A rediscovered treasure of 1990s DIY filmmaking, Cauleen Smith’s Drylongso embeds an incisive look at racial injustice within a lovingly handmade buddy movie/murder mystery/romance. Alarmed by the rate at which the young Black men around her are dying, brash Oakland, California, art student Pica (Toby Smith) attempts to preserve their existence in Polaroid snapshots, along the way forging a friendship with a woman in an abusive relationship (April Barnett) and experiencing love, heartbreak, and the everyday threat of violence. Capturing the vibrant community spirit of Oakland in the nineties, Smith crafts both a rare cinematic celebration of Black female creativity and a moving elegy for a generation of lost African American men.

“Future and past, you want to hold all of that. You want to celebrate, you want to protest, you want to do all at once.”—Cauleen Smith

“Black film—whether it be documentary or fiction—has long been assigned the role of educating and elucidating liberal white audiences, and/or rectifying historical omissions or errors of representation,” writes Smith. “Films that refused this service were summarily ignored and dismissed as narrative structural failures . . . I’ve spent so much energy trying to figure out how to defend and protect this film that I hardly know how to speak of it any other way.” —Cauleen Smith

Redescubriendo la visión cinematográfica de Cauleen Smith en Drylongso

El largometraje debut de la cineasta afroamericana, recién rescatado, explora temas incómodos bajo la lente del feminismo negro, y desafía y subvierte estereotipos impuestos.

Por Lily Droeven

A finales de la década de los ochenta y a lo largo de los noventa, la cineasta y artista Cauleen Smith formó parte de las realizadoras afroamericanas independientes dispuestas a contar sus propias vivencias y dilemas. Smith reexaminó los eventos históricos de su pasado e identidad cultural a través de cortometrajes en los que incorporaba elementos del afrofuturismo y activismo comunitario bajo un formato de filmación experimental y casero. En esa época, directores afrodescendientes como Spike Lee y Wendell B. Harris Jr. tenían una visión mucho más amplia y reconocida en Hollywood, a diferencia de las mujeres cineastas que no corrían con la misma suerte: sus trabajos no eran visibilizados y, cuando lo conseguían, el interés resultaba ser mínimo. La directora y autora Julie Dash fue la única afroamericana en obtener distribución en los cines de Estados Unidos con su largometraje debut Daughters of the dust (1991) que se presentó en el Festival de Sundance ese mismo año. Otras cineastas no consiguieron llegar a los espectadores principalmente por falta de distribución. Tal fue el caso de Ayoka Chenzira con Alma’s rainbow (1994), una película coming-of-age que llamó la atención del público hasta su relanzamiento en el año 2022 tras ser restaurada.

Eso mismo sucedió con Drylongso (1998), el largometraje debut de Cauleen Smith basado en uno de sus cortometrajes previos. Su título está inspirado en el libro homónimo de John Langston Gwaltney que se traduce como “gente ordinaria de la clase trabajadora negra”. Drylongso se presentó en el Festival de Sundance 1999 y también le otorgó a su directora el galardón “Someone to watch” en los Premios Independent Spirit. A pesar de esta buena recepción por parte de la audiencia y la crítica, el largometraje fue lentamente desplazado de las grandes salas de cine hasta, literalmente, quedar en el olvido. En años posteriores, la cinta únicamente se presentó en museos de Estados Unidos junto a los cortometrajes experimentales de Smith y otras de sus obras artísticas en formato multimedia. No fue hasta 2022 que Smith empezó a ser más reconocida cuando su ópera prima fue redescubierta y vuelta a estrenar en los cines y festivales. En 2023 fue restaurada en 4K por Janus Films y distribuida por The Criterion Collection en una edición especial que incluye entrevistas y otros cortometrajes de la directora con el propósito de hacerla llegar a un mayor número de audiencias y concederle su merecido lugar como obra maestra del cine independiente de los noventa.

