[Frameworks] Cauleen Smith Screenings at PFA in Berkeley

[Stephen Anker]

Friends in the Bay Area are invited to three screenings I curated of films
by widely celebrated artist-filmmaker Cauleen Smith at the Pacific Film
Archive this Thursday through Sunday, February 8, 9 and 11.
All programs include short films that are rarely seen and the first, on
February 8, will also present her powerful feature, Drylongso.

Cauleen Smith—In Space, In Time
February 8–11, 2024
“Everything I make is just an offering. I think of my work as a
contribution to the histories of the Black diasporas and our powers of
invention, survival and generativity.” —Cauleen Smith
BAMPFA welcomes Los Angeles–based artist Cauleen Smith to present three
programs of rarely shown short films and a screening of her seminal,
recently restored feature Drylongso. Smith, one of the leading American
artists of this generation, defies easy categorization. From multimedia
installations to slide performances and a wide variety of films that move
between genres, Smith creates nuanced portrayals of African diaspora
culture and its troubled history in the United States, as well as the
issues facing Black women in contemporary life, all in her distinctive
voice. Unpredictable, witty, and always thought-provoking, Smith weaves
“everyday possibilities of the imagination” into improvisational,
jazz-inflected experiences that celebrate the freedom of creativity.
Throughout her career, Smith has concentrated on short filmmaking and has
created more than twenty short films since 1990. Ranging widely in style
and drawing upon experimental film tradition, third world cinema, science
fiction, and the music of Sun Ra and other great Black musicians, Smith’s
short films are poetic experiences that subtly interweave narrative and
personal and cultural themes. —Steve Anker

Thursday, February 8, 7 PM
Drylongso (1998)
Plus two short films, The Changing Same and Lessons in Semaphore
Cauleen Smith and Brandi Thompson Summers in Conversation
“An enduringly rich work of DIY filmmaking, Drylongso remains a resonant
and visionary examination of violence (and its reverberations), friendship,
and gender” (Film at Lincoln Center). “Drylongso, more than any other film
I know, examines the physical space and toughened, often-ramshackle beauty
of West Oakland. Smith thematizes the act of looking at the various spaces
of Black Oakland through her protagonist Pica (Toby Smith), a photographer
committed to the documentation of the most endangered urban species, the
Black male, before his systematic elimination. Smith takes us from the
upper-middle-class neighborhoods just off downtown to the run-down
postindustrial zones of the port. In so doing, she generates
inner-cityscapes whose rigorous depiction rivals the best of James Benning”
(Michael Sicinski, Radical Light).

Friday, February 9, 7 PM
Short Films: Black Echoes and Imperatives
Cauleen Smith and Steve Anker in Conversation
This is a program of ten films that weave together multiple styles into
portraits of people and places, both real and imagined, from renowned
activists and artistic visionaries to the filmmaker herself. Each can be
seen as a brief chapter in a larger project: an ongoing exploration of many
themes and concerns as expressed in Cauleen Smith’s own unmistakable voice.
Evident throughout is Smith’s singular spontaneity and wit, a flow of
haunting metaphors, and the courage to move seamlessly between different
forms of film and video technology. The program includes one of Smith’s
earliest and best-known films, Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly
Gabron) (1992); the poignant and elegiac Crow Requiem (2015); the redolent
utopian testament Pilgrim (2017); and H-E-L-L-O (2014), which envisions a
revived New Orleans through a series of musical street tableaux.

Sunday, February 11, 2 PM
Short Films: Epochal Cultures – Chicago and New Orleans
Cauleen Smith and Steve Anker in Conversation
Cauleen Smith portrays two vital Black urban cultures, Chicago and New
Orleans, through several short fantasy and documentary films that are
largely imbued with local music and that focus on creative personalities
and locations vital to these great cities. Chicago is represented through
selections from Smith’s The Way Out Is the Way Two (2012), a cycle of
fourteen musical and philosophical pieces, including the astonishing
interventionist Space Is the Place (A March for Sun Ra) (2011). Smith’s
little-known, richly imaginative short feature The Fullness of Time (2008)
is a poignant evocation of New Orleans during the time following Hurricane
Katrina; it blends science fiction fantasy with musical street activism.
The program begins with Smith’s recent film, My Caldera (2022).
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