The Watermelon Woman es una película romántica y dramática estadounidense de 1996 escrita, dirigida y editada por Cheryl Dunye. Siendo la primera película dirigida por una lesbiana negra, la película está protagonizada por Dunye en el papel de Cheryl, una joven lesbiana negra que trabaja a tiempo parcial en una tienda de videos mientras intenta hacer una película sobre Fae Richards, una actriz negra de la década de 1930 conocida por interpretar los estereotípicos papeles de "mammy" relegados a las actrices negras durante ese período.

The Watermelon Woman fue producida con un presupuesto de $300,000, financiada por una subvención del National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), así como por un evento de recaudación de fondos y donaciones de amigos de Dunye. La película se inspiró en parte y está dedicada a la memoria de actrices negras como Louise Beavers, Hattie McDaniel y Butterfly McQueen. Fae Richards es un personaje ficticio creado por Dunye para la película como una amalgama de y sustituto de las actrices negras relegadas o olvidadas en la historia del cine, y como resultado del presupuesto de la película, que no pudo costear imágenes de archivo de actrices reales.

The Watermelon Woman se estrenó en el Festival Internacional de Cine de Berlín de 1996. La película recibió críticas en general positivas y se considera un hito en el New Queer Cinema. Generó controversia por una escena de sexo lésbico que llevó a un escritor de The Washington Times a cuestionar su financiación por parte del NEA, lo que a su vez llevó al NEA a reestructurar su sistema de subvenciones. En 2021, The Watermelon Woman fue seleccionada para su preservación en el Registro Nacional de Películas de los Estados Unidos por la Biblioteca del Congreso por ser "cultural, histórica o estéticamente significativa".

The Watermelon Woman is a 1996 American romantic comedy-drama film written, directed, and edited by Cheryl Dunye. The first feature film directed by a black lesbian, it stars Dunye as Cheryl, a young black lesbian working a day job in a video store while trying to make a film about Fae Richards, a black actress from the 1930s known for playing the stereotypical "mammy" roles relegated to black actresses during the period.

The Watermelon Woman was produced on a budget of $300,000, financed by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), as well as a fundraiser, and donations from friends of Dunye. The film was partly inspired by and dedicated to the memory of such Black actresses as Louise Beavers, Hattie McDaniel, and Butterfly McQueen. Fae Richards is a fictional character created by Dunye for the film as both an amalgamation of and stand-in for Black actresses sidelined or forgotten in film history, and as a result of the film's budget being unable to afford archive footage of real-life actresses.

The Watermelon Woman premiered at the 1996 Berlin International Film Festival. The film received generally positive reviews and is considered a landmark in New Queer Cinema. It garnered controversy for a lesbian sex scene that prompted a writer for The Washington Times to question its NEA funding, which in turn led to the NEA restructuring their grant system. In 2021, The Watermelon Woman was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant"

The wry, incisive debut feature by Cheryl Dunye gave cinema something bracingly new and groundbreaking: a vibrant representation of Black lesbian identity by a Black lesbian filmmaker. Dunye stars as Cheryl, a video-store clerk and aspiring director whose interest in forgotten Black actresses leads her to investigate an obscure 1930s performer known as the Watermelon Woman, whose story proves to have surprising resonances with Cheryl’s own life as she navigates a new relationship with a white girlfriend (Guinevere Turner). Balancing breezy romantic comedy with a serious inquiry into the history of Black and queer women in Hollywood, The Watermelon Woman slyly rewrites long-standing constructions of race and sexuality on-screen, introducing an important voice in American cinema.

El primer largometraje dirigido por una lesbiana negra, The Watermelon Woman de Cheryl Dunye presenta una narrativa alternativa y llamativa frente a la representación convencional de los negros a lo largo de la historia del cine. Cheryl interpreta a Cheryl, una versión ficticia de sí misma, empleada en una tienda de videos en Filadelfia que busca completar un documental. El tema de su película: una actriz negra de los años 1930 que fue encasillada, acreditada solo como "la mujer de la sandía". Dunye ilustra las implicaciones de la identidad de la mujer de la sandía (o su falta de identidad) como un punto crítico para fomentar conversaciones sobre la representación, un gesto particularmente poderoso en una década en la que la comunidad artística aún no estaba dispuesta a considerarlas. Al proporcionar hábilmente un entorno desenfadado para esta urgente investigación, Dunye también retrata una vibrante comunidad lésbica que apoya y empodera a quienes pertenecen a ella, una representación también críticamente ausente en el cine a mediados de la década de 1990. Cuando Jeannine DeLombard escribió en el Philadelphia City Paper que la película contaba con “la escena lésbica más ardiente jamás registrada en celuloide”, el filme generó una considerable reacción negativa de escritores y políticos conservadores que cuestionaron la asignación de fondos del NEA en el presupuesto de producción. Tenían razones para estar preocupados: aunque la película no es pornográfica, es muy, muy sexy, incluso celebratoria. ¿Qué podría ser más peligroso para las personas en el poder? – MoMA

