Steve Erickson
Compensation relates two stories of love blocked by disease, 80 years apart. Unusually, these are also tales of couples where one partner is Deaf and the other is hearing. Director Zeinabu irene Davis used cinema as a visual medium to bridge the gulf between these two groups’ experiences. Intentionally, she minimized dialogue, while interpolating archival photos. The title comes from a poem by Paul Lawrence Dunbar, written as he was dying from tuberculosis.
In each section of Compensation, the lead characters are played by the same actors. Both meet on the same beach at the shore of Lake Michigan. The section set during the 1910s starts by relating the history of African-Americans’ migration from the south to Chicago. A title card states that the city’s “colored” population doubled between 1900 to 1910; Black Chicago residents’ hopes of avoiding racism would be dashed. Malindy (Michelle A. Banks) is expelled from a school for Deaf children when it segregates itself. As an adult, she becomes a dressmaker, falling in love with Arthur (John Earl Jelks), an illiterate man born in Mississippi. She helps him to learn how to read, as well as encouraging him to study ASL. In the ‘90s, Malaika, a graphic artist, falls for Nico, a librarian. Their relationship can only go so far because Malaika is HIV-positive, although she can’t bring herself to tell Nico face to face. She refuses to have sex with him, claiming to be suffering from a yeast infection.
Davis emerged from the L.A. Rebellion, a group of African-American filmmakers based around UCLA. (Charles Burnett was the cinematographer on her 1986 student film Crocodile Conspiracy.) The movement would be the subject of her documentary, Spirits of Rebellion. While Compensation is Davis’s only feature-length narrative film, she’s made 12 movies in all, with some of her earlier shorts seeming to build towards it. Although A Powerful Thang’s vision of romance in the ‘90s is much more optimistic, it too is concerned with the danger of AIDS.
Compensation looks towards silent cinema as a period of innovation, when the medium wasn’t set in stone as an institution. A group of Black moviegoers attend a film called The Railroad Porter, a piece of slapstick whose characters are also entirely Black. That contrasts with the choices at the multiplex Malaika and Nico consider attending in the ‘90s, which include Weekend at Bernie’s 2 and Last Action Hero. Title cards appear onscreen throughout. Each section’s score was composed by a different musician. Reginald R. Robinson supplied ragtime piano, suggesting a soundtrack typically performed to accompany silent films, while for the ‘90s scenes, Atiba Y. Jali worked with African rhythms and instruments.
More subtly, Compensation’s use of sound is remarkably tactile and textured, with echoes and quiet background noise; the onscreen descriptions reveal how hard summarizing musical effects in words can be. As in all her work, Davis honors African and African-American forms of music. Her characters are often musicians: the male protagonist in A Powerful Thang was a saxophonist, while Nico plays percussion on the beach. Reading a poem takes the form of a call-and-response chorus between teacher and students. In Compensation’s press kit, Davis explains, “The audio design was carefully constructed to approximate Deafness through such techniques as silence and breath awareness, exaggerated volume, heavy bass frequencies and vibrations, and underwater sound reproduction. Effects in this section include aural distortions of communication devices like telephones, answering machines, and the TTY (teletypewriter). “
According to Davis, Compensation remains the only feature-length film built around a Black, Deaf character. Her own experiences in ASL classes made their way into it. Nico studies ASL in order to better be able to communicate with Malaika. His teacher warns her students not to treat themselves as Deaf people’s saviors or to look on them with pity. The difficulty of communicating between Deaf and hearing people, as well as a degree of suspicion among the Deaf, is present in both of the film’s couples, but it’s hardly insurmountable. The struggle and stigma of living with disease proves to be far harder. The ‘90s section was shot in 1993, before effective treatment for HIV had been developed, even though the film would not be released until 1999.
Time and time again, African-American directors have been able to get unique, innovative debut features made, but are unable to build a career from them. Although well-received by critics at the time, Compensation was commercially marginal, never picked up for theatrical release. Four years ago, the Criterion Channel raised its profile dramatically by streaming it, leading to its current restoration and re-release. Shot during a period when Hollywood embraced films by Black directors that tended to focus on gangs and drugs, Compensation avoids all such clichés about Black Americans’ lives. While its characters, especially in the first section, have to fight against racism, other forms of difference are equally important. If its originality may have worked against its commercial prospects in 1999, one hopes it will help Compensation find an audience in the present.
The “Compensation” restoration premieres Friday at New York’s Film at Lincoln Center. It opens February 28 in Chicago with a national roll-out to follow.
