Ordinariness
by Doreen St. Félix
Her name is Pica. Her eyes are browner than brown, and her hair is fixed in fat, neat plaits. Hasn't she got a tintype beauty about her, like she could belong to any century? Toby Smith, the actor who plays Pica in Cauleen Smith's portrait of a young artist, the 1998 film Drylongso, embodies that anamorphic stage: girlish from one angle and grown from the other. Around her mother, around her professor—she is a student of photography at the local Oakland community college—she is moody, recalcitrant, depleted. Don't let Malik come by. Pica turns teasing and bashful around Malik. He is courting Pica. He coasts down sun-drenched Oakland blocks on his ecru bicycle, drifting always toward his pig-tailed subject of interest. Being an artist, too, a designer of t-shirts, Malik understands that to flirt with Pica is to speak her language, which is the language of seeing. "Hey, when you gonna take my picture, girl?"
Pica demurs. That he wants it so bad is the issue for self-serious Pica. She has an old-school bordering-on-superstitious understanding of the power of her camera, a Polaroid, its ability to involve itself with human activities, the principle one being the making of history. To make a photograph, to Pica, is to be real particular with the soul in thrall to the lens. She needs the pure brush of true confrontation. In the film, when she asks the boys who will become her subjects, can I take your picture, they are baffled, agreeing, and hesitant. She photographs them as an act of resistance to the killings of young black men in her city. Norms break when she asks them. She knows her photos are life-and-death totems. She isn't ready to enter that space with her Malik, in the way that she has with the strangers-not-strangers she snapshots around town. Pica's rectangular photographs are talismanic, and have a sort of material double in the bric-a-brac world of Drylongso: the deck of tarot cards Pica takes everywhere. And so the preoccupation of this black girl is fate.
Cauleen Smith, Drylongso, 1998, film still. Courtesy of the artist and Morán Morán.
The word "drylongso" (ordinary) comes from the Gullah language; it is a blues word too, meaning "the same old thing" or "worn out." Pica's daily life is full of unremarkable occurrences. She pays rent to her mother. She flirts with Malik. She suspects her mother lets her lovers into her room, her sanctuary, while she's gone. Smith exploits the conventions we are used to: the two best friends, the boy who meets the girl, to make not only her story, but the storytelling itself, look and feel familiar. Drylongso is like two films at once. It is that warmer romantic drama of young love and docked bikes I described earlier. The film is also a real noir as the daily dangers of life—the very essence Pica entombs with her camera—loom. We overhear television broadcasts warning about a serial killer targeting children, who hovers like a toxic miasma in the midst of the film's atmosphere. Malik's repeated request to be photographed becomes like an omen as the story goes on. Because their courtship seems classic, we know, before it happens, that his fate will be tragic.
Smith was born in Riverside in 1967, her birth coinciding exactly with the "birth" of the L.A. Rebellion film movement. This new black cinema, the visual counterpart to the Black Arts movement, concerned itself with interiority, marshalling techniques from the European and African neorealists. This was a cinema that did not heed the conventions of the studio. It needed people, it needed imagination. At film school, she studied under Larry Clark and encountered resistance to her script idea. It took her years to complete. She knew she had to raise money—35,000 dollars—to shoot on 16mm Fujifilm stock. Drylongso was lauded at Sundance. At the turn of the nineties, the decade of Miramax and the willful indie auteur, Smith seemed primed for a career as a working film director. The critical establishment, hungry and interested, did love to mistake Smith's artwork for a PSA. She had to constantly field questions about the so-called pathologies plaguing black communities that she once recalled were better suited for a sociologist. She is an artist. "It was a relief to walk away from this film and let it live its afterlife in VHS obscurity," Smith once wrote.
As is the story with Smith's peer black woman vanguards (like Julie Dash, Kathleen Collins, Zeinabu irene Davis, and Bridgett Davis), the acclaim did not lead to, and likely even prohibited, a propulsive independent film career. The qualities of the vanguard are not easily compatible with Hollywood. These directorial debuts did not suggest placid hired guns. We like to thank the intrepid artist for her intervention, her virtue, and her resourcefulness—she makes films on the cheap—and then let her go. The diversion was an injustice and yet it protected some filmmakers from the forces of tokenization. Feeling unsatisfied with the Hollywood dead-end life of spec scripts and dropped deals, Smith left; alas, a tension arises, when an artist moves on, and past work is resurrected.
