“You have to have a certain sense of defiance in you so you don’t self-destruct. They can’t stop the creative thing in you”1
I could never get Camille Billops’s image out of my mind. Though I never met her in person, I have long treasured a personal idea of her – one that doubtlessly glamourises the real woman in a way she would have discouraged. Billops expressed herself across multiple disciplines, as a sculptor, printmaker, professor, editor, filmmaker, salon-convener, and community archivist, a dazzling multiplicity I imagine as both exhilarating and exhausting. The news of her death took me right back to the classroom at the University of Chicago where I first saw her work as a student. Seeking community with others living the same strange grief – experienced when someone known only through the intimate-afar world of their words and works dies – I tweeted my heartfelt tribute into the void of the internet: “Somehow you think someone like this, an artist, who defined deep, deep parts of how you see yourself and everything you look at will always be with us, making. Oh, what a woman.”
I felt I knew her, despite her provocations and the theatricality of her films. She appeared in every single one of them, playing a version of the ‘home videographer’. In her lifetime, she wrote, directed, produced and edited all six of them, with husband James Hatch, a theatre historian. Her performance in Finding Christa (1991), the film for which she won the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary as director at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival, is particularly enigmatic. For many viewers, it was infuriating because it was artful. Finding Christa is about Billops meeting her daughter Christa as an adult 20 years after giving her up for adoption. Abandoned by the child’s father, Billops assessed whether she wanted to or could manage to raise her child alone or whether any of her family members might adopt her. Struggling to continue her education and work to support them both, Billops eventually decided to put her daughter up for adoption at age four. And she never looked back. In the film, Billops offers no apology, defending her decision as a feminist statement about claiming her freedom as a woman to change her life, and admitting, matter-of-factly, that she was not a very good mother.2 Other films were similarly concerned with “dirty laundry”. Billops and Hatch’s exploration of racism and racial fantasy among “good people” in The KKK Boutique … Ain’t Just Rednecks (1994) is a thought-provoking farce. Meanwhile, A String of Pearls (2002), which focuses on the men in Billops’s family, is made up of footage of them as children, conversations (and confrontations) with them as adults, and audio of doctors describing the type of trauma they see in the emergency room as well as in stress-related illnesses. It’s a masterful elaboration of the avant-garde film essay and of the talking head narrative documentary – an entirely innovative take on autobiographical filmmaking. When watching Billops’s films I think that what the artist Lorraine O’Grady said of Finding Christa is equally applicable to all of them: “it expands the concept of documentary into something for which I still can’t find a name […] with revolutionary potential.”3
I realise now that I needed to feel I knew her. Not as a mother but as a mentor, a guide to be consulted sparingly, one who had taken risks as an educator and art practioner and had attained some of what I myself wanted to attain. I took Billops to be a fucking real person, my highest praise. Messy. Alluring and complex. Mysterious. Someone who gave herself permission. Unpredictable. Cool. Warm. But also angular. Not here for your hypocrisy and your passive aggressive professionalist gaslighting bullshit. Forget about romantic family ideas, because Billops was committed to her own needs and desires. Here was someone devoted to writing all day or painting all day or printmaking all day. Asking questions all day. As adventure, not drudgery. In my image of her I saw qualities I wanted to emulate. Billops was a woman with the courage of her tastes, her enthusiasms, and her convictions. Philosophical. Deeply reflective. Singular. Even her outfits and accessories spoke to a departure from the norm. Where middle-aged white-identified ladies of the arts and humanities might wear ‘statement’ necklaces, Camille wore a statement mustache, men’s hats, and bright red sneakers. Paying homage to multiple cultural influences, Billops gleefully upturned expectations of what a beautiful woman, never mind a serious Black woman, should look like. In interviews she is direct, although she often seemed to express her more biting comments and jokes under her breath, laughingly, as if to confide them to you. If I’m honest, I wouldn’t say the idea I have of her makes me feel comfortable or at ease. You get the feeling that she could either inspire you or embarrass you, or maybe even break your heart.
