One Shot is a series that seeks to find an essence of cinema history in one single image of a movie.
The mirror reflects a curious and alarming scene: in the foreground, Mozelle, a young woman, and Eve, a little girl, gaze wide-eyed at the men standing behind them. One of the men holds a gun to the chest of the other. The shot embodies the seamless ambition of Kasi Lemmons’s directorial debut Eve’s Bayou (1997), the tale of the Batistes, a haunted Creole family plagued by the careless philandering of their patriarch. Eve (Jurnee Smollett) has already caught her father making love to his mistress—a poorly kept secret in any case—but by now rage has eclipsed heartbreak as she helplessly watches her family unravel. Her aunt Mozelle (Debbi Morgan) seeks to impart upon the child an unconventional lesson in grace by revealing her own past infidelity: she had planned, she tells Eve, to run away with her lover, but he fatally shoots her husband when she changes her mind. And so the pair find themselves at this mirror, where this memory from Mozelle’s past unfolds. The episode encapsulates the film’s core themes: ancestral hauntings, the mysterious nature of memory, and above all, Black women looking. The men remain out of focus, but the Black woman and girl watching are central. Black women filmmakers in particular—from Kathleen Collins to Zeinabu irene Davis to Julie Dash—seem especially drawn to the depiction of storytelling as an intimate, binding, and temporal-defying practice that does not merely bridge the past to present to future, but suggests these dimensions exist in synchronicity. In Eve’s Bayou specifically the scene becomes notably multivalent, for Mozelle and Eve are doubly connected by a peculiar birthright: clairvoyance. Whether Mozelle has resurrected this memory for the child or they co-weave it together out of their supernatural kinship is characteristic of the film’s defining ambivalence, but what essentially remains is the gaze—the authorship—of Black women. At one point, Mozelle leaves her niece’s side to stand beside her husband in the mirror: she is author and actor, collapsing the presumed boundaries between history and, as it turns out, premonition. Mozelle and Eve cement themselves in the tradition of conjure women—a legacy that entails mediating between past and present through oral history, storytelling—and in her way, so does Lemmons.