The first feature film directed by a black lesbian, Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman presents a striking alternate narrative to conventional black representation throughout film history. Cheryl portrays Cheryl, a fictionalized version of herself as a Philadelphia video store clerk on a quest to complete a documentary. The subject of her film: a black actress from the 1930 who was typecast, credited only as “the watermelon woman.” Dunye illustrates the implications of the watermelon woman’s identity (or her lack of identity) as a critical turning point to spur conversations about representation—a particularly powerful gesture in a decade in which the arts community was still unwilling to consider them. Deftly providing a lighthearted setting for this urgent investigation, Dunye also chronicles a vibrant lesbian community that supports and empowers those who belong to it, a representation also critically absent from cinema in the mid-1990s. When Jeannine DeLombard wrote in the Philadelphia City Paper that the film featured “the hottest dyke sex scene ever recorded on celluloid,” the film garnered considerable backlash from conservative writers and politicians who questioned the NEA grant allocation in the production budget. They had good reason to be concerned: although the film isn’t pornographic, it is very, very sexy—even celebratory. What could be more dangerous to the people in power? – MoMA

The Watermelon Woman: Faking It/Making It

Two friends find themselves stubbornly intertwined yet comically at odds. They’re Black, they’re lesbians, they work at a video-rental store in Philadelphia—and they’re ambitious, too, though not to the same end. Cheryl is eager to complete her first film, though she struggles to find direction; Tamara seeks romantic and domestic bliss, pushing for a closer relationship with her busy girlfriend, Stacey. The pair shoot a wedding and argue over the pay and then the B-roll. At the ceremony, a smattering of Black attendees, as well as a Black server, seem out of place among all the white people—it’s an interracial marriage. The Watermelon Woman (1996), filmmaker Cheryl Dunye’s debut feature, chronicles the entanglements of love and friendship, art and self-invention, and the dreaded “race relations” by straddling real and imagined auto/biography. Dunye (who also plays Cheryl, a fictionalized version of herself) focuses the beginning of the film on seemingly offhand exposition—interpersonal conflicts and funny mishaps unfold at the wedding and video store. But these low-key moments accrue and lead to revelations that reach beyond the limits—and clichés—of “storytelling.” The Watermelon Woman is as invested in ideas as it is in characterization, as curious about how relationships come together—and apart—as it is in the identities and ideologies that undergird them.

At its core, the film is a romantic comedy. Cheryl—single, stubborn, and film-obsessed—bristles at the attempts by Tamara (Valarie Walker) to get her shacked up. A karaoke night at a local club plays out to a hilarious conclusion: Yvette (Kathy Robertson), Cheryl’s hyperfemme, long-limbed blind date, sings an absurdly off-key rendition of Minnie Riperton’s “Lovin’ You.” Tamara wants Cheryl to find romantic partnership that meshes with the social requirements of her own Black lesbian romance (the date is a friend of Stacey’s). Cheryl, however, is more interested in making her film—short interviews that Cheryl shoots in Philadelphia and elsewhere for her project are interwoven throughout The Watermelon Woman.

Cheryl continues to resist the idea of coupling up until someone wanders into the video store, obviously interested. The interloper in question is Diana (Guinevere Turner, cowriter and star of the 1994 lesbian film Go Fish, directed by Rose Troche), who, Tamara quips, “has nice bone structure, if you’re into white girls.” (Tamara also takes an immediate disliking to a new coworker, Annie—played by Shelley Olivier—a white Bryn Mawr graduate with blond streaks in her hair and a punk aesthetic.) Tamara wants Cheryl to pursue Yvette, but Cheryl is turned off by Yvette’s attitude and presentation. At first, Tamara seems neutral about Diana—who wears the casually chic threads of someone who has always fit in—and curious about Cheryl’s dalliances with her. But that changes after a double date during which Diana puts superlocal Stacey off with her well-traveled connectedness, expressed with an aloof arrogance. Tamara later tells Cheryl that she thinks Diana “wants to be Black” and that Cheryl’s interest in white girls (this isn’t the first one she has dated) belies her own Blackness. Their friendship goes downhill from there.

