In “Naked Acts,” a Black Actress Confronts Herself
In the 1996 film Naked Acts, Cicely is an actress who has just been cast in a leading role in a Black indie film. She is newly slim—she’s just lost 56 pounds, she tells her mother—and the part could be her big break. But she’s been asked to appear in a nude scene. For the rest of the movie, Cece cajoles her director, bickers with her costars, flirts with her ex (who also happens to be the movie’s producer), and contends with her mother, a former Blaxploitation star. The question of whether or not she will do the scene propels all of these interactions, even as the film deftly touches on body image, how Black women are portrayed in media, generational trauma, childhood sexual abuse, and mommy issues.
Midway through the film, Cece looks at herself in her mirror and practices crying for an upcoming shoot. As played by Jake-ann Jones, the scene captures the heady charms and deft tonal shifts of the movie. It’s funny, touching, revealing, and a technical tour de force for both Jones and the character she’s playing. Up until this point in the movie, Cece has resisted showing any vulnerability—she often enters scenes with her arms crossed over her chest. When we first meet her, she’s wearing a bold, bright magenta pixie-cut wig that doesn’t quite suit her, suggests someone who wishes she could pull the look off. “Oh, I like what you’ve done with your hair,” her mother’s latest boyfriend says, gently, when he sees her in it, and Cece tugs at the wig’s ends.
But in front of the mirror, Cece is performing the sensitivity she has resisted showing to any of her friends and family. She bares her teeth, wipes her cheeks, frowns, moans. Like the canniest of artists, she is able to be emotionally raw and in command of herself only when it’s in service to a piece of fiction.
Director Bridgett M. Davis says the scene encapsulates one of her intentions in making Naked Acts. ”How do you show interiority on film?” she asks. “What would it mean for you to watch [Cece] watching someone else? Because I think that’s such an intimate moment. It felt very radical at the time because I thought, I don’t see this in film nearly enough. It does endear you to someone. I think that’s my way of … representing [Cece’s] humanity. I’m gonna let you see a way to endear yourself to this character.”
I am interviewing Davis over Zoom, amidst the much-heralded rerelease of Naked Acts this June. Digitally restored and remastered by Lightbox Film Center, in collaboration with Milestone Films, the reissue has been met with sold-out audiences and rapturous reviews. This is not necessarily a surprise to Davis, who notes that she toured 24 festivals with it when the film was released 28 years ago.
“I have shown this film with so many audiences around the world,” she says. Naked Acts did not find a distributor upon its initial release, but that wasn’t because Hollywood didn’t know about it—it received a positive review in Variety. “I did so many industry screenings” at the time, Davis says. “I will tell you, to the person, I heard the same thing over and over [from distributors and producers]: ‘This is really wonderful. We just don’t know who the audience is.’ This idea of these gatekeepers who only have one frame of reference—not only who they think will go see films, but who they think Black folks ought to be on film. If you can’t see Black humanity, how can you understand or appreciate this work?” Naked Acts failing to find a distributor in 1996 “wasn’t about the value of the film, [and] in some ways that’s harder to accept,” the director says. For Davis, “Naked Acts always had people who loved it. That really buttressed me, because I felt like I would just go where I got my love.”
Naked Acts has its current second life because of Maya Cade, founder of the Black Film Archive. Cade stresses that the movie was not a hidden gem to her—she’d always known it existed, and finally got a chance to view it while completing a residency at Indiana University’s Black Film Center & Archive. “Within 10 to 12 minutes, I’m writing down in my little notebook, ‘How can I get this film distributed?’ ” For Cade, what resonated was “the messages … working through your body image as a Black woman, working through the trauma of survival, whether that’s sexual violence, whether that’s the violence of confronting everyday issues as a Black woman. How [Davis] managed to contrast that with the lightness of the film, the comedy of the film, I’m just like, ‘This needs to be in front of everyone.’ ”
“Often we consider: What is our power?” Cade says. “I have the trust of an audience, and I don’t take that lightly. I knew whatever power I had, I had to use it to ensure that [I was shining a light on] another Black woman’s story … because I think if the Black Film Archive only benefits me, then what is it really doing?” She called a distributor she knew, whom she felt would understand the film. “Within one week,” she says, “the distributors saw it and the contracts were signed. It’s a very rare scenario that that is true, and honestly, I feel very blessed.”
“I say get a millennial in your life,” Davis jokes. She had followed Cade’s work with the archive on social media even before they met. “I remember this sadness in my heart, because I thought, ‘Oh, I wish she knew about my film, but she probably won’t,’ because it felt to me like my film wasn’t part of the conversation the way I wanted it to be when you talk about Black women filmmakers of a certain era. Honestly, seldom was my name mentioned. I remember I was like, ‘Oh, maybe one day she’ll know,’ and then she reached out to me. It’s magic.”
“Every [Black] film is a miracle,” Cade says. “As most Black filmmakers say to each other and to the world, the most radical thing a Black filmmaker can do is make a second film.”
You Might Also Like
