ALMA’S RAINBOW INTRO
The following text has been adapted slightly from the intro written and read by Rógan Graham. Scroll to the bottom to find more reading recources for Alma’s Rainbow.
Rógan Graham is a film curator, critic, and marketer from South London.
Alma's Rainbow, originally shot on 35mm, is an American coming-of-age film directed by Ayoka Chenzira originally released in 1994.
What you are seeing is the restoration of the film, which was overseen by Julie Dash, and was released to theatres and streaming in 2022 in the US. T A P E collective, an independent distributor run by two women of colour, are the first to distribute the film in the UK.
The film follows Rainbow Gold, a Brooklyn teenager who experiences the pangs and joys of coming of age with her slightly aloof mother and visiting show business aunt.
Ayoka Chenzira has worked as a filmmaker since the 1970s, working largely in experimental film. Alma’s Rainbow is her first traditional feature. Chenzira is also the first African American woman animator.
Chenzira’s own journey is not too dissimilar from Rainbow Golds, in an interview for the Criterion Collection writer Tayler Montague says Chenzira’s
“Journey began in her mother’s beauty parlour, where she was surrounded by the beauty of women from different walks of life. These childhood experiences instilled in her a desire to tell the stories of this community. After enrolling at NYU Film School in the 1970s, she found herself swept up in the Black independent film scene of New York City, which placed her in the midst of legendary women like historian and curator Pearl Bowser and filmmakers Julie Dash and Kathleen Collins, the latter of whom became a mentor to Chenzira.” At New York University Film School. There were four Black students at the time Chenzira attended. “It was the ’70s, so Black exploitation films were very popular. And those films weren’t something that I was interested in. As students, we were supposed to work on one another’s films, and nobody wanted to work on mine, which was fine with me because, you know, there was a parallel universe where I was meeting Black filmmakers in New York making their first independent films or going to workshops or grassroots community organisations to learn filmmaking.”
Many of us are aware of the white male auteurs who came out New York City in the 1970s. Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, Brian De Palma and Francis Ford Coppola many of whom are still working to great acclaim today. However, how many of you had heard of Ayoka Chenzira? One of the more recognisable black female names of that period is that of Kathleen Collins, director of seminal feminist work Losing Ground and mentor to Chenzira.
Chenzira tells Montague, “Kathleen Collins and I were very close. She was my daughter’s godmother. And when Kathleen was in the process of dying, she did not tell me that. She called me on the phone, and we just started talking about a lot of things, and she knew that I was very interested in film and experimentation—experimentation not only in terms of the form, but doing things with film like heating it up and seeing what that would look like, attaching things to it and seeing if it could go through a projector scanning it. And she was supportive of none of those things [laughs]. But what she did say to me was that if I kept doing this experimental stuff, I wasn’t going to be able to feed her godchild. And so she told me that she was going to go on sabbatical, and she wanted me to take her place at the City College of New York in the film department. And I said sure.” Chenzira never saw herself in higher education, but stayed on as a professor becoming one of the first african american professors of film studies pioneering the film department at historically black college Spelman.
Of Alma’s Rainbow, Chenzira says “Women start to get tense when their daughters get to be a certain age and boys start hanging around the corner. I was aware of this tension and just wanted to have some conversation around that, because women often forget that they were once girls and once teenagers. They take on this role of mother, as opposed to the role of person.”
Of the colourful aesthetic , Chenzira says this came as a reaction in some degree to the popular blaxploitation films, Chenzira continues “The Black exploitation films that were popular when I was at NYU never looked beautiful to me. They never looked like they were made with a lot of care. And I grew up in a world where, however much or little money you had, being clean and beautiful was really important. And to this day the idea of beauty is still something important to me. It’s a gift to the world.”
To me, Alma’s Rainbow is a tender exploration of the deferred dreams of mothers and the strength of character it takes as working class people to pursue uncertain creative paths. In amongst that, some cringeworthy, emotional and honest depictions of puberty!
Alma’s Rainbow is part of T A P E’s season SNAPSHOT - on Black Girlhood on Screen.