Filmada con una cámara de 16 mm, Drylongso sigue la vida de Pica Sullivan (Toby Smith), una joven estudiante de arte que vive en Oakland y empieza a fotografiar con una cámara Polaroid a hombres jóvenes afrodescendientes con el fin de preservar su existencia, pues teme que –a raíz de los asesinatos, muertes por sobredosis y la violencia que se comete contra ellos– terminen por extinguirse. Al documentar mediante fotografías que estos hombres alguna vez estuvieron con vida, no caerán en el olvido.

Una vez que Pica comienza a capturar a los jóvenes de su vecindario con la cámara, aparece Malik (Will Power), un muchacho que muestra interés en su proyecto de arte y le in- siste en que le tome una fotografía. La interacción y coqueteo mutuo parecen insinuar que un posible romance está por comenzar, pero este se corta abruptamente cuando el joven es asesinado. El dolor de perder a alguien que amaba hace que Pica continúe con mayor interés con su ejercicio fotográfico, al que agrega algunos poemas escritos por ella a modo de dedicatoria y, también, como una forma de expresar su sentir ante lo ocurrido. Es así como se establece una incógnita policiaca –la búsqueda del asesino– contrapunteada por el tono emotivo e íntimo de la protagonista.

Además de esta trama, se nos muestra un segundo hilo narrativo: una noche Pica conoce a Tobi (April Barnett), una joven que durante una cita es violentada por Jefferson (Timothy Braggs). Pica es testigo de ese incidente y la ayuda hasta asegurarse de que ha llegado a salvo a su casa. Después de este primer encuentro, Tobi empieza a portar prendas masculinas para mostrar un perfil más discreto. Además, decide visitar a Pica para agradecerle su ayuda. Como respuesta al cuestionamiento de por qué ha cambiado su vestimenta, Tobi menciona: “Sabes cómo son los hombres blancos: cuando nos ven andar por la calle, se sienten dueños de la acera y, al mirarnos, enloquecen. Cuando voy caminando vestida así, se alejan.” Si bien afirma esto con total seguridad, también sabe que pueden agredirla si es confundida con un joven negro, por lo que no está del todo a salvo. En esta parte de la narrativa, Smith se enfoca en difundir los peligros raciales que viven las mujeres negras a diario: si bien Tobi viste como un hombre para sentirse protegida, está consciente de que esto no la mantiene alejada por completo de una posible agresión. En vez de sentir miedo, ha preferido mostrar una actitud desafiante ante el peligro.

Es muy importante recalcar que la trama del asesino es empleada como una doble narrativa en la historia: en un principio es vista solo como una amenaza para los hombres –lo que hace suponer al espectador que se encuentra ante un crimen de odio racial–, pero este peligro se vuelca hacia las mujeres conforme avanza la cinta. Pica y Tobi son atacadas en un callejón durante una noche, lo cual muestra la realidad en la que viven las mujeres afrodescendientes. Si bien Smith se encarga de resaltar que la violencia y la precariedad son males comunes en la vida de las comunidades negras, paralelamente traza la importancia del compañerismo femenino entre Pica y Tobi, con lo cual comunica que una mujer nunca estará sola, que siempre habrá otra para apoyarla, sea amiga suya o no. Aunque la película nos muestra la amistad entre dos mujeres afroamericanas, la intención final de Smith es volverlo un tema universal.

Podríamos decir que Drylongso es una película construida de una manera artesanal y personal, no solo en su contenido, sino también en su forma. A pesar de contar con un presupuesto limitado, Smith la elaboró y editó de una manera impecable: mantiene una paleta de colores y objetos sumamente llamativos, además de que una parte de los créditos iniciales y finales fueron escritos a mano y pintados con acuarela. La directora logró llevar a cabo la cinta con sus propios recursos utilizando el formato casero de filmación y el empleo de polaroids que tomó en el transcurso de los años. La gente que aparece como extra vivía en Oakland, algunos eran conocidos personales de la directora y otros hacían teatro comunitario, lo cual permitió que sus actuaciones tuvieran una sensación mucho más natural, una decisión muy acertada por parte de Smith. La composición cinematográfica por momentos da la impresión de que estamos viendo un documental, principalmente durante las escenas en las que Pica está tomando fotos en la calle o cuando vemos las noticias y reportajes en la televisión que alertan a la comunidad sobre los crímenes. Estos elementos en conjunto logran que la película esté elaborada a modo de un collage visual, lo cual empata a la perfección con la cubierta diseñada por Krista Franklin para la edición hecha por The Criterion Collection.

