Jessie Maple, a bacteriologist who took up filmmaking in the 1970s, became the first Black woman to join the camera operators union in New York and went on to direct trailblazing independent films died May 30 at her home in Atlanta. She was 86.
“the first African-American woman to direct an independent feature film in the post-civil rights era.” The statement did not cite a cause.
Ms. Maple was part of that new cinematic vanguard and got her start in training programs run by WNET, New York’s public television station, and Third World Cinema, a film company started by actor. She worked as an apprentice editor on a pair of Gordon Parks films, “Shaft’s Big Score!” and “The Super Cops,” but found that she had little interest in the role, which confined her to a dark office and film laboratory.
“If I had waited, I would never have become a cameraperson,” she told the Times in 2016. “So I took ’em to court. At the [time], they said minorities could not learn how to use the cameras.” “It’s a hard-hitting, slice-of-life drama that’s also notable for its unapologetic depiction of underage drug use among black male youth,” film critic Tambay Obenson wrote in a 2020 article for
The film was shot in part at Ms. Maples’s home, a Harlem brownstone with a spacious basement that she and her husband converted into a movie theater named 20 West, after their address on 120th Street.Ms. Maples ran the theater for about a decade, beginning in 1982, and used the space to showcase a rich array of Black independent films, from contemporary work by Spike Lee to early 20th-century “race movies” that anticipated her own films by 60 years or more.
Around that same time, she met Patton, a photographer for publications including Jet and Ebony. They later supplemented their filmmaking income by running a pair of Harlem diners; after moving to Atlanta, they started a vegan dessert business.
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