“I was trained in semiotics, so even just a toilet paper commercial – if it racialises and genders hygiene – can drive me up the wall”
When the Los Angeles-based filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist Cauleen Smith directed her debut feature, Drylongso (1998), she was a second-year MFA student at UCLA, where students were forbidden from shooting feature-length films for lack of experience; Drylongso quickly burned through its $35,000 budget – a grant Smith received from the Rockefeller Media Fellowship – and thereafter became an object lesson in what can be achieved in the face of scarcity (and school policy). A nuanced portrait of a friendship between two Black girls in West Oakland, the film collages genres ranging from the Künstlerroman and psychogeography to the slasher. It also laid the groundwork for many of the formal and thematic concerns Smith would flesh out in subsequent decades – through film, installation, music and other media.
In the mid-2000s, Smith expanded her films into multichannel installations that, influenced by the Latin American Third Cinema movement, explored Black feminism, Afrofuturism, diaspora and microhistories. These have been presented at venues including Kunstverein in Amsterdam, Collective in Edinburgh, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Last year, she delighted New Yorkers with The Wanda Coleman Songbook, an immersive installation at 52 Walker that utilised floor-to-ceiling projections, sound and scent to pay tribute to Coleman, an acclaimed LA poet who passed away in 2013.
Smith has also produced sculptures and drawings and, in the meantime, continues to make films couched in the cinematic language of the mid-twentieth-century avant-garde, an experimental tradition she actively interrogates, revises and expands. Her film The Volcano Manifesto (2025), a nonlinear, three-part meditation on resource extraction and Western imperial legacies, premiered at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight festival earlier this year and was most recently screened at BlackStar Film Festival in Philadelphia. It is emblematic of her work: rigorously researched yet nimble in its handling of facts and theories, semiotic but highly affective.
ArtReview There’s a moment in The Volcano Manifesto (2025) when actress Dionne Audain is sitting inside a cave, and she tells the viewer, “Put Plato’s cave out of your mind.” In the same scene, she refers to the cave she’s sitting in as a ‘hold’ and invites us to consider its temperature, humidity and darkness. Can you speak about the significance of the cave motif in this film and the forms of knowledge this scene alludes to?
Cauleen Smith I had to mention Plato because it’s impossible to have a conversation about caves without people bringing up Plato. But after you put that out of your mind, you can actually think about what caves are and what we might learn from them – how might they help us think through things. That’s when it gets interesting for me. [Édouard] Glissant has this beautiful passage [in Poetics of Relation (1990)] where he describes the horrors and terrors of being captured and put into the hold of a ship, where, by having everything stripped – gender, language, culture, autonomy over what you know – a group of people who, when they had those things would have considered themselves different from each other, suddenly become one people. Fast-forward 400, 500 years, and this thing that we can now call Black culture and a Black diaspora actually had to make itself out of an apocalyptic space of capture. So I’m thinking about caves as all of these different notions of shelter, fugitivity, refusal, reclusion.
AR You’ve spoken about how images are rhetorically constructed based on violent, racialised logics, and I think one way you counteract that tendency is by emphasising mediation and disjunction in your films. The Volcano Manifesto is made up of three discrete films, for instance – My Caldera (2022), a montage of volcano footage set to heavy metal, Mines to Caves (2023), a series of wildlife images overlaid with the names of crystals and minerals, and The Deep West Assembly (2024), a tongue-in-cheek survey of the American West that foregrounds its legacies of imperialism and extraction. The films speak to one another obliquely, and the viewer has to work to make the necessary connections between them.
CS I think that has to do with old-school experimental film training and with understanding that your audience can make the meaning if you can put two or three things together. The films that invite or challenge the spectator to do that are what made me fall in love with experimental film. Even if I disagreed with the filmmaker, I knew they were not trying to insult me. They were doing more than trying to seduce me, spoon-feed me, or even reinforce my own idea of myself. They were offering me a challenge to think differently or have a question. That’s to me the highest respect that an artist can give a spectator.
AR There’s a thread I’ve noticed in your films that has to do with the way individuals survive by negotiating between visibility and invisibility, spectacle and camouflage. One of the ways this manifests is through masks and costuming. In Egungun: Ancestor Can’t Find Me (2017), a figure walks out of the sea in rainboots, draped in shells and seaweed; the costume reminds me of a ghillie suit. There’s also a figure in Crow Requiem (2015) wearing a crow mask and a figure in The Deep West Assembly with feathers on their head who appears in downtown Los Angeles, at the site of a nineteenth-century slave market. One can draw references here to the cultural traditions of the Yoruba and indigenous Calusa people or to the flamboyant costumes of Sun Ra, but I’m also curious about the relationship between regalia and camouflage in your work.
