Sojourner
2018 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
22:41 minutes
Cauleen Smith
Set to the iconic and spiritual music of Alice Coltrane’s Turiyasangitananda (1937–2007), Cauleen Smith’s film Sojourner travels across the US to visit a series of sites important to an alternative and creative narrative of black history. While the approach may appear spiritual, it is more futuristic (Afrofuturism and Radical Jazz) than religious. Smith is interested in using the individual stories of “those who have formed their own solutions” as a reconstructive and healing lens for considering the past. These individuals include (in addition to Coltrane), Rebecca Cox Jackson (1795–1871), Simon Rodia (1879–1965), and Noah Purifoy (1917–2004). The film ends with a feminist reimagining of a 1966 photograph by Billy Ray at the Watts Tower, with a group of men listening to the radio. The radio is a prop used throughout the film, transmitting words of critique, inspiration and philosophy that serve as a voice over for the film, and an act of shared and collective listening in various scenes.
Cauleen Smith is an artist and filmmaker whose approach has been shaped by the discourse of mid-twentieth-century experimental film — including structuralism, third world cinema, and science fiction. As an African American filmmaker, she approaches her subject with a sensitivity to the history of racial politics in the US and an engagement with the ongoing struggle for black liberation. Her work imagines a version of black experience, a parallel reality, that is feminist, spiritual, and both reverent and defiant. Her recent video installations are often accompanied by wall-paper, reflected light and other interruptions that transform the black box of the gallery.
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