Read: An Anagram of Ideas on Art Form and Film (1B)

Ukrainian-born ethnographic filmmaker Maya Deren discusses her approach to avant-garde, ritualistic, and expressionistic cinema.

Watch:

Pattaki (Dir. Everlane Moraes, 20min, 2018) (please contact [email protected] for password)

Synopsis: In the dense night, when the moon lifts the tide, beings trapped in the daily life of water scarcity, they are hypnotized by the power of Yemaya, the goddess of the sea. (from the filmmaker)

Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification (Dir. Barbara McCullough, 1979, 4min)

Synopsis: Made in collaboration with performer Yolanda Vidato, Water Ritual #1 examines Black women’s ongoing struggle for spiritual and psychological space through improvisational, symbolic acts. Shot in 16mm black-and-white, the film was made in an area of Watts that had been cleared to make way for the I-105 freeway, but ultimately abandoned. Though the film is set in contemporary L.A., at first sight, Milanda and her environs (burnt-out houses overgrown with weeds) might seem to be located in Africa or the Caribbean, or at some time in the past. Structured as an Africanist ritual for Barbara McCullough’s “participant-viewers,” the film addresses how conditions of poverty, exploitation and anger render the Los Angeles landscape not as the fabled promised land for Black migrants, but as both cause and emblem of Black desolation. (Jacqueline Stewart)

Shopping Bag Spirits and Freeway Fetishes: Reflections on Ritual Space (Dir. Barbara McCullough, 1981, 60min)

Synopsis: Barbara McCullough’s journey as a film- and video-maker has focused less on finished products and more on processes, at once aesthetic and spiritual.  Shopping Bag Spirits and Freeway Fetishes: Reflections on Ritual Space represents a significant stretch along McCullough’s path, where she conversed with other L.A.-based Black artists about the role of ritual in Black life and creative practice.  Visual artist David Hammons likens his activities to vanguard musicians as he improvises an outdoor composition of found objects.  Poets Raspoeter Ojenke, Kenneth Severin, K. Curtis Lyle and Kamau Daa’ood describe and display their synergistic approaches, as do improvisational musicians Freedom in Expression, accompanying one another with voice and percussion.   Kinshasha Cornwill and Houston Cornwill describe their performance/visual art collaborations.  Senga Nengudi recalls feeling “possessed” while dancing in costume at the collaborative performance she staged to open her “Freeway Fets” installation at a Los Angeles freeway underpass.  And in an intimate conversation, Betye Saar offers McCullough an inspiring definition of ritual: It is not just a rite, but also what feels “right,” a process that builds the artist’s confidence and the traditions that can be passed along to future generations.

McCullough uses video footage, still photographs, interview audio and musical selections by Don Cherry to explore how her own film and video practice fits into Black traditions of performance and visual arts.  McCullough opens Shopping Bag Spirits with footage from her own project, Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification, a landmark of Black and feminist experimental filmmaking.  In addition to featuring alternate shots, McCullough’s 16mm film footage is enhanced with video effects.  Blighted urban ruins become enchanted with glowing purples and blues, as video technologies (explored in courses with Shirley Clarke), add new dimensions to McCullough’s repertoire. (Jacqueline Stewart)

Retrieval (Dir. Fatimah Asghar, 2023, 18min)

Synopsis: RETRIEVAL is a lyrical short film that explores the process of a soul retrieval in the aftermath of sexual assault – the spiritual undertaking of bringing back a part of your soul that has been traumatically separated. Holding the line between magic, fantasy, and grounded reality, the film asks the question: what sight of miraculous intervention do we need to conduct to seam together such a violent rupture? (from filmmaker)

Discussion Questions:

• How do mythologies (particularly Yoruban spirituality featured in both Moraes and McCullough’s films) serve to highlight the material realities depicted in either film?
• What is your perception of how time and space in constructed in the films?
• What is the role of personal storytelling and memory in the films?
• How are ritual objects engaged within the films?