These dynamics play out alongside Cheryl’s own investigations into an elusive part of Black queer film history. Turning the camera on herself, she explains her project and her process: After seeing an obscure 1930s movie, Plantation Memories—improbably directed by a white lesbian—she has become entranced by the Black mammy character, credited only as “the Watermelon Woman.” Or rather, not the character but the actress who plays her, who seems to have a depth and presence that surpasses her thin, stereotyped role. Cheryl’s difficulty in uncovering the actress’s identity has inspired her to make an investigative documentary. Here already we observe three films, which all play a role in replenishing incomplete archives: Plantation Memories, a re-creation of a kind of early Hollywood film that does exist; Cheryl’s unfolding documentary, which elaborates and improvises on the made-up Plantation Memories; and The Watermelon Woman itself, which explores real questions and frustrations around omissions in early U.S. cinema by way of the two former film-inventions. And there’s even a fourth film looming beyond the diegesis: with a title derived from Melvin Van Peebles’s Watermelon Man (1970), about a white man who wakes up one morning to find he’s Black, The Watermelon Woman not only refashions a historical archive but develops a personal one, too, as Dunye both collects references and also imprints them in the language of her film.

The Watermelon Woman premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1996, and upon its wide release in 1997 was met with critical acclaim, if a kind of patronizing “brava” from some white, straight critics. The film wasn’t without its controversy: Shortly after its premiere, a particularly sensual sex scene between the characters Cheryl and Diana became the subject of a moral-panic-inducing op-ed in the conservative newspaper the Washington Times. The writer, Julia Duin, had read critic Jeannine DeLombard’s positive review of the film in the Philadelphia City Paper, which referred to “the hottest dyke sex scene ever recorded on celluloid”; Duin took umbrage at such a film receiving government money: a $31,500 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Citing the Washington Times article, Republican representative Peter Hoesktra called for the NEA to receive a budget cut of that exact amount, accusing The Watermelon Woman of displaying graphic sexual and illegal acts. On the House floor, Democratic representative Sheila Jackson Lee defended the film, and Hoekstra eventually withdrew his amendment, though the impact of conservative pressure against federal arts funding was lasting. The scandal, which played a significant role in leading to major cuts to the NEA, was fit for celluloid itself.

Unsurprisingly, The Watermelon Woman was born of Dunye’s own stymied investigations into Black film history while studying at Temple University. She found that early U.S. cinema seemed to systematically omit credits for Black actresses, usually relegated to mammy roles. By the time she started to work on The Watermelon Woman, she had already helmed several experimental short films exploring Black and lesbian identity and feminism, including the 1990 autobiographical project Janine, excavating her teenage relationship with a wealthy white girl. This personal work teases at the uneasiness of racial and queer identities: Is who I am what I desire? If Van Peebles’s Watermelon Man must refigure his life according to societal expectations of Black men, Dunye’s Cheryl struggles to embody her Black lesbianism according to the expectations of Tamara, Stacey, and then Diana. Dunye calls upon the film within a film—Cheryl’s documentary—to sort through this conundrum of self-invention. In her search for the actress who played the Watermelon Woman—whose name, she learns, is Fae Richards (Lisa Marie Bronson)—Cheryl begins interviewing scholars of feminist history. Notably, the famously contrarian cultural critic Camille Paglia plays herself, speaking with her trademark exclamatory confidence. Paglia, in a kind of self-satire, proffers a positively spun theory of the mammy, yet—like the other interviewees—has no knowledge of the Watermelon Woman.

The missing archive is a persistent theme in Black American art, from the unknown stories of enslaved Africans kidnapped across the Atlantic to the suppressed histories of Black radical activists of the mid-twentieth century. Imagining those contents has led to constant renewal within Black aesthetics, including with Julie Dash’s 1991 film Daughters of the Dust—which emphasizes alternative forms of Black mythmaking, melding invented symbols and actual history while very loosely following a narrative structure—and Saidiya Hartman’s 2019 book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, a deeply researched literary retracing of forgotten and discarded histories of rebellious, working-class Black girls’ lives, as well as with experimental visual works by artists Jacolby Satterwhite, Doreen Garner, Arthur Jafa, and Khalik Allah. Dunye, however, works from a more conventional formal palette, playing instead with the ideas and assumptions that convention elicits. It’s a strategy in many comedies, but you also might call it a queer practice: taking things as they are and twisting them. When Dunye conducted research for The Watermelon Woman at the Lesbian Herstory Archives and the Library of Congress, she found she was unable to use relevant documents in her film for an affordable price. So, instead, working with artist Zoe Leonard, she staged all the archival photography seen in The Watermelon Woman. In one scene, Cheryl visits the cheekily titled Center for Lesbian Information and Technology (CLIT), where a frazzled archivist (a cameo by writer, activist, and AIDS historian Sarah Schulman) rifles through disorganized boxes—it’s a funny bit that also references the limitations involved in The Watermelon Woman’s production. In Dunye’s second film, the bleak prison drama Stranger Inside (2001), made for television, she would continue to draw on documentary methods, pulling again from academic research—this time the work of abolitionist scholars—and working with real female inmates to develop the script.

