Director has her own rhythm

You may never have heard of Darnell Martin, but you've probably seen her work as director of several episodes of Law and Order and other popular TV shows.  Television directors just don't get the same attention as film directors, and women in the business rarely get much attention except as actresses. She's been working in the business since the 1980s at first as second assistant camera on  Do the Right Thing, and as a writer, learning her craft with hands-on experience.

A couple of things about Martin are striking. When she made her1994 feature debut, I Like It Like That, she was the first African-American woman to direct a studio feature - certainly an attention-getting distinction, and she didn't want a big deal made of it.  She told American Visions magazine "It pisses me off . . . I wasn't thinking about trying to do something politically correct. I was trying to follow the human beats. My foremost interest in filmmaking is about character, about the environment of my characters. I wasn't trying to do a film about Latinos or women or anything like that. I just tried to make a film about people." 

Her feature films seem (at least to me) to have a documentary flair. The 2005 Their Eyes Were Watching God, based on a Zora Neale Hurston novel, tells us almost as much about life in an all-Black Florida town in the 1920s as about one woman's search for love and respect. And of course the 2008 Cadillac Records is rooted in the reality of 1950s Chicago blues, with all its raunchiness and exploitation. Several reviews seemed particularly vicious and petty, with complaints like "Beyoncé Knowles doesn't look anything like Etta James."  (Oh, please!) It's the music that matters, and the music is great in this overview of Chess Records and the movement of "race music" into the mainstream. Mick LaSalle at the San Francisco Chronicle gets it: "A good general rule is that if one performance is good, credit the actor. But if everyone in the movie is doing excellent work, this is no coincidence. This is the product of superior direction."

Martin is identified as a pioneer of black film, which has a 100-year history in the United States - kind of funny when you think that she was born in 1964 in the Bronx. "There would be no Denzel Washington without Sidney Poitier and no Sidney Poitier without Paul Robeson . . . no Gina Prince-Bythewood without Darnell Martin" writes Nsenga K. Burton Ph.D. at http://www.theroot.com/views/celebrating-100-years-black-cinema-0 which is altogether worth reading.

Martin has not announced any upcoming film projects, but has scheduled a couple of episodes of Happy Town  and one of Mercy for 2010.