Así pues, Drylongso comunica un mensaje crucial en tanto captura y denuncia las injusticias que hasta el día de hoy continúa sufriendo la comunidad afrodescendiente en Estados Unidos. Esto lo consigue sin tener que subestimar, cuestionar ni revictimizar a sus personajes. Si el rescate de esta cinta ha valido la pena, es porque Smith exploró estos temas incómodos bajo la lente del feminismo negro, desafió y subvirtió los estereotipos impuestos al tiempo que celebró tanto la creatividad de su protagonista como la propia.

Drylongso: A Refuge of Their Own

Exalting Black women’s self-invention with DIY effervescence, Drylongso (1998) is a gorgeously generous study of friendship, creativity, violence, and survival. The multidisciplinary artist Cauleen Smith developed the idea for the project from her habit of taking Polaroid photographs. Shot on 16 mm, with a small budget but a boundless sense of community on both sides of the camera, the film enjoyed an auspicious reception in 1999 at the Sundance, South by Southwest, and Urbanworld Film Festivals, and later earned Smith the distinction of “Someone to Watch” at the Independent Spirit Awards. Despite its many accolades, Drylongso was not picked up for distribution and did not reach the audience it deserved. Though Smith trained as a filmmaker, she eventually found a more welcoming home in the art world; the more than forty short films she has made in the intervening years have mostly been shown as part of installations in museums and galleries around the globe. The recent restoration of Drylongso, which premiered in 2022 and is presented on this release, offers a belated and necessary occasion to reassess this radiant work of everyday Black feminist world-building and its place within the history of independent cinema.

The film, Smith’s debut feature, was made during an explosion of independent Black filmmaking in the late 1980s and 1990s. A corrective to the criminalizing and stigmatizing images of Black people prevalent in American media at the time, this new wave was led by such directors as Spike Lee, Bill Duke, and Wendell B. Harris Jr. But even this significant shift left a form of exclusion intact: Black women filmmakers had less access to funding, were ignored by distributors and denied exhibition platforms, and were barely present in the fields of film criticism and scholarship. When Drylongso premiered, it had been seven years since Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991) became the first feature by a Black American woman to receive theatrical distribution, a milestone that was followed by the release of Leslie Harris’s Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. a year later. Demanding more than tepid accommodation, Dash, Harris, and Smith—all of whom have made only one feature to date—radically circumvented the obstacles in their way, depicting Black girls and women in ways that were formally inventive, aesthetically riotous, and fundamentally unimaginable before their films were made.

Although the initial responses to Drylongso were celebratory, they tended to perceive only the attention the film pays to the disposability of Black life in the United States and how this condition affects men and boys. Less discussed was how the movie is ultimately focused on the bond between two young Black women and the ways that they imaginatively, collaboratively choreograph their lives in the face of their common vulnerabilities. Pica (Toby Smith) is a self-assured art student figuring out how to cultivate her craft and tend to her community. In a metacinematic echo of Cauleen Smith’s photographic inspiration for the film, Pica takes Polaroid snapshots of Black boys and men, fearing that they are becoming an endangered species. In an early scene, she starts up a friendship with Tobi (April Barnett), whom Pica witnesses being thrown out of a car and assaulted by her date, Jefferson (Timothy Braggs)—the last straw in the couple’s abusive relationship. The film follows the new friends during the two weeks leading up to Pica’s end-of-semester student exhibition, an event that is inflected with disquieting urgency by the background presence of a serial killer targeting Black youth.