CS I think there’s a universal relationship that humans have to masking that allows us to reckon with the things in this world over which we have no control, which we have great fear or shame over, for which we experience grief, loss, or tremendous reverence – things that are so much bigger than ourselves that we feel inside of us. The appearance of a masked figure can address and embody and act for us. There’s also this idea of an inability to perceive. A girl with a crow mask on is not any more legible without the mask on. There are limits to her mobility or how she’s perceived no matter what. That’s the irony of the mask.
Then there’s the truly supernatural component. The figures in Egungun: Ancestor Can’t Find Me and The Deep West Assembly are both loosely modeled after actual West African masquerade figures. I first encountered the figure in The Deep West Assembly in the Met. It used to be on display, and it no longer is. I can’t help but wonder if it’s because they learned that it should have never been on display: It’s a tiny 18-inch doll that is, in its proper context, kept hidden until there needs to be a kind of reckoning and punishment – until there is some injustice or some calling out of a wrong that needs to be done. You don’t want to see that little figure, and it is a scary little thing. I had pictures of it in my phone for 15 years and didn’t know what to do with it, until I realised it belongs in downtown LA at the [former] slave market.
AR I appreciate that these figures aren’t immediately legible the way a human protagonist in a film might be.
CS I’ve been noticing an abuse of pictures of people. Maybe ‘abuse’ is a strong word, but there’s a way in which pictures of people are consumed to that I find disconcerting. As a filmmaker, it’s a problem because it’s hard to make a cinematic image without a human in the frame. There are reasons you need people – for scale, for affect, for narrative coherence – but the consumption of people through the image has always been a real problem. I was trained in semiotics, so even just a toilet paper commercial – if it racialises and genders hygiene – can drive me up the wall.
It’s hard for me sometimes to make an image because I worry about producing something that complies with the training that we’re subjected to, the training being how we are conditioned to look at, consume and take pleasure in images. It’s so easy to comply with that, and I’m not sure it is in our favour to do that to our images of ourselves.
AR Can you speak a bit about your research process? What’s going through your mind, for instance, when you’re looking through the archives of an institution?
CS Every once in a while, I have the privilege of being inside of an archive, but usually I don’t. It’s hard to get access to them, and then when you are in them it’s a tedious experience. And you have to kind of know what you’re looking for to be able to see something, and this means there’s a limit to how much knowledge you will ever be able to mine. I avoid archives when I can, and for some shows like The Wanda Coleman Songbook I didn’t really need them. Because all I wanted really was Coleman’s books.
AR And these are relatively accessible. You had copies of Coleman’s many collections of verse, which include Imagoes (1983), Hand Dance (1993) and Bathwater Wine (1998), laid out on an ottoman stool in the exhibition space for visitors to peruse.
CS Her poems are incredible records of LA, of life in LA from a particular perspective. I was trying to align that with what was observable for me [living in the city]. And there are gaps between what she describes and what I can see. There are time lags and all these ways in which things are shifted and changed. With Coleman, it was a different kind of research. Maybe ‘research’ is the wrong word.
AR It doesn’t come close to articulating the kind of affinity someone can feel towards a subject or figure of interest.
CS I’ve come to think that maybe the archive as the site of discovery is a little bit over-articulated. When I got to go through Octavia Butler’s notes and commonplace books [at the Huntington Library], after spending weeks combing through everything, I realised that everything Butler was thinking about she poured into those books. You might glean the most lucid and effervescent version of her thoughts from the commonplace books. She makes a note to herself in one to buy lipstick. She keeps all the stickers from every Barnes & Noble book she ever bought in them. Those things make me love her, but they don’t really teach me more about how to think.
There’s also the suggestion that that kind of knowledge has greater value than what you see when you sit on your front stoop and watch people or learn when you eavesdrop on the bus. When you make a note of all the shoes people are wearing on the subway, that is also research. I think that knowledge production and learning and what we call ‘research’ – which I’m starting to think we need a different word for – is a kind of avid, active, protracted, concentrated study.
AR Maybe ‘study’ is a better word.
CS That’s what it is, and you can do that anywhere and with anything.
Cauleen Smith: Dusk of Dawn is on view at Joel and Lila Harnett Museum of Art, through 13 December
