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Jessie Maple

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Jessie Maple is an American cinematographer and film director most noted as a pioneer for the civil rights of African-Americans and women in the film industry.[1] Her 1981 film Will was one of the first feature-length dramatic films created by an African-American woman."[2]

Early life and education

Maple was born in Louisiana in 1947 in a family of 4 brothers and seven sisters.[3] In the 1960s and 1970s, Maple was head of a bacteriology and serology laboratory in Philadelphia and New York.[4] She later wrote for the New York Courier. She received film training through Ossie Davis's Third World Cinema, and through the National Education Television Training School, a program run by WNET public television in New York City.[3] The latter program was established for African Americans to learn behind-the-scenes camera jobs in order to get into the union, but funding for this program was short-lived; as Maple noted, "It was so successful that after one year they shut it down."[5] She began her career in film as an apprentice editor for Shaft's Big Score! and The Super Cops.[6] After being admitted to the Film Editor's Union, Maple studied and passed the examination for the Cinematographer's Union.[3]

Career

Following a prolonged legal struggle in 1973, Maple became the first African-American woman admitted to the New York camera operators union.[3][7] She described her lawsuits and struggle in a self-published autobiographical book, How to Become a Union Camerawoman (1976). In a 2020 interview, she said, "After I passed the test and got into the cameraman’s union, then they told the studios not to hire me and blacklisted me. I decided, well, I’m going to fight this....I decided, let me get this out the way, I sued them all at once, ABC, CBS, NBC, and I won."[8]

Working for many years as a news camerawoman, Maple recounts she had her best moment when she realized she could "edit the story in the camera and prevent the editor from taking a positive story and making a negative one out of it," particularly in stories with a race element where black people were often left out of the news story.[5] According to Maple, "I would shoot [the story] in a way where they couldn't cut the black person out of [it]. They had to see both sides of what happened and what they had to say."[5] In 1974 Maple cofounded LJ Films Productions with her husband, Leroy Patton, to produce short documentaries.[9]

In 1981, Maple released the independent feature film Will, a gritty drama about a girls' basketball coach struggling with heroin addiction. With that release, Maple has been cited as the first African-American woman to direct an independent feature-length film in the post-civil rights era.[10][11] In order to show her own film, and other independent movies by African-Americans, Maple and Patton opened the 20 West Theater, Home of Black Cinema in their Harlem brownstone home in 1982.[12] Her second independent feature film was Twice as Nice from a screenplay by poet and actress Saundra Pearl Sharp.[13] Released in 1989, the film is a tale of twin sisters who play basketball.

The Black Film Center/Archive at Indiana University holds the papers and films of Maple in the Jessie Maple Collection, 1971–1992.[14]

Selected filmography

Features

Documentaries

  • Methadone: Wonder Drug or Evil Spirit (1976)
  • Black Economic Power: Reality or Fantasy (1977)

Books

  • How to Become a Union Camerawoman: Film-Videotape, New York, L. J. Film Productions, 1977
  • Maple, Jessie; Butler, Danielle E. (2019). The Maple Crew: A Memoir. Jessie Maple. ISBN 9780578502021.

References

  1. ^ BFC/A (April 12, 2012). "Into The Archive: Exploring the Jessie Maple Collection". Black Film Center/Archive. Indiana University. Retrieved 20 January 2016.
  2. ^ Bobo, Jacqueline (2017). "Black Women Filmmakers; a brief history" from The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY: Routledge. pp. chapter 23. ISBN 9781138924956. Jessie Maple and Kathleen Collins...were among the first black women to create long-form narrative dramatic feature films: Maple directed Will (1981) and Collins directed Losing Ground (1982).
  3. ^ a b c d Staff (February 1976). "A Lady Behind the Lens". Ebony. 31 (4): 44–52.
  4. ^ McCluskey, Audrey T. (2005). "Doing It Her Way: An Interview with Jessie Maple". Black Camera. 20 (2): 1–9. ISSN 1536-3155. JSTOR 27761653.
  5. ^ a b c Margolis, Harriet; Krasilovsky, Alexis; Stein, Julia (2015). Shooting Women: Behind the Camera, Around the World. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-1-78320-506-6.
  6. ^ Heyde, Paul (2006). "Black Women Filmmakers Forum: An Alternative Aesthetic and Vision". Black Camera. 21: 15.
  7. ^ "An Evening with Jessie Maple". Tell It Like It Is: Black Independents in New York, 1968–1986. The Film Society of Lincoln Center. February 2015. Retrieved 20 January 2016.
  8. ^ NuBlockMuseum (February 6, 2020). ""I invest in myself and I make my films": Jessie Maple on breaking boundaries and filmmaking"". Stories from the Block. Retrieved June 19, 2021.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  9. ^ "Will (1981)". New York Women in Film & Television. Retrieved 20 January 2016.
  10. ^ Oxendine, Alice (July 30, 2013). "Remembering Jessie Maple And Her Landmark 1981 Feature-Length Film, 'Will'". Shadow and Act: On Cinema of The African Diaspora. Indiewire. Retrieved 20 January 2016.
  11. ^ Holden, Stephen (February 15, 2015). "Films by Jessie Maple in Lincoln Center Series (Film: Fighting for Rights and Making Movies)". New York Times. p. AR4. Retrieved 20 January 2016.
  12. ^ Carpenter, Sandy (December 10, 1983). "'Burning An Illusion' Is Cruel Racial Awakening". New York Amsterdam News. 74 (50): 26–27.
  13. ^ "57 Films To Be Saved Through the NFPF's 2015 Preservation Grants". The Film Foundation. June 4, 2015. Retrieved 20 January 2016.
  14. ^ "Jessie Maple Collection, 1971–1992". Archives Online. Indiana University. Retrieved 20 January 2016.

Jessie Maple at IMDb

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