Drylongso mixes tonalities of terror with elements of unpretentious beauty. Dappled with light and scattered with images of flowers, candles, and trinkets, it has the improvisatory ease of a student film, the tension of a thriller, the soothing hum of a hangout movie, and the shape of a coming-of-age narrative. In the way it plays with moods and genres, the film reflects Audre Lorde’s teaching that “there is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” In defiance of universalizing stereotypes, Smith’s reliance on multiple filmic registers expresses the complexity of what Pica experiences in the world with a degree of critical thoughtfulness that is still unusual in films that center Black women.

The layered emotional connection that develops between Pica and Tobi is foregrounded through Smith’s frequent use of intimate close-ups. Their bond rests on a shared experience of instability: Pica’s mother (Channel Schaffer) is unreliable, and Tobi’s is entirely absent. Though the film takes care to avoid the pathologized image of the “bad Black mother,” it pays tribute to the complicated and beautiful ways that Black women protect and parent themselves as well as one another. Drylongso is also a sensitive examination of a friendship forged across a clear class difference: Tobi receives seemingly limitless funds from her mother, while Pica pays rent to hers. Smith doesn’t romanticize or paper over that divide, and in several scenes, the characters’ divergent social backgrounds lead to moments of discomfort or mutual misunderstanding. But Pica and Tobi negotiate these disparities with grace and cocreate a refuge for each other, resisting their devaluation by the outside world.

Decades before the term care was commodified beyond recognition, Smith was attentive to the ethics of cultural production in her depiction of Pica’s artistic practice. Pica explains her project to her sometimes frustrated but always encouraging photography professor, Mr. Yamada (Salim Akil), as a task of “capturing and preserving” her subjects’ images, “some kind of evidence of existence.” In a robotic monotone, she lists statistics illustrating the precarity of Black men’s lives. Her art responds to this reality through a creative process guided by unshakable principles. When Mr. Yamada presses Pica on her decision to work with a Polaroid camera instead of the equipment his students typically use, she sardonically responds, “I came here to learn how to express myself. What, you gotta have a 35 mm camera to be expressive nowadays?” She adds, “When I take people’s pictures, if I don’t let them keep ‘em, at least I can show it to ‘em right away.” She also notes the ways that evidence can be used as a form of surveillance and control, countering her professor’s suggestion of making copies from negatives by explaining, “Don’t nobody want no negatives of themselves floating around.” Her instincts are attached to an uncompromising respect for her subjects’ autonomy.

The film’s ambivalent relationship to seeing and being seen—a self-reflexive critique Smith handles with subtlety—also comes up in Pica and Tobi’s second encounter, which begins with a misrecognition. Tobi has started to dress as a boy, partly to protect herself from commonplace harassment by men, and partly to make herself appear more noticeable and threatening to white people who would otherwise knock into her in the street as though she weren’t there. Tobi’s changing style gives her the ability to camouflage, but her need to do so exposes the potential dangers of visibility for Black women. In the present-day American cultural and political landscape, where the representation of marginalized identities is celebrated without being interrogated, Smith’s film reads as a subversive challenge to the assumption that visibility necessarily secures value or safety.

Throughout the film, Smith evokes the banality of violence and precarity in Black life. In one scene, Pica and Tobi sit on a dock and casually share the number of funerals they have attended that year: five and seven, respectively. The serial-killer subplot also creates a sense of atmospheric danger, often through news reports on the murders that Pica’s grandmother frequently watches on television. The formal counterpoint of these segments has the effect of illuminating Smith’s method; they are emblematic of the kind of media spectacle that the film deliberately and strategically rebukes in favor of an emphasis on ordinary life.

Memorialization and mourning are at the heart of Drylongso. Early in the film, a love interest is introduced in the form of Malik (Will Power), a sweet young man who rides around on his bike selling his own multicolored, creatively designed T-shirts and constantly asking Pica, “When you gonna take my picture, girl?” Their brief romance is brutally curtailed when he falls victim to the serial killer, a painful loss that catalyzes Pica’s reorientation of her practice from documentary to elegy. The skeleton of Malik’s bicycle is the first object in a series of vibrant shrine-sculptures that she dedicates to lost boys and men in the community. Made by the visual artist Wura-Natasha Ogunji, these handcrafted works beautifully recall the assemblages of other artists, such as Senga Nengudi and Betye Saar. Like Pica’s and Ogunji’s, Smith’s art-making is suffused with a spirit of generosity and textural sensitivity, and drawn to the socializing, relational capacity of objects. The film reminds us that mourning is a life practice, and that the ability to honor and hold those we have lost is the antidote to the deathly finality of forgetting.

