“D-I-Y” Quotation and Created Appropriation

Abstract

Chapter 3 explores how white indie filmmaker Michel Gondry appropriates The Watermelon Woman’s oppositional aesthetics as a culturally appropriative, cross-racial ventriloquism. Like The Watermelon Woman, Be Kind Rewind (2008) creates an archive of classical quotations around a Black classical Hollywood artist, but while Watermelon Woman invented a fictional Black artist within an archival absence, Be Kind creates over a real-life artist, Fats Waller, a racist erasure by a white director fabricating Black artistry through cross-racial ventriloquism. Be Kind’s faux-35mm footage overlooks composer, artist, and activist Fats Waller’s real life and career and, instead, instrumentalizes Waller as a signifier, an image, a symbol of ancestral and commercial aura through monochrome’s cultural-memory-making power. Be Kind has too long masqueraded as goofy comedy without the critical weight to warrant interrogation of its (in)appropriation-via-quotation. Focusing on film quotation reveals this film’s strange, strained relationship to classical archive, Hollywood historiography, and race.