Movies: Cauleen Smith

Three women in Hollywood talk to the camera one summer (with a coda six months later). Sara is a casting director; her soliloquies are addressed to Samson (her blind infant son) and to Holly Hunter. She talks about her husband's refusal to touch thei...

An Alien is sent to earth to investigate the "incubators." She discovers that she is replacing a rogue agent. She questions her mission....

Explores the careers of twenty black women working as film directors....

Presented as a trilogy for the first time, Cauleen Smith’s The Volcano Manifesto brings together three recent films—My Caldera (2022), Mines to Caves (2023), and The Deep West Assembly (2024)—in a densely woven meditation on geological and cinematic ...

Choreographer Taisha Paggett activates a vacant lot in the Washington Park Neighborhood on the southside of Chicago and enjoys an encounter with young resident Maylk Singleton....

Back in 2018 I invited an intergenerational group of women to help me make some moving-images in Noah Purifoy’s Desert Museum in Joshua Tree. The resulting film, 'Sojourner,' contemplates centuries of black feminist mysticism and cultural production....

“Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron) is less a depiction of 'reality' than an exploration of the implications of the mediation of Black history by film, television, magazines, and newspapers. Using her alter ego, Kelly Gabron, Smith fabric...

A found footage assemblage of epic proportions. Produced on residency at Chicago Film Archives, with music by The Eternals....

The word bone translates to yoruba as “bones.” In Egungun: Ancestor Can’t Find Me, a shell-covered sea creature swims emerges form the Gulf of Mexico and wanders island jungles and shores. The shelled creature we see wandering in this film bears trai...

Smith interweaves the figure of the crow through the histories of Syracuse and Auburn, New York, both of which were key stations on the Underground Railroad and innovators in early cinematic and 3D optical technologies. Crow Requiem connects this his...

Images and poems responding to the photographs of Malik Sidié. A collaboration with poet, A. Van Jordan. Loops designed for install....

Set in Noah Purifoy’s Outdoor Desert Art Museum in Joshua Tree, California, artist Cauleen Smith reimagines this unique space as a radical feminist utopia. Among the scattered assemblages, a group of women whose dynamic, colourful outfits radiate wit...

Night Sky is the story of two friends' journey through the desert into a synesthetic realm of the senses. After their car breaks down, Cleo and Jay discover a small portal that leads to another dimension where a dance marathon never ends, time collap...

The countdown audio footage from the Apollo 11 launch date is heard over a flamed-out, iridescent landscape. Appropriating and reframing the historical moment in its present site, Smith creates small disruptions and proposes, finally, the intent to t...

Personal pilgrimages to three sites of extreme creativity, invention, and generosity: Alice Coltrane's Ashram, Watts Towers, and Watervliet Shaker Community...

A young woman in a photography class begins taking pictures of black men out of fear they will soon be extinct....

A global portrait documenting the year's events, Cinetracts '20 features the work of an international lineup of 20 filmmakers. Capturing the zeitgeist in their own backyard, the artists' short films are the culmination of a year-long residency projec...

Mythical forms embodied in puppetry and cinematic spectacle....

Part of a multi-platform project highlighted by an hour long documentary about black filmmakers who worked and studied at UCLA between 1965 and the 1990s....

"Remote Viewing" is a story in which a man related that, as a boy, he had watched the whites in his town attempt to obliterate every trace of the black community’s history by digging a deep hole in which to bury a historical schoolhouse....