At CLIT, Cheryl finally happens upon a strong personal link to Fae: an autographed photo of the actress signed to June Walker (poet Cheryl Clarke), who, it’s implied, was more than a fan. The confirmation that Fae was herself queer breaks open a string of associations for Cheryl, and the project becomes more than a puzzle to solve—it turns into a beacon in her own life. Her findings recall her relationships with Tamara, from whom she increasingly grows apart, and Diana, whom she barely knows at all. When Cheryl first came upon Plantation Memories, she assumed that the film’s white lesbian director, Martha Page (The Watermelon Woman coproducer Alexandra Juhasz), was Fae’s secret girlfriend. But in a letter to Cheryl, June, who’s Black, redirects her; the compelling part of Fae’s story isn’t her work with Martha but rather her life as a Black artist and lesbian, which included a long-term relationship with June. Fae struggled against the prejudice of the mainstream film industry, eventually finding a haven in all-Black productions, and lived out the rest of her days in domestic bliss with June in Philadelphia. What is Cheryl avoiding by seeking out an ultimately alienating relationship with the self-absorbed Diana? Diana has a huge, nicely decorated apartment and “volunteers,” notably for a charity that works with poor Black youth—is Tamara right in saying that Cheryl is aiding in her own fetishization by taking Diana seriously? If Fae could escape that fate by leaving mammy roles behind for a more obscure, yet more artistically satisfying, career, then why can’t Cheryl finally fall into step with her old friend?

Dunye doesn’t offer easy answers: Cheryl and Diana are badly matched not simply as a result of race and class but because their attraction is driven by curiosity rather than recognition. Soon, Cheryl begins cringing at Diana’s pronouncements, such as “Actually, my father’s sister’s first husband was an ex-Panther. His name was Tyrone Washington!” Whether or not Diana is fetishizing Cheryl, specifically, it becomes apparent that Diana’s proximity to Blackness has provided her a kind of “cred” she can’t acquire from her rich, white circles, and yet she’s happy to use both to get her way. Here, Cheryl becomes something of a chump, getting played by yet another suspect white woman, as Tamara lamented during their last argument. Yet, in rejecting Tamara’s call to an acceptably Black lesbian domestic life, Cheryl asserts an artistic freedom, one that Dunye enthusiastically delivers on with The Watermelon Woman: the freedom of invention.

After Stranger Inside, Dunye directed a few more features, including two cowritten with Schulman: The Owls (2010), a crime thriller featuring performances by Turner and fellow Watermelon Woman alum V. S. Brodie, and Mommy Is Coming (2012), about a lesbian couple trying to spice up their sex life outside of their relationship. Like The Watermelon Woman, these were low-budget features for which Dunye relied on the help of friends, especially other gay and lesbian artists and filmmakers. She then took on a tenure-track professorship, and it wasn’t until 2017 that she would be able to return to directing, for television shows including Ava DuVernay’s drama Queen Sugar and several others helmed by Black artists, such as Moonlight cowriter Tarell Alvin McCraney’s David Makes Man and Misha Green’s Lovecraft Country.

It’s easy to lament the level of improvisation and compromise Dunye has been required to embrace in her filmmaking career, especially during a time when Black lesbian perspectives weren’t themselves embraced in mainstream or even independent-film circles. But The Watermelon Woman has outlasted a moral panic as well as Hollywood neglect: it’s still screened in repertory theaters and at universities, is part of the Museum of Modern Art’s film collection, and in 2021 received the Legacy Award at the Cinema Eye Honors. It’s an endlessly revealing film, with the power to surprise and invigorate audiences who are seeing it again or for the first time. That’s in large part because the kind of dexterity and imagination that Dunye had to display in making The Watermelon Woman also happens to be the film’s driving narrative force. In the end, Cheryl doesn’t stay loyal to a fixed idea of identity but to the freedom of making things up as she goes along. Her methods aren’t necessarily superior to Tamara’s, but they’re her own.