Drylongso, having been restored recently by the Criterion Collection and Janus Films, now indexes largely, strangely, on the life's work of Smith, who, after she left Hollywood, went on to become a prolific artist. Drylongso is not an autobiographical film, "copied" from nineties black life, mind you—Smith invented this Oakland story, which has the structure of a parable—but I am interested in certain resonances between character and director. Smith's practice includes sculpture, performance, installation, experimental film, forms that don't belong in Hollywood and instead land in galleries, museums, and other places in "the art world." I encountered Smith's work at the Whitney Biennial almost a decade ago. It was the perpetual season of state killings: Tamir Rice, Atatiana Jefferson, Mike Brown. Smith, who has said that her work relies on a kind of optimism and an attraction to the surreal, felt her imagination shrink under the weight of this wave of televised violence. At the presentation, she had sewn banners by hand that, with their emphasis on symbology and interest in storytelling, made you think of Faith Ringgold's tapestries and Haitian drapo Vodou. She made the banners into instruments and gave them purpose—in what she calls "waking life" beyond the museum's walls—as markers during processionals held in honor of our murdered people. The museum and the gallery can be a terminus, the place where works go to be enshrined and die. Instead, Smith, like Pica, insisted on the utility of her work, its propensity to memorialize.
Cauleen Smith, Drylongso, 1998, film still. Courtesy of the artist and Morán Morán.
The film is a funny critique of the art school institution, how it seeks to professionalize the instinct of the artist. Pica is in her early student career at a local college, where she studies 35mm photography. She misses class a lot. She is not the model black female student the film satirizes: one of her classmates, who, at one point, waxes poetic and rattles off theory dutifully. When her professor, Mr. Yamada, who dresses all Afrocentric but is a stickler for convention, asks "what's your concept," what Pica can rattle off is the statistics, the undeniable circumstances that make her work necessary and cogent. As she does so, the words wash a trance over her, as if she's possessed: "It's estimated that…. one out of every four black men is currently involved in the penal system and 95% of black men that are in prison cannot read beyond a sixth grade level." Without exhaling, she goes on: "Damn Yamada, you know this. I shouldn't have to tell you this. I'm capturing and preserving their images, some kind of evidence of existence." In response, her professor admonishes her for using a polaroid camera, diminishing her work as "snapshots." Pica retorts: "I came here to express myself…. you gotta have a 35-millimeter camera to express yourself?"
Cauleen Smith, Drylongso, 1998, film still. Courtesy of the artist and Morán Morán.
Her professor and the model student live as if the one world is the art world. Pica cannot afford to live that fantasy. She is still in flux, delineating her relationship to her community and to her work. At the pier one afternoon, Pica and Tobi count the number of funerals they've been to that year. People come up to Pica on the street and ask her for photographs of their brothers, whom she had unwittingly memorialized with her photo project. The project that her university had deemed insufficient, the community saw as indispensable. Likewise, we can think again of Smith's banners, brought out of the secularized museum, brought into the zone of community where they might take on talismanic value. Drylongso shouldn't be reduced to the mantle of prescience, but isn't there something of the future Cauleen Smith in the film's ultimate scene? Using scraps and other found materials, Pica makes altars for her photographs, now representations of her community's dead, and presents them in an abandoned lot with her fellow neighborhood dwellers as primary audience. They have a spiritual quality. They ward off evil. The show could not be installed anywhere but outside, where it is wall-less.
Necessarily, then, Drylongso is spun out of the neighborhood. It has, as Yasmina Price (citing the Cuban filmmaker Julio García Espinosa) has written, the aspect of "imperfect cinema." The frisson of life is there, not shined up, made compliant with the dicta of Hollywood filmmaking. Smith brought in friends and local artists to play roles. Real Oakland establishments provide sets: the pier at Lake Merritt, the park, and the patio, where we land into the film's primal, beginning scene. Pica perches outside the pink house she lives in with her mother and her grandmother, having just returned home from her little exile, which is occasioned by one of her mother's loud card parties. Outside, a stone's throw from Pica's porch, a man beats a young woman, and leaves her on the concrete. Pica invites the woman to sit with her, and they do, in silence, as they wait for the woman's taxi.
