HFC at Doc Days '24: Seeking Mavis Beacon

First, some scene-setting: If you’re interested in archival work, you’ve likely heard the phrase archival turn bandied about, a shorthand to describe the shift, over the course of the 20th century, of archives as objective, passive repositories of knowledge to subjective, active sites of discourse. That is to say: who creates the archive? Who curates it? And who, in this act of creation and curation, is left out?

So central to the archival turn has been the interrogation of that absence. It will, dear reader, likely not surprise you that those marked absent from the archive are groups traditionally left out of institutionalized spaces of knowledge-making more generally: Black and Indigenous people of color, particularly women of color; trans and queer people; disabled people; so forth. In recognition of this, significant work has been done to restore the–a?–historical narrative, both through institutionally backed archives and the emergence of grassroots, community-owned and run archives. And to be clear, this is good, important work. But it is not without its own ethical quagmire: what if someone doesn’t want to be restored?

Which brings us to Seeking Mavis Beacon, video artist Jazmin Jones’ directorial debut focused on Jones and her collaborator, Olivia Ross’ efforts as “DIY detectives” to locate Renee L’Esperance, the Haitian model who posed for the original Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing box art. L’Esperance was paid $500 for the modeling gig and received no royalties. Despite the overwhelming success of the Mavis Beacon series and the character of Mavis herself becoming a household name, L’Esperance herself was not widely known, and disappeared entirely from the public eye some 20 years ago. 

Though ostensibly about locating L’Esperance, and deeply invested in questions around Black identity and community formation, technology and digital embodiment, Seeking Mavis Beacon is a documentary interested in documentary as an art form, with Jones’ and cinematographer/collaborator Yeelen Cohen’s backgrounds as digital/video artists on full display. They treat the screen as a computer monitor, juxtaposing Facetime videos, photobooth-recorded interviews, memes, Tiktoks, and Youtube clips over presumably Jones’ desktop. When they move into the real world, it is equally as artfully arranged, as Jones and Ross set up their studio within an unnamed “video game nonprofit space” and fill it with images of Black women, altarpieces, and fish tanks, illuminating Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing discs buried in their colorful gravel. The visual curation constantly happening works to enforce the broader questions of archiving and of data management; Mavis Beacon’s history, like the studio, like the desktop, like the archive, is constructed. 

Jones establishes this early on, playfully referencing Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman throughout the documentary–The Watermelon Woman being a fictional documentary about Dunye’s search for a (non-existent) Black lesbian actress from the 1930s named Fae Richards. Dunye reveals The Watermelon Woman as fiction in the credits, with white text on a black background stating simply “Sometimes you have to create your own history”–an interstitial that finds itself embedded in Seeking Mavis Beacon, too. 

This is not to say Seeking Mavis Beacon feels inauthentic, but rather, it’s slowly untangling what authenticity means. Mavis is not a real person, but to many she may as well be, illustrated through their conversations with mainly Black women who point to her as critical representation (Jones herself identifies Mavis as pivotal to her interest in technology). At the same time, she’s a character created by a group of White male software developers, one of whom bluntly admits the choice to use a Haitian model was a marketing tactic. The use of women, and notably women of color, as the “face” of software is not limited to Mavis, though she’s the first, and perhaps most enduring, example. And underneath the character is the mysterious L’Esperance, a real woman with a real life, who Ross and Jones want to identify so she can tell her story–so they can, as Jones puts it, give her her flowers. But this impulse to restore L’Esperance to the historical record depends on L’Esperance’s willingness to cooperate. That’s the tension the documentary rides throughout, raising questions about digital footprints and the right to be forgotten.

Seeking Mavis Beacon is inventive and powerful, playful and thoughtful in turn. It resists the urge to wrap up neatly, allowing the viewer to instead spend time with the questions Jones and Ross raise. In the post-screening Q&A at AFS Doc Days, Ross noted that they wanted to prioritize “mystery over mastery,” seeking not to reveal L’Esperance at the expense of her personal safety or desires, but to honor her legacy. The love that Ross and Jones have for L’Esperance, and for each other, is deeply felt, and beautiful to witness. 

Toward the end of the documentary, as Jones and Ross reflect on their progress, Ross announces that what she’s learned is that “the truth is fluid as fuck.” Seeking Mavis Beacon captures that messy fluidity, refusing the easy route a documentary can take: they can’t curate and present the truth for us. We have to sit with the complexities, too.  

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