In recent years documentation of Billops and Hatch’s work has dwindled, but in May, a month before Billops’s death, a substantial article on her personal life appeared in Topic. The piece, written by Sasha Bonét, had a tight focus, describing how Billops had dropped off her daughter, Christa, at a children’s home one day and driven away, despite offers from various family members to raise her.4 It then charts their adult relationship: Christa’s idolisation of her mother and a second abandonment. At her passing, I began to reflect on the irony that though Billops had given up Christa in order to pursue her art career, this decision would nonetheless have an enduring presence in the criticism of her art, particularly her films. It’s true, however, that the loss of a child would always haunt a mother on some level, and in the article Billops does discuss her feelings of guilt. Bonét writes that “Camille, unprompted, kept coming back to the matter of giving up her daughter 56 years ago.” Billops says “You have to forgive your guilt,” revealing more ambivalence here than she did in Finding Christa. “I should have done it earlier,” she went on. “It was hard, but I did what was best for both of us.”5 The word regret does not appear anywhere in the article. Reactions to Bonét’s interview were strong. Many readers said they were “disturbed”, fascinated, appalled, and even “gutted” by Bonét’s account of Billops’s unilateral and unapologetic rejection of motherhood.6 Discussing Billops’s life and career, Bonét’s piece evoked her youthful charisma in photographs with her dashing husband and portrayed her dementia, guilt, and longing – or searching – as an elderly woman. Between those two periods of Billops’s life, each rich with quests of a different kind, is a multifaceted career in which she made immense outward contributions to society as a whole. These must be acknowledged and carefully reckoned with
In New York, having left behind their familial ties, Billops and Hatch established their Soho home as a base for collaboration which they maintained together until Camille died. Young poets, musicians and playwrights passed through their loft, which, alongside their living quarters, at one point housed a kiln, a gallery, a studio, and eventually a library.7 Billops convened a Sunday salon in their living room where they invited artists to discuss their work, often recording oral histories that would later be adapted for publication in the journal they co-founded, Artist and Influence: The Journal of Black American Cultural History.8 From 1968 until her passing, Billops has been listed among the editors of Johns Hopkins University Press’s Black American Literature Forum, currently titled The African American Review (edited by St. Louis University’s Nathan Grant). From 1973 to 1987 she taught in the arts faculty of Rutgers University in Newark. With Owen Dodson, Billops co-authored The Harlem Book of the Dead (1978), a now out-of-print collection of funeral portraits by the photographer James Van Der Zee, with a foreword by Toni Morrison. In 1991 she co-edited a special ‘Black Film Issue’ of Black American Literature Forum, in which key scholars and filmmakers such as William Greaves, bell hooks, Marlon Riggs, and Jacqueline Bobo, engaged each other on matters of ethics, history, politics, and style in the medium.9 Together with her archiving, Billops’s editorial work and oral history projects embody her personal commitment to documentation. In an interview with hooks for Reel to Real, Billops said:
“I always tell people that if you are not on a piece of paper, then you don’t exist. […] I always tell people the most revolutionary thing you can do is do a book about your life. Don’t let anybody call it a vanity press. You just do this, this magnificent thing, and you put it on the best paper you can find. Put all your friends in it, everybody you loved, and do a lot of them so one day they will find you and know you were all here together.”10
She thought about the whole of Black art and theatre in this way: its papers and its communities – people, friendships, conversations – were worthy of remembering and they were to be tenderly kept, documented and shared or else risk being lost to forgetfulness.
Arthur Schomburg, whose own personal collection formed the basis of the majestic Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, published his philosophy of Black archival practice in Survey Graphic magazine in 1925. The opening paragraph reads, in part:
The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future.[…] History must restore what slavery took away […] So, among the rising democratic millions we find the Negro […] to become the most enthusiastic antiquarian of them all.11
From 1968, Billops had begun gathering primary source materials for what would become the Hatch-Billops Collection (incorporated in 1975), a treasure trove of materials that documented 20th-century Black art, letters, film and performance. It was open to researchers and housed within Hatch and Billops’s loft.12 In 1992, the year of Billops’s Sundance win, a portion of this collection was donated to Indiana University’s Black Film Center/Archive, where I am currently the director. Founded in 1981 by professor Phyllis Klotman, the BFC/A is both a historical repository and a living, breathing center of Black film that is open to class visits, welcomes researchers and produces film programming during the school term. Klotman built up the BFC/A as a national Black cultural institution with her scholarship and her connections with contemporary Black independent filmmakers like Billops. Both Billops and Klotman each began their repositories at different locations, one independent in New York City and the other tied to a department within a large public academic institution in the Midwest, yet both shared the purpose of providing their students access to primary sources about Black Americans. The BFC/A still serves that fundamental purpose today. As both centre and archive, I think of it as a collection of conversations between past and present, the formal purpose of the archive intertwined with the camaraderie of discovering new films and their worlds together.
Our Hatch-Billops Collection is arranged in three series: General Film Publicity, 1937-1977; Finding Christa, 1991-1995; and Monographs and Serials, 1960-1977. As I explored it after her death, I realised the deeper significance of something fundamental. The materials we have are not about Billops herself, but show us something of how she thought and what she found so important. The collection allows us to look at the world through her eyes. That the BFC/A’s Hatch-Billops Collection is not primarily a biographical archive of personal papers makes its references to Camille’s career all the more startling and illuminating. Included is a catalogue from her 1992 screening of Suzanne Suzanne and Finding Christa at the 11th Annual Women in the Director’s Chair festival in Chicago. Flipping through the pages, we see not only Camille Billops but her peers: Julie Dash screened Illusions, Kathy [Kathleen] Collins’s 16mm print of Losing Ground was presented alongside Cheryl Dunye’s Janine, while Zeinabu irene Davis presented A Powerful Thang (1991). The back cover features an advertisement for a conference at the BFC/A. In September of 1988, Billops sent a copy of a film that Klotman didn’t think the BFC/A could afford at the time and so she returned it with a note explaining the situation. Exploring another folder, I find a postcard from Billops to Klotman referencing comments on a manuscript that the artist had sent to the professor.
