Embracing the Old: Speculative History in ‘Compensation’

By Juahl Ganaway

Zeinabu irene Davis’s 1999 film Compensation functions as both an homage to early Black cinema and a speculative intervention into its absences. Compensation refuses to let material survival determine the boundaries of Black film history. The film is told through twin narratives, one set in 1910s Chicago and the other in the 1990s, with the same actors playing parallel couples across time. In the 1910s storyline, Malindy (Michelle A. Banks), a deaf Black woman, and Arthur (John Earl Jelks), a new migrant laborer, build a relationship in their segregated urban world. In the contemporary 1990s storyline, the other couple, Malaika (also Michelle A. Banks), an artist, and Nico (also John Earl Jelks), a librarian, meet in a decidedly different version of Chicago, where they must grapple with questions of intimacy, disability, race, and history. By reconstructing early cinema aesthetics and centering the narrative of deaf Black women, Davis is able to situate disability, gender, and race within the missing details of silent cinema, critiquing the historical exclusion of Black and disabled subjects from cinematic and archival legibility. 

Compensation uses a counter-evidentiary method, drawing on speculative historiography and using imaginative reconstruction to work within the gaps left by the historical record. To be clear, speculative historiography in this instance means a way of writing film history that works both critically and creatively within archival absences, especially when the historical record is fragmented, biased, or otherwise incomplete. 

To scholar Allyson Nadia Field, speculation expands what functions as historical evidence, allowing film history to move beyond its dependence on the chance survival of film objects. Black film history has too often been shaped only by what remains visible to the archive. As Field argues, film history is a “history of survivors,” where material access determines which filmmakers, spectators, and forms of cultural life remain legible as history at all. In Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity, scholar Jacqueline Stewart positions Compensation alongside Daughters of the Dust (1991) as a part of a lineage of Black women filmmakers who re-staged the early twentieth century, exposing the racialized structures embedded within film history. 

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Stewart notes that Davis “foregrounds the problem of compiling evidence, particularly visual evidence, of Black migrant and urban experience…”  In Compensation, Davis restages the film The Railroad Porter (1913) by William Foster, a nearly lost Black-cast comedy widely considered to be the first film produced by an African-American. Through her restaging of Foster’s lost film, Davis reimagines what can no longer be seen, reanimating the missing archive and performing the visual labor vital to recovering early Black cinema and Black spectatorship. By reconstructing The Railroad Porter, alongside the audience watching it, Davis gives Black spectatorship a visual history, refusing to let the disappearance of the film obscure the Black cinematic culture that surrounded it. As Davis cuts between her fictional spectators responding to her speculative reconstruction, she in essence creates a film within a film that exemplifies the history of film. This layering collapses temporal distance, and the 1910’s audience becomes a reflection of the 1990s viewers, and Davis is both historian and participant.

Scholar Allyson Nadia Field’s work on early Black filmmaking as a tool of uplift also clarifies Davis’s intervention. Where filmmakers like William Foster and Oscar Micheaux used cinema to project ideals of racial progress, Davis returns to these same visual codes and questions who these images were meant to uplift in the first place. Davis’s use of silent film conventions draws attention to the racial and bodily exclusions that structure early cinema. By placing the story of a deaf Black woman in the stylistics of the silent era, Davis allows disability to become a means of seeing Black film history otherwise.

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Compensation reclaims silence and makes it both a subject and a strategy of the film. By foregrounding sign language and intertitles, Davis complicates what “silent” cinema means when its central character communicates without verbal language. Compensation also reimagines questions of Black modernity. Davis’s vision of modernity is recursive, built on the echoes between the 1910s and 1990s. The film’s structure (mirrored narratives, recurring gestures, and photographs) suggests that progress isn’t linear. Photography is an anchor for this cyclical form; photos in Compensation feature images of Black women, both historical and fictional, creating a living conversation between the present and the past. The portraits of black female activists like Ida B. Wells and Lucy Parsons evoke the set design of Oscar Micheaux’s film Body & Soul (1925), which famously displays a portrait of Booker T. Washington, but by centering women, Davis places figures often left out of the historical narrative into collective memory. These images become speculative evidence, building a counter-archive in which Black women are continually seen and remembered.

The doubled narrative of the two parallel stories invites a cyclical reading of history.  By mirroring these lives across time, Compensation implies that the conditions that shape race, gender, and disability are still unresolved. The film also redefines what cinematic restoration can mean, becoming not a total fiction but a continuation of history; after all, imagining the past is, in itself, a way of keeping it alive.

Ultimately, what Compensation offers is an alternate model of film history, one built on the reimagining of what was lost. Compensation insists that invention is a truth-telling mode, and that re-envisioning the past is a necessary act of resistance. This lesson feels especially urgent in an era where Black archives and cultural institutions are being defunded and remain vulnerable to erasure. Compensation refuses to let the limits of the surviving archive become the limits of Black historical memory, and uses speculation as a necessary way to carry forward histories that material survival alone would leave behind. By reimagining early Black film culture through the lens of disability and gender, Davis redefines restoration and creates what she calls a rejuvenation, giving new life to Black histories whose material traces have become fragmented or otherwise inaccessible.

Juahl A. Ganaway is a (burgeoning) film critic and archivist-in-training pursuing an M.A. in Cinema Studies at New York University. They have previously written for outlets like Film Daze and The Film Magazine and have a love of all things Black, Queer, and Southern.