguration of the music video medium, it was the first film to be made to a preexisting song. Sixty years later, the song moves into a third instantiation when Isaac Julien returns to a fragment of Smith’s film performance in his dreamy Looking for Langston. It situates Smith in the context of Black queer literary voicings and media history more generally, thus assuring a primary place for Smith in the history and theory of film. Taken together, these films’ acousmatic voices provide the material for an aesthetic theory of Black queer film as an ongoing, questioning encounter between sound and image, one where the otherworldly takes precedence over realism.
This essay appeared in the spring 2023 issue of Film Quarterly, in the “Black Infinite” dossier, edited by Michael B. Gillespie. Thank you to Michael and B. Ruby Rich for their support.
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