Drylongso is one of the rare films that takes the self-determination, intelligence, and day-to-day existence of Black women and girls seriously. In 1984, Kathleen Collins—another Black woman filmmaker with one feature to her name—delivered a lecture at Howard University in which she stated plainly: “No one is going to refuse me the right to explore my experiences of life as normal experiences.” With these words, Collins unraveled the mythologizing caricatures to which Black people are reduced in mainstream American culture. As she had done with her film Losing Ground (1982), Collins used her talk to offer an elegant, precise, and impassioned challenge to a system that could never account for her devoted attention to Black women’s interiorities and adamant valuation of everyday Black life. Smith would go on to share these cinematic priorities, and they are written into the film’s title, inherited from anthropologist John Langston Gwaltney’s 1980 book Drylongso: A Self-Portrait of Black America. The word drylongso, which means “ordinary” or “getting by with very little,” is rooted in the Gullah Geechee communities of the American South. These origins draw a valuable connection to Zora Neale Hurston, whose anthropological work documented, preserved, and was influenced by Gullah Geechee culture, and whose own filmmaking was attentive to the self-expression of Black people in the registers of the social and the quotidian. Smith’s kinship with Hurston and Collins is demonstrated by her film’s engagement with the Black sociality they nurtured.

Anchored in an expansive cosmology of Black feminist consciousness, Drylongso also belongs to a tradition of subversive cinema. Though it has a relatively conventional narrative, the film is evidently connected to the training Smith received in oppositional filmmaking at San Francisco State University, where she studied with Trinh T. Minh-ha, Larry Clark, and Lynn Hershman Leeson. One of Smith’s first films, the experimental short Chronicles of a Lying Spirit by Kelly Gabron (1992), shares Drylongso’s subtle destabilizations of gender, its careful attention to personal identity under construction, and its critique of mainstream-media narratives of Black people. Smith has also cited the influence of Third Cinema on her practice. That revolutionary, anti-
imperialist, and anticapitalist film movement, which emerged in Latin America in the 1960s, was shaped by a series of manifestos. One of the most significant of these writings is the Cuban filmmaker Julio García Espinosa’s “For an Imperfect Cinema,” a fiery 1969 text that rejects the technical perfection and deceitful embellishments of Hollywood and European cinema, and proposes the experience of ordinary people as a baseline for an aesthetic that could reflect the material conditions of their lives and of cinematic production. Drylongso is “imperfect cinema” played in the key of Black feminism. Smith models a practice grounded in curiosity, hospitality, and sensuality, deftly engaging in the mundane scale of mythmaking that Black women artists have devised to give themselves the creative sanctuaries they have otherwise been denied.

This sense of deep-rootedness and interconnectedness blossoms in Drylongso’s final section. Pica’s art show, Evidence of Existence, pulls her more tightly to Tobi and her mother while also gathering the community at large. Battling a chronic cough, fearing the serial killer who lurks in the area where she performs her side job wheat-pasting posters, and racing to her end-of-semester deadline, Pica is able to put the show together only through an embrace of mutual care. Tobi ends up helping her finish her project—in one scene, we see them sitting on the floor, side by side, glue in hand and surrounded by multicolored pens and paper. Shortly after, Pica finally confides in her mother, telling her about the upcoming exhibition and asking for catering help. However fallible she may be, Pica’s mother rises to the occasion when she’s needed, easing the tension between them.

