Framing the Feminine: Harriet, Constructing Black Female Subjectivity and Agency

Abstract

This chapter examines director Kasi Lemmons’ process of composing, framing, and situating within the mise en scène the female characters in Harriet (2019), particularly the titular protagonist played by Cynthia Erivo. Using the theoretical frameworks of formalism and feminist film theory, “Framing the Feminine: Harriet, Constructing Black Female Subjectivity and Agency” argues that through her composition, the arrangements of visual information including lighting and camera movement, Lemmons’ lens prioritizes the female form as a signifier of agency and power. The female characters function to drive the narrative, Lemmons positions Harriet Tubman cinematically in her strength and sense of self without objectification or sexualization, excoriating the historically pathological ways often posited in classical Hollywood narratives regarding black female representation. Lemmons uses common cinematic vernacular to decenter the male gaze, reorienting spectatorship by prioritizing female first person subjectivity and narrative significance. The complex use of symmetry, depth of field, implied eyeline, deep space composition, relative size, and counter balance all unapologetically function to develop the active black female voice and tone of the story.

Free the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space and the look of the audience into dialectics and passionate detachment.

—Laura Mulvey (1975)

Creating space for the construction of radical black female subjectivity …film in particular, as a powerful site for critical intervention

—bell hooks (1992)