Zeinabu irene Davis’s 1999 film Compensation transcends its modest methods, leaping between genres and time periods with the aid of little more than some costume changes, a bevy of archival photographs, and techniques informed as much by silent film as by the informal, relaxed indies of its time. Following and spiritually linking the fates of two separate couples (both played by John Earl Jelks and Michelle A. Banks) in 1910 and 1990 Chicago, Compensation, written by David and her husband Marc Arthur Chéry, sketches an image of Black history at once ever-shifting and frustratingly locked into cycles of pain and perseverance.
At first, panning shots over still photographs of 1900s life in Chicago’s Black neighborhoods and figures like poet Charles Laurence Dunbar (whose 1905 poem lends the film its title) make Compensation seem like the kind of PBS documentaries that proliferated in the wake of Ken Burns’s The Civil War. The...
At first, panning shots over still photographs of 1900s life in Chicago’s Black neighborhoods and figures like poet Charles Laurence Dunbar (whose 1905 poem lends the film its title) make Compensation seem like the kind of PBS documentaries that proliferated in the wake of Ken Burns’s The Civil War. The...
- 2/21/2025
- by Jake Cole
- Slant Magazine
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