In the same way that Smith approached making Drylongso as a collaborative community practice rather than as a colonizing, invasive production, Pica does not document Black trauma for institutionalized consumption but instead creates art that serves as a conduit of memory for her people. She defies convention by presenting her shrine-sculptures at a cookout rather than a gallery. These works are a form of sharing and collectively holding grief. The notion of “giving back” is so often positioned across a differential of power, but here the offering is horizontal and reciprocal: Pica gives to the people who give to her. Similarly, Drylongso is a tribute to the richness of what can be made with little and shared without limit. The film finds both Pica and Smith cultivating artistic practices devoted to Black life, building bright, multiform worlds out of the same materials that get them through every ordinary day.

Destroying Narratives: Cauleen Smith

Cauleen Smith in conversation with Carolyn Lazard

Cauleen Smith is an interdisciplinary artist operating with multiple materials and modes, including installation environments, referencing mid-20^th-century experimental film. She draws from devices originating in science fiction to deploy a conversation with the representation of black women in Western cinema as radical others, and to address the dislocated relationship with ideas of belonging to a “homeland.”

CAROLYN LAZARD
Over the past few years, you’ve created more and more installation work and pieces that expand outside of a traditional cinema environment. There seems to be this never-ending debate about the contested presence of cinema in the gallery space. Can you address these formal changes in your work and why you necessarily wanted to take your work out of the theater?

CAULEEN SMITH
When I first started making films, showing moving images in gallery and museum spaces was both prohibitively expensive and technically difficult. It was actually painful to have my work in art shows because the exhibition decisions were so disrespectful to the medium and the way the work was intended to be viewed. Digital video has changed that. A good projector is affordable and requires no human projectionist for operation. An extremely high-quality piece of media can loop effortlessly on a media player. Furthermore, there are the natural similarities between installation art and filmmaking: the completeness, the immersiveness, the totality of materials and playing with their materiality is, to me, echoed in each form. The installation becomes a container, a wrapper, for the films, and sometimes a physical echo of things occurring in the films. It also becomes a three-dimensional footnote in a sense because I rely on the environment in which my films play to expand and illuminate the content, tone, and forms deployed in the films. By building chambers, what I have taken to calling “space stations,” I have a chance to control the spectator’s approach toward the work and influence their receptivity. Frequently the installation is a playful obstruction. A way of slowing down the spectator, of inviting them to spend more time with the work by offering them information that can only be gleaned by being inside of the space that contains the film.

CAROLYN
In H-E-L-L-O (2014) and in The Way Out Is The Way Two: Fourteen Short Films about Chicago and Sun Ra (2012), you work directly with musicians, addressing the legacy of black music and the avant-garde. Your use of non-diegetic sound, dubbed dialogue, and text in lieu of voice can be quite disorienting. The dissonance between sound and image points to worlds outside of the frame, adding layers of perception. Often, one senses that there is an entirely separate sonic narrative unfolding under your films. Could you address your relationship to sound as a filmmaker?

CAULEEN
I admit to the strangeness of something your questions alludes to, which is the fact that I really do favor dissonant, non-diegetic sound design. I get excited when the sound I hear disagrees with the image I see but somehow manages to point me toward a new question or possibility. Whenever a spectator is offered drama through dialogue, they desire the satisfaction—the seduction—of losing themselves in the affective transference that occurs between screen character and individual spectator. Dialogue is a very special kind of text, different from essay, poetry, or expository voice-over. I love what it can do, but I don’t love enabling that traditional desire for illusionistic filmmaking in my spectators when I am trying to offer them a different kind of viewing experience. In the context of my work, it’s misleading to invite viewers to lose themselves in the narrative drama, when all of the tension actually resides in the image and its formal relationship to what comes before and after and what sounds support or undermine those images. Rather than completely mute the figures in my films, I prefer to untether the voice from the body and insert some slippage. In that space, I hope, is the potential for a kind of recognition of self, that invites more than desire. Cognitive estrangement and cognitive dissonance are both tactics that I rely on quite heavily. What does it feel like to live in a body that is perceived as malevolently vacant, fugitive, unknowable, and black? Estrangement and dissonance are two psychological states that come to mind when I think about how black people have to move through the world and the assumptions we are sometimes subjected to. Undermining the mundane aspects of moving through cinematic space by peppering the sonic environment with alien information seems like an invitation to contemplate the discomfort—and that freedom.

