Ava DuVernay: Origin (ARRAY Films, 2023)

African American filmmaker Ava DuVernay’s big and brilliant new film, Origin, is based on – and takes its title from – prizewinning author and journalist Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent (Random House, 2020), for weeks # 1 on a New York Times bestseller-list.

Or rather, it is the fictionalized story of Wilkerson’s life in a period of “grief and growth,” as one reviewer put it, Wilkerson (b. 1961) losing her husband (played by Jon Bernthal), her mother (Emily Yancy), and her close cousin (Niecy Nash) while doing research for and writing her big book in search of a theory that would explain not only American racism and white supremacy, but India’s treatment of Dalits, the ‘untouchables’ at the very bottom of India’s hierarchy of caste, and Nazi Germany’s extermination of some six million Jews between 1941 and 1945, during WW II.

Race and caste. A headline in the New Yorker read: “Few Films Make Ideas Exiting, but “Origin” Succeeds,” calling DuVernay’s approach – turning a work of historical and sociological nonfiction into a dramatized story centering on its author – “audacious.” Race and caste are not synonymous, but they tend to share certain features: The prohibition of sex and marriage between castes/races; putting people in boxes they can’t escape, e.g. the U.S. “one-drop rule” determining who is ‘black’; a belief in the inherent superiority/inferiority of castes/races; the idea of a racial purity that must not be ‘polluted’ by blood; and we must not forget sheer terror and cruelty to keep the system in place.

The film takes us to the troubled past and present of India, Germany, and America, but the film’s greatest achievement may be the narrative of the personal journey of Isabel Wilkerson brought to life in a virtuoso performance by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, supported by an outstanding cast. (Here, like other reviewers, we must mention Audra McDonald as Miss Hale – Miss Hale, not ‘girl’).  Isabel’s paralyzing sorrow at the untimely passing of her white husband Brett at the age of 46 (”We did not break”); the grief at the death of her mother; and that of her cousin, Marion, from an illness. And her heartbreaking real or imagined meetings with victims of race and caste bigotry and hatred.

The Trayvon Martin Case. Let us look at one of several stories in a film that runs for 2 hours and 21 minutes, the episode that opens the film and sends Wilkerson on her journey as “a woman in pursuit of an idea,” as Ava DuVernay said in an interview on NPR/National Public Radio.

On the night of 26 February 2012 neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman shot and killed an unarmed 17-year old Black teenager, Trayvon Martin, in Sanford, Florida. In the film we see a hooded Trayvon Martin leave a convenience store and walking in the dark through a white neighborhood, followed by a car of vigilantes, with Zimmerman talking on the radio to the police, the tapes of the conversation later released to the press. Tried for second-degree murder, George Zimmerman was acquitted on the basis of Florida’s Stand Your Ground-law (self-defense).

Towards the end of the film Wilkerson/DuVernay compares the world we live in now with a house with stress cracks built into the foundation, and a roof that must be repaired. We did not enslave Africans, we did not send Jews to the kz-camps, we did not create the caste system of India – not one of us was around when this house was built. But here we are … the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. The cracks won’t fix themselves, and any more deterioration will be on our watch.

Big questions. Ava DuVernay (b. 1972) makes big films asking big questions. In 2014 Selma, nominated for an Oscar in the best-film category, told the story of Martin Luther King, Jr. (played by David Oyelowo) and the historic and history-making 54-mile march in March 1965 from Selma to Montgomery, the capitol of Alabama, protesting segregation and disenfranchisement, one result of which was the US Congress’s passing of the Voting Rights Act of August 6, 1965.    

In 2016 the New York Film Festival opened with Ava DuVernay’s documentary film 13th (named for the 13th Amendment from 1865 to the United States Constitution, abolishing slavery) on the United States criminal justice system and the disproportionate mass incarceration of people of color – what civil rights lawyer and legal scholar Michelle Alexander has called “The New Jim Crow.”

And now we have Origin. While Selma was a box office hit, the big budget Origin has been a flop. In Denmark marketing has been limited and lackluster. Yet anyone who has seen the film in a small art cinema or in a big commercial movie theatre, will testify to its powerful emotional impact on its viewers. And when it premiered at the 80th Venice International Film Festival in September, 2023, competing for a Golden Lion, it received an eight minute standing ovation from the audience.

UFI // 20 November 2024  

Postscript: The resurrection of Allison Davis. In 1941 anthropologist Allison Davis (1902-1983) published his landmark Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class (University of Chicago Press). A second, abridged edition was published in 1965 – the 1965 edition reissued in 2022 with a new foreword from Isabel Wilkerson, Pulitzer Prize winner 1994 for her journalism. A testimony to Wilkerson’s debt to Allison Davis’s book in the research and writing of her own book.

In Ava DuVernay’s film we see Wilkerson reading Allison Davis’s now classic book. DuVernay then takes us with Davis and his wife back to Berlin anno 1933, where the Davises witness the open humiliation and brutalization of Jews on the streets of the metropolis, and to Opernplatz, May 10, 1933, and the burning of thousands of books by famous writers blacklisted by the Nazis.

But it is the discovery that Nazi politicians and lawmakers in preparation of the notoriously racist and anti-semitic Nuremberg laws of 1935 – that deprived Jews of German citizenship and outlawed miscegenation – had taken a close look at the Jim Crow laws of the United States that sends the Davises back to America, to the small town of Natchez, Mississippi, documenting how segregation and white supremacy had dominated every aspect of life in the American South of the 1930s.

Ava DuVernay’s film and the reissue of Deep South in 2022 with Isabel Wilkerson’s foreword have contributed to the resurrection of Allison Davis, whom historian David A. Varel in 2018 had called “The Lost Black Scholar,” as an accomplished and trailblazing American anthropologist.