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  • Close-Up GalleryPrecious
  • David C. Wall (bio)

This issue of Black Camera has a special focus on Lee Daniels's 2009 award-winning Precious.1 The story of the film's production, development, distribution, and (largely) critical and popular success is by now well known. The Close-Up section acknowledges the significance of this film by engaging with the myriad complicated discourses that surround the movie. The essays and commentaries included reveal the multiplicity of readings available to the thoughtful critic as well as the contentious and provocative nature of the film itself. This complexity is further attested to by the artwork on the cover and accompanying this special section.

Precious is a difficult film to watch. It has to be acknowledged that a significant part of its power as a work of cinema is in its stark and unrelenting rendering of trauma and abjection. Yet, at the same time, it is filled with moments of quiet joy and dignity. And it is, perhaps, in those moments of joy and dignity that a larger truth of Precious might be found. At the same time, there are very specific African American social, historical, and cultural contexts in which the film is situated. This is, at least in part, a cause of some significant debate surrounding the cultural labor of Precious. Is it an excoriating indictment of a society in which a black underclass is left to rot? Or is it merely one more predictable iteration of the pathology of the black family that panders to white liberal sensibilities? It is, of course, both and more.

While implicitly acknowledging the historical and cinematic contexts of the film, Adele Stephenson's portrait of Claireece "Precious" Jones moves away from the more immediate and obvious images of deprivation and despair. The painting positions Precious not only in the milieu of contemporary black urban life but also in the traditions of Western art history, especially as that history relates to images of mother and child. Stephenson's immediate reference point is a painting by Raphael entitled Madonna and Child with Book (ca. 1502), but of course images of motherhood are found in the Western tradition going as far back as ancient Rome when pictures of mothers and children—known as caritas—functioned as visual embodiments of charity and kindness. Our own visual encoding of motherhood is [End Page 220] dominated by images of the Virgin Mary. Indeed, we might argue that all images of motherhood are in some way related to the powerful ubiquity of Christian imagery that for centuries has located Mary at the visual center of discourses of maternity, nurturing, kindness, and humanity.

For Stephenson the relationship between Precious and her children became the central element in the film. "I watched the film a number of times before beginning the work. What struck me, what the thread was for me, was a single line of the relationship between Precious and her own children."2 The image of mother and child becomes, then, the central point for the collision of the multiple discourses in the film and the social tensions that are played out through the stultifying intimacy of the domestic arena.

Though images of the Virgin and Christ child are ubiquitous, as a genre they offer an almost limitless set of versions, variations, and visions. Modern versions have abounded as a consequence of both the development of technologies of communication and reproduction and, perhaps ironically, the secularization of Western culture that has allowed the image to proliferate through countless utilities of commodification unimaginable prior to the twentieth century. Stephenson's own painting engages with these disparate iterations of the Virgin and Christ child while reaching back to some core elements that express peace, abundance, and, most importantly, hope.

It is with this sense of hope that Stephenson has attempted to imbue the image of Precious. Notwithstanding the ruptured vision of motherhood presented by Precious's own mother, the portrait of Precious Jones is designed to encourage a nuanced reading of the character that articulates much more than yet another vision of victimhood. In speaking to the film's broader politics, Stephenson is, thus, making an effort to avoid equating blackness with the...

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