CAROLYN
So much of your work is in a deep, ongoing conversation with Afrofuturism. Does the genre allow you to elude the sociological impulse that seems to dominate representations of black bodies on-screen—or, rather, the way those images are interpreted by white institutions? How does science fiction destabilize black representation?

CAULEEN
It seems ludicrous to be a filmmaker and have a deep ambivalence about figurative representation, and yet I do. Mainstream cinema history is so rooted in taking pleasure in representation within narrative forms. Therein lies the rub: a great deal of that “pleasure” involved some tenaciously destructive representations of black people that we are still attempting to extinguish. In addition, there are the politics of representation initiated in populist force by the Black Arts Movement. This fundamental idea that people need to see their humanity rendered before them really captivated me when I first began to make moving images. These ideas profoundly motivated the making of my narrative feature film Drylongso (1998). But after making that film I was so alarmed by the overdetermined way in which the characters were being read and, frankly, pathologized. Spectators had a real desire to lock in the meaning and the purpose of these fictional lives. I was horrified and humiliated by the way that the media in particular wanted to frame the film as an instrument for social critique and refused to acknowledge its craft or aesthetics—as if the images made themselves and were simply authentic receipts for a slice of black life! I understand better now that for most people, the aesthetics of the film were so unfamiliar that they were literally illegible. But to me, being from the West Coast, being a resident of the Bay Area, being a black girl, the images I was making felt rather mundane—sort of every-girl enough to function as an avatar for any person’s emotional life. I no longer expect the average spectator to receive my work in the way that I am expected to consume mainstream Eurocentric cultural product. I am no longer that naive; our relationship to images in this world is not symmetrical. So, after the experience of peddling Drylongso and being confronted with the perversity of colorblindness—define colorblindness: the inability to see black people as people—we’re dealing with in dominant culture, I immediately started destroying narrative. I embraced the literary devices developed in science fiction for the specter of the alien because it was so clear to me that within the realm of Western cinema that’s exactly what black girls are: aliens, freaks, and objects that require containment due to their opaque and inaccessible psyches and their uncontrollable sexual (reproductive) technology. Narrative representation explores allegorical morality. I’m not so interested in framing social desires. I’m interested in ethics, questions of how humans form and enact their consciousnesses. Exploring the stakes of ethics requires speculation. It requires empathy and detachment simultaneously. This is what I love about sci-fi.

CAROLYN
Song for Earth and Folk (2013), The Grid (2011), and Remote Viewing (2009), while taking different approaches, all address the fragile relationship between humans and nature. These pieces often show black figures in the landscape or deal with the American compulsion to remove black figures from the landscape. You also often shoot in the American West. Considering the ambiguous politics of land artists: the erasure of black labor and indigenous sovereignty, the appropriation of working-class labor to articulate a white masculine mastery of the land—is your work in dialogue with or a critique of this work?

CAULEEN
These works did push me even closer toward trying to understand my own relationship to the land, being the descendant of captive Africans, and being cargoed onto the North American continent—a land that was inhabited and stewarded by a people who endured obscene genocide. The work that I am making right now is attempting to reconcile the kind of dislocation that comes from actually not having any kind of homeland at all—from being a people who made ourselves in the fires of survival in the “New World.” I’m thinking about utopias and looking at successful attempts to live as an ethical being. And I’ve noticed that successful utopian communities are kind of like spaceships, plopping down somewhere and occupying space, alienating their neighbors, attempting diplomacy, sometimes succeeding, sometimes provoking ire. The occupation is usually porous, but it is never indigenous. When I shot Remote Viewing, we dug a hole in the ground that was twenty feet by twenty feet by twenty feet. It felt much more ominously deep than I could have imagined. Once the hole was dug, it frightened us. I had to leave it overnight. I had nightmares about finding broken children and dead animals in the hole I’d dug. This is not the relationship to the Earth I want to have. So Song for Earth and Folk is very direct about attempting to describe our dysfunctional relationship with our planet, our willful ignorance, our psychotic cruelty to living things and ecosystems. For me it’s urgent in terms of having a sense of place on the planet. What ground can I claim, where on earth would I, an alien, a being born out of circumstances unprecedented in human history, be welcomed? I feel like taking on Land Art was a step along the way to confronting the stakes of being human in the 21^st century. We really need another radical shift in consciousness, like when Europeans finally understood that the Earth revolved around the sun, this changed everything for them (and sadly for the rest of us on the planet) because they went from thinking of Earth as the center of hell to thinking that the planet was God’s gift and they could just go around taking whatever they wanted. And now the entire planet has adopted this notion of the human as being a creature that defines itself by what it accumulates. Sylvia Wynter calls us Homo economicus. If humans can endure a radical shift like that, surely we can do it again. We have to if we want to remain on this planet; we just have to.

