Seek­ing Mavis Bea­con review – Delight­ful search for miss­ing icon

Mavis Bea­con is con­sid­ered with­in the Amer­i­can pop­u­lar con­scious­ness to be the first influ­en­tial black woman with­in the world IT… even though she doesn’t actu­al­ly exist. She’s a dig­i­tal Man­dela Effect; a vir­tu­al image craft­ed to sell copies of the icon­ic typ­ic pro­gramme, ​‘Mavis Bea­con Teach­es Typing’.

In the doc­u­men­tary, Seek­ing Mavis Bea­con, co-col­lab­o­ra­tors Jazmin Jones and Olivia McK­ay­la Ross attempt to find Hait­ian mod­el Renée L’Espérance, whose pho­to and like­ness was used for the Mavis Bea­con char­ac­ter, and give her her much-deserved flow­ers for inspir­ing a new gen­er­a­tion of black inno­va­tors in cyber­space. In the process, they delve into ques­tions con­cern­ing their per­son­al rela­tion­ships to tech­nol­o­gy, and the ways black iden­ti­ty can be cel­e­brat­ed or exploit­ed with­in the dig­i­tal realm.

Through its rough-around-the-edges, DIY style, Seek­ing Mavis Bea­con epit­o­mis­es what feels like a col­lec­tive effort to dis­cov­er the woman who influ­enced so many lives. The doc­u­men­tary fea­tures pre­scient inter­views with a broad range of guests, includ­ing authors and cre­atives, along­side audio-record­ed phone-ins and video clips pulled from online, often arranged to form a kind of vibrant, vir­tu­al collage. 

With Seek­ing Mavis Bea­con the two co-col­lab­o­ra­tors ques­tion the ways black peo­ple are rep­re­sent­ed in dig­i­tal spaces, and how they can reflect their own iden­ti­ties through the use of cyber­space. The doc­u­men­tary also inter­ro­gates the hid­den bias­es and prej­u­dices against peo­ple of colour that influ­ence the cre­ation of AI and oth­er interfaces.

Jones and McK­ay­la Ross’ film is often about the jour­ney, not the des­ti­na­tion, but the pace and rhythm of their debut feels uneven at times, par­tic­u­lar­ly as you approach the final third of the film. The themes explored along the way are fre­quent­ly much more engross­ing than the actu­al hunt for L’Espérance, and their attempts to con­tact her feel slight­ly tedious and repet­i­tive, leav­ing you impa­tient­ly tap­ping your feet. 

At its core, though, Seek­ing Mavis Bea­con is the debut film of two young Black women, carv­ing out their own place for them­selves with­in the his­tor­i­cal record. It’s not flaw­less, or free of blem­ish­es and glitch­es, but nei­ther should it be. As the film details, it sound­ly rejects the unjust demands for per­fec­tion dealt out to women of colour by soci­ety. In turn, they wish to give L’Espérance the space and time to tell her own sto­ry, but what if she doesn’t want to be found?

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