Cauleen Smith Movies

A young woman in a photography class begins taking pictures of black men out of fear they will soon be extinct.

Personal pilgrimages to three sites of extreme creativity, invention, and generosity: Alice Coltrane's Ashram, Watts Towers, and Watervliet Shaker...

Night Sky is the story of two friends' journey through the desert into a synesthetic realm of the senses. After their car breaks down, Cleo and Jay...

Smith interweaves the figure of the crow through the histories of Syracuse and Auburn, New York, both of which were key stations on the Underground...

The imagery of the film is of volcanic scenes in various life stages, from pouring magma to inert mountain, with colors unnaturally saturated –...

Set in Noah Purifoy’s Outdoor Desert Art Museum in Joshua Tree, California, artist Cauleen Smith reimagines this unique space as a radical...

Daily Rains is a measured, poetic work that confronts head-on the micro- and macro-aggressions faced by young Black women. Restored by the Academy...

Entitled, a correspondence with historical still life painters. Super-8 transferred to digital video “Smith has developed a lyrical visual...

Back in 2018 I invited an intergenerational group of women to help me make some moving-images in Noah Purifoy’s Desert Museum in Joshua Tree....

Mythical forms embodied in puppetry and cinematic spectacle.

Second of three films relating to American conceptual Land Art of the 1970's and American histories and traumas.

Images and poems responding to the photographs of Malik Sidié. A collaboration with poet, A. Van Jordan. Loops designed for install.

Part of a multi-platform project highlighted by an hour long documentary about black filmmakers who worked and studied at UCLA between 1965 and the...

A lyrical visual poem on movement, time, and wandering.

Three women in Hollywood talk to the camera one summer (with a coda six months later). Sara is a casting director; her soliloquies are addressed to...

The syntax of cinema collides with string theory and the unchanging sameness of movies, romance, horror, and landscape.

"Remote Viewing" is a story in which a man related that, as a boy, he had watched the whites in his town attempt to obliterate every trace of the...

In Mines to Caves, Smith foregrounds how traditional capitalist structures like overconsumption and land development affect our relationships to each...

The countdown audio footage from the Apollo 11 launch date is heard over a flamed-out, iridescent landscape. Appropriating and reframing the...

Explores the careers of twenty black women working as film directors.