CAROLYN
Increased representations of blackness have been critical to the self-image of black people, but greater visibility has not necessarily resulted in more protection from state violence. Does this, for you, have aesthetic implications?

CAULEEN
Kerry James Marshall’s epic retrospective is currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. His project of creating a black historical painting canon is triumphant. His craft, technique, and poetic aspirations are marvelous. Seeing that show really confirmed and validated the populist project of black representation. And yet, I am not convinced that representation alone will liberate—or illuminate. I think there are spaces within our minds that are not reached through language and representation, but accessed through energy, through abstraction, through the unsayable and unseeable. These kinds of qualities have no value for people who define themselves based on what they can accumulate and how they appear. For example, Kerry James Marshall’s paintings actively reject accumulation as a way of validating black life: his work mocks and undermines traditional portraiture. And yet, for centuries these qualities, the realm of the unsayable and the unseeable, were the ones that humans used to understand themselves and the world around them. There is ample evidence, thanks to science’s tendency to make experiments to prove things that we already know, that a great deal of this knowledge is potent and relevant to our current conditions. How do we arrive at what we already knew? It is very important to be confronted with one’s own discomfort with the unknown, with the difficult-to-see, the hard-to-hear, the uncomfortable-to-feel.

CAROLYN
Do you see yourself as connected to a long legacy of black experimental filmmakers? What lineages of art making do you feel a part of, or entitled to?

CAULEEN
Like most aspiring filmmakers of the pre-digital generations, I struggled to find models for how to make. (Now my students torrent anything they want, when they want it!) My models really should have been films like Bless Their Little Hearts (1984) and Passing Through (1977). I didn’t get to see Passing Through until just after 2000 even though I had the great filmmaker Larry Clark as a cinematography professor at San Francisco State University; he refused to screen it for his students! When I finally saw the film, I wept in frustration, thinking about how I might have understood image making if I’d seen it earlier in my development. But Larry’s ideas on cinematography deeply influenced me, and still do. One thing that I have to interject here is that those L.A. Rebellion films are always read through a lens of poverty. Always framed as if the low budget somehow undermined the greatness and separated the work from other radical films of the era. Today, after seeing many of them, I don’t want to discount the struggle and frustration of having to work with no money, but the films are so incredibly rich in aesthetic language and form that I find it really unjust to discuss them from this notion of deprivation. This legacy is so important to me. I learned so much from the generations ahead of me—watching them talk about their work, listening to their analysis of art and film in general. And also being critical and demanding more from myself based on what we all now know. Now that I’m older, very much mid career, I’m taking a lot of pleasure in watching younger artists make experimental work, and I am so very excited by young curators like Erin Christovale for circumventing the habits and traditions of some of the long-standing New York-centric institutions and finding new spaces and platforms for experimental work. I think things have been much easier for me than they were for my predecessors, so it’s a lot easier for me to be welcoming to younger artists, and to facilitate opportunities when I can. I enjoy making time for watching their work. It makes me feel like the tradition of black experimental film is real. It’s enduring. It will become a resource and a reference for all artists and filmmakers.