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Cauleen's
Cosmic Vision
By Carla Robinson
Cauleen
Smith, the award-winning writer/director of Drylongso,
recently wrapped production on her latest film, a short titled Holly
Would if She Could. Smith, whose work is undergirded by themes of
isolation, displacement, and self-realization, displays a visionary
sensibility that sets her apart from her contemporaries. It is this
sensibility that makes her films so engaging and worthwhile, yet it
also distances her from the mainstream. But Smith is not concerned
about taking the mountain to the mainstream. She'd rather the
mainstream come to the mountain. Her labor is about creating art
that is worth the journey.
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Courtesy Cauleen Smith
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Smith is savvy when it comes to both the art and
business of filmmaking, having made so many of her own films that she
tends to lose count, but it is her vision that drives her. For the
longest, it's driven her to present important issues through the
framework of science fiction, elements of which can be seen even in
her most straightforward, narrative pieces. For example, the serial
killer in Drylongso feels more like an omni-present extraterrestrial
than a mere man. And in Holly, Smith plays out a cautionary tale of a
young wannabe starlet through the schism of a dreamscape, showing us
the disconnection between what the eponymous Holly wants and what she
fears she'll get.
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"To me, sci-fi, gives you the
opportunity to create very specific metaphors that are absolutely
about now." Smith said in an interview. "You go to another
planet and you have alien races warring and you're really talking
about the Palestinians and the Israelis, or Blacks and Whites."
As Smith sees it, science fiction can be a vital expression of the
Black experience. "Outer space is a greater metaphor for people
of the Diaspora than for anybody else," she explained. "It's
our origin. When we look into a black sky, we're looking at where we
came from. Stevie Wonder has been singing about this for twenty years,
I'm just picking up the torch."
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Smith, who was educated in California,
has lived in Europe, and now teaches film at the University of Texas
at Austin, most explicitly picks up the sci-fi torch in her short film
The Changing Same. Here, she deals head-on with societal estrangement.
"The story is that an alien is sent down to planet earth to
infiltrate humanity and learn its customs," she said. "She
finds another alien who has been here a long time and he's been
intoxicated by this society and he is toxic, he's dying, and he wants
to go home." The aliens find refuge in one another, but the
physical home they seek proves elusive. "They've been living on a
mothership, floating through the galaxy, and they're hoping that this
place will be it. The reality is that there is no home for these
aliens. I can't think of a better metaphor for black people."
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Undoubtedly, Smith will keep presenting
higher levels of metaphoric and literal truth to audiences left of
center, and through the force of her own gravitational pull, closer to
the mainstream.
M
May 2003
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