The BFC/A’s Hatch-Billops collection is only a fraction of the whole Hatch-Billops archive, yet it offers a unique window into Black film exhibition in New York across the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s as Billops saw it. We also see something of the delicate relationship between donor and archive director, the publicity strategy of a growing academic enterprise, and the mutuality between multiple cultural organisations. It’s moving to see these collections speaking to each other across their tidy grey boxes. Billops and Klotman’s efforts remind me of something that E. James West wrote in ‘The Significance of Private Collectors in African American History’, that “Irrespective of size or stature, individual collections provide an important reminder that the preservation of Black history is not a foregone conclusion, but that it is a struggle which is constantly fought and refought by those who value it.”13 Many world-renowned formal collections like the Schomburg and the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library’s James Weldon Johnson Collection, began as meticulous yet informal personal compendia like the Hatch-Billops, which were later given to the care of universities. Such repositories can provide for consistent environmentally controlled and secure storage as well as access to researchers and the general public. In 2002, Billops and Hatch donated the vast majority of their collection to Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. Known as the Camille Billops and James V. Hatch Archives at Emory University, its highlights include:
- Thousands of rare and out-of-print books, periodicals, posters, and pamphlets on all aspects of African American history and culture
- Interviews with more than 1,200 writers, artists, poets and other cultural figures
- 10,000 slides of Black art
- 1200 theatre programs
- 6,000 black-and-white photographs
- 300 lobby cards (Similar to a film poster but usually 11×14 inches. No longer used but some older examples are collectible)
- 2200 exhibition catalogues
- Scripts of nearly 1,000 African American-authored plays14
Particularly notable are the oral histories, a labour-intensive and deeply emotional form of scholarship that captures first-person accounts of artists describing their careers and telling their stories. Her collecting practice prioritised the ephemeral and everyday, intentional yet casual communion, and she nurtured as she preserved the living, breathing creativity of the prismatic moment that she was a part of. Through her generosity, this has become our heritage.
Billops’s heirlooms, including her films, artworks, edited collections, and archives, have left us with both her curatorial vision and a sense of her humanity, the pain she inflicted and endured in order to create. We become familiar with her way of seeing the world through her artistic and cultural work. Billops asserted her selections, her vision of what mattered to her and what did not. We look back at the past through her discerning gaze and learn from her by retracing her steps, yet, too, stop to question her path and reflect on how we got here.
1. Lynda Jones, “Dream On, Dreamer.” Village Voice September 6, 1994, 60. Quoted in “Other Voices” Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Women Filmmakers of the African and Asian Diaspora: Decolonizing the Gaze, Locating Subjectivity, Southern Illinois University Press, 1997 (pp. 128-154), p. 134. 2. Billops’s further filmography includes: Suzanne Suzanne (1982), Older Women and Love (1987), Finding Christa (1991), The KKK Boutique … Ain’t Just Rednecks, (1994), Take My Bags (1998), A String of Pearls (2002). All titles are available for purchase or rental from Third World Newsreel. 3. Lorraine O’Grady, “On Black Women Filmmakers,” Artforum, January 1992. Hatch-Billops Collection, Special Collection HB, Black Film Center/Archive, Indiana University, Bloomington. 4. In Finding Christa, Billops says that her family members were not as forthcoming with support at the time as they perceived themselves to be. 5. The article was published in a Mother’s Day edition of the magazine. Sasha Bonét, ‘The Artist Who Gave Up Her Daughter’, Topic, May 2019. 6. For general reactions to Bonét’s article see Twitter. 7. For more on Billops and the New York scene see Michele Prettyman. “Controlling the World Within the Frame: Julie Dash and Ayoka Chenzira Reflect on New York and Filmmaking.” Black Camera 10, no. 2 (2019): pp. 69-79. 8. A complete set of the journal, Artist and Influence, is a part of the Emory collection. 9. Valerie Smith, Camille Billops, and Ada Griffin, eds. “Black Film Issue” Black American Literature Forum 25, no. 2 (Summer 1991). 10. bell hooks, “confession—filming family: an interview with Camille Billops” Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class and the Movies (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp.141-151, p. 147. 11. Arturo Schomburg, “The Negro Digs Up His Past”, Survey Graphic, March 1925, pp. 67-672, p. 670. 12. Billops and Hatch explain that they actually maintained a nascent form of their collection while they were still at the University of California, Los Angeles. See ‘Camille Billops and Jim Hatch – Archivists’, YouTube. 13. E. James West, ‚The Significance of Private Collectors in African American History’, Aaihs (online). 14. Pellom McDaniels, ‘In Memoriam: Camille Billops, An Avant-garde Artist to be Recognized and Reckoned With’, Scholarblogs Emory.
Terri Francis teaches at Indiana University and directs the Black Film Center/Archive. Her book, Josephine Baker’s Cinematic Prism, will be out soon from Indiana University Press.
This essay first appeared in Another Gaze 03. You can buy the issue here. If you like what you read please consider donating.
