ABSTRACT
A gothic family melodrama and mystery, Kasi Lemmons’s Eve’s Bayou (1997), situates Black female interiority as the locus of power and feeling and, as was increasingly important to independent film at the time, adds new voices and new perspectives to American cinema. Popular with audiences and acclaimed by critics, the lush and verdant Eve’s Bayou – Lemmons’s debut feature, which she also wrote – illustrates how bearing witness involves a layered history of perception. Within a suspense-driven plot and ecologically diverse setting, Eve’s Bayou features a vibrant and glamorous Southern family that quietly carries slavery’s trauma. Through bell hooks’, Mia Mask’s, and Kara Keeling’s frameworks, this chapter appreciates how Eve’s Bayou celebrates Black female characters who learn to appreciate their own “power in looking,” in hooks’ terms, a power with the capacity to both rupture and heal.
