This Must Be the Place
Cinema, location, and architecture; film as history and prophecy.
Although shot in 2000, Frailty heralds themes that would trouble the coming era (and its cinema): Christofascist warfare, “cleansing” the region of unsavory figures, the son split between patriarchal fidelity and his own scruples.
For Hurston, it was most important to define Black culture in continuity and coherence; but even as she nobly destabilized the disingenuous objectivity and authority of the discipline, she does not quite upend the colonial configurations of an institution that has generally pathologized Black life and transformed it into spectacle.
Our imaginations forge our borders as surely as our borders forge us. Virginia Woolf demanded a room of her own, but Charlotte Brontë's lady in the attic might've had something altogether different to say about that. For ultimately we are the ones who affix meaning to place.