Cauleen Smith, Drylongso, 1998, film still. Courtesy of the artist and Morán Morán.
The stranger-woman comes into Pica's life in the oddest way. Waiting for the bus one afternoon, she notices a boy sitting next to her. She asks to take his picture, and he relents. It isn't until Pica photographs him that she realizes who she is looking at: the stranger from the patio. (Only in the process of photographing can Pica truly see). We learn her name is Tobi. But there is always a wrinkle, a warp. Tobi, for one, lives a double life in the wake of the violence she endured on that curb, vigilantly avoiding her assailant. She tucks her hair underneath a bandanna, wraps herself in oversized flannels and barrel-leg sweats and struts down the avenue in a kind of drag. She is emboldened by her power, the fear she can engender in the white women who scurry past when she strides down the sidewalk. Drylongso is also, then, a study of how young people play with heterosexual order; it's an erotic film, too. Pica accepts Tobi's drag almost instantly, and there is even a current of attraction running between the two, as Tobi passes in the world—Pica laughs, at one point, and wonders if Malik and her mother will think that Tobi is her boyfriend.
At night, Pica works for a clandestine activist group, wheatpasting flyers for missing black boys and girls in Oakland. The work is dangerous, drawing her to secluded crevices of the city. She does it for money and for a sense of political purpose. The newscast continues to inform us that there is a serial killer on the loose in her midst. He is one shrouded man, but we can't help but think of him as a metaphor for an encompassing force. Remember Pica, with her professor, counting how many boys she's lost. He is the embodiment of the necropolitical systems threatening life in the late twentieth century black city, threatening Pica and all whom she loves. Drylongso, I think, insists on the humanization of the black artist. Pica feels powerless, after she has lost Malik, with no photograph to remember him, and that feeling of powerlessness is not to be avoided. The black artist in America is not a savior, and she is not a balm. She is a person.
Cauleen Smith, Drylongso, 1998, film still. Courtesy of the artist and Morán Morán.
Pica returns home one night after wheatpasting, her hands covered in blood—and not her own. A cough plagues her. Pneumonia. The cough, its unsubtle foreshadowing, is the stuff of a thriller. Drylongso is also about young people under threat; Pica's real sickness worsens as the killer, the real man and the existential threat, draws closer. It's Tobi who nurses her back to health, back to her artmaking. Pica's obstinance to authority rubs off on Tobi, who later steals her ex-boyfriend's car. The girls are interestingly motherless, or else, have mother problems. Tobi's mother is never home, instead plying her daughter with wads of cash. Pica's mother means well but isn't too functional. In both cases, the maternal-filial dynamic seems flipped: the mother has the addled joie de vivre bearing of the stereotypical daughter; Tobi is weighted under the responsibility to care for and protect herself, Pica is taciturn, stern, worried always about the rent. The film isn't interested in pathologizing the matriarchy, mind you. Drylongso considers how two black girls can save both themselves and each other. It is as if Pica's focus on black male death is the film's way of smuggling its argument about black femicide. Pica and Tobi need each other to see their own peril. Not only to see it, but to rescue each other.
"I don't understand artmaking without public space." Reflecting in the early months of the pandemic, Smith offered a credo that could have been Pica's credo. Smith undermines the gallery's atmosphere of exclusion; she knows that to have crossed over to the walled enclosure is not a healthy ambition for the black American artist. Her works complete themselves in the outside world. "The community," then, is no cliché. Drylongso ends with a scene of celebration and of grieving. The whole neighborhood comes out to the lot to commune with Pica's altars. Their grieving activates the altars. And the altars activate the community.
Photo by James Emmerman.
Doreen St. Félix is a writer and critic. Since 2017, she has worked as a staff writer at The New Yorker. She is the winner of a National Magazine Award. She is at work on a book.