HORACE TAPSCOTT: 
A MUSICAL GRIOT
A SCREENING OF THE FILM AND Q&A WITH FILMMAKER 
BARBARA MCCULLOUGH (2017)

liquid blackness in Conversation with Barbara McCullough

Research

Barbara McCullough: Materials on the Film, Filmmaker, and Artistic Context

Black Women Filmmakers | Experimental Cinema | Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification | Liberation Aesthetics

-curated by Wolfgang Boehm, Dafna Kaufman and Jazmine Hudson

Black Women Filmmakers

The L.A. Rebellion tradition, an ex post facto collectivization of Black artists who went through the UCLA film school through the establishment of the Ethno-Communications Program, subsisted between the years of 1967 until 1989. (Stewart). Barbara McCullough along with a few other women of color brought new ideas, strategies and techniques to the UCLA’s film program in the 1970s. The second wave of the popularly known L.A. Rebellion filmmakers was dominated by women of color including McCullough, Alile Sharon Larkin, Julie Dash, Jacqueline Frazier, Melvonna Ballenger, O. Funmilayo Makarah, and Carroll Parrott Blue. A look at their Project One films clearly reveal new approaches on popular themes of community, family, political activism, race and personal experiences. These filmmakers also developed their style by experimenting with form and function, turning their cameras into weapons to fight in an age of upheaval. (Stewart).

This willingness to experiment in film as an act of revolution influenced Barbara McCullough, a student, filmmaker, black woman and mother, to pursue experimental, decidedly Black, feminist art. Her creative fire was fueled by a friendship with Julie Dash, whom she met while Dash was completing Four Women (1975), before Dash joined the UCLA community (Jones). McCullough was impressed and inspired by her and later developed Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification (1979) (Jones). Her first encounter with Dash reinforced her desire to make films, specifically challenging, experimental film. After first meeting Dash and viewing her work, McCullough realized that “This was the first time I had ever seen a Black female image in film that reflected my community. And what knocked me out was that her character was dancing to the music of Nina Simone” (Jackson). McCullough initially studied dance before turning to filmmaking, and in the face of the free and unrestrained Black femininity in Dash’s Four Women, she sought to carry that energy forward (Masilela). Barbara McCullough and Julie Dash formed an important link in the chain of great artists who sought to make their mark through film in the L.A. Rebellion movement.

Barbara McCullough presented a personal portrait with photographic stills and moving images in her Project One film, Chephren-Kafra. While her attention to Africa and the diaspora were interesting, they were common themes already explored by male UCLA students. This film articulated an Afrofemcentrism, which examines the location of family, destabilizes the boundary between home and work, and visualizes cinematically unfamiliar ideas of the black female imagination.

Alile Sharon Larkin’s The Kitchen and Julie Dash’s The Diary of an African Nun, both produced in 1977, theorize the relationship between desire, social constructions of beauty and propriety and their effects on the black female body. Reminiscent of “the goddess” in Phillis Wheatley’s 1775 poem Enclosure, Larkin’s protagonist sees hair as a function of how one is treated or mistreated in society. While Wheatley describes “golden hair” as key to “unnumbered charms and recent graces,” Larkin pictures straight/coiffed hair as the portal to a better life. However, unlike the controversial poetry of an enslaved poet, Larkin’s short film narrative shows how this psychosocial disturbance traumatizes the body and the mind by presenting the character in catatonic states, inflicting abuse on her daughter, and ultimately restrained and held captive in a psychiatric ward. Primarily through editing, Julie Dash takes this theme a step further in her adaptation of Alice Walker’s story of the same name. The Diary of an African Nun visualizes the body/mind’s vulnerability to social pressures by exquisite framing, fast-paced editing, high-contrast cinematography, and manipulation of affect through musical choices, narration, and sound amplification.

Jacqueline Frazier and Melvonna Ballenger both thematize reproduction, but in very different ways. Frazier’s Hidden Memories (1977) explores childbirth and abortion as two possible outcomes of a woman’s pregnancy, divided across different time periods through the use of flashbacks and montage. Lingering gazes, echoing dialogue, and the returning Diana Ross and The Supremes “Reflections” theme song also complicate notions of space and time. As Frazier raises concerns around biological reproduction, Ballenger symbolically multiplies or reproduces the meaning and implications of the seemingly quotidian idea of rain. Rain(Nyesha) opens with fragments of rain-themed songs, a rainy weather report, and the dismal emotions of a rainy day. Quickly, this rain develops into a metaphor for social conflict and labor injustice without losing the icons of rain in the mise-en-scene. This re-production of rain ushers in polysemic effects of rain as an agent for change, cleansing, personal reflection, and group-solidarity.

Even though O. Funmilayo Makarah’s 1975 critical meditation on patriotism, equality and racism in Apple Pie (1975) predates Atlanta-based conceptual artist, Paul Benjamin’s, Oh Say (2016) audiovisual installation, it’s just as unsettling and provocative. While Benjamin collects and layers found audio and visual clips of male and female African-Americans singing “The Star Spangled Banner” dating back to the 1960s to the present and projects it on a wall in a gallery, Makarah approaches her Project One film like a social experiment, in which she asks multiracial, male subjects to sing the U.S. National Anthem. According to Makarah, the phonic dissonance she gathered is reflective of the state of political discord in the United States. Despite a constantly changing political and technological environment, Makarah’s film experiment continues to reverberate and contribute to contemporary American discourse in art, film and politics.

 Carroll Parrott Blue’s social documentary, Two Women, explores the relationship between two Black women of different generations. Her interests are not just philosophical, but ontological. She examines the life of her aunt, an older black woman, and a teenage girl. She seeks to understand what it means to be older or younger, a woman, and Black.

While each of these filmmakers produced either feminist and Afrofemcentric texts challenging dominant conceptions of the black female body, the spaces they are found in, and what they could do, Chephren-Kafra, further expanded the limits of the mother’s black mind/body by including her youngest child in the frame. To reflect on Alice Walker’s collection and quest, “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens,” the films of Ava DuVernay and Dee Rees, Beyonce’s Lemonade, Barry Jenkin’s Moonlight, and many more are the “flowers, petunias, roses, dahlias, forsythia, spirea, delphiniums, verbena…and on and on” of these L.A. Rebellion/UCLA women.

Contributions from Shady Patterson and Daniel Van Jeigerhuis

Field, Allyson Nadia, Jan-Christopher Horak, and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, editors.

          L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema. 1st ed., University of California

          Press, 2015.
High Tesfagiorgis, Frieda. (1987). Afrofemcentrism in the Art of Elizabeth Catlett and

          Faith Ringgold (a View of Women by Women). Sage: A Scholarly Journal on

          Black Women. v4 n1 p25-32 Spr 1987.
Jackson, Elizabeth. “Barbara McCullough.” Black Film Review, vol. 7, no. 2, June 1993, p. 4

Jones, Kellie. “Now Dig This! An Introduction.” Now Dig This! Art in Black Los

          Angeles, 1960–1980 Digital Archive. Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2016.

Masilela, Ntongela. “Women Directors of the Los Angeles School.” Black Women Film

          and Video Artists, edited by Jacqueline Bobo, Routledge, 1998, pp. 21–41.

Stewart, Jacqueline. “Defending Black Imagination: The ‘L.A. Rebellion’ School Of

          Black Filmmakers.” Now Dig This! Art in Black Los Angeles, 1960–1980

          Digital Archive. Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2016.
Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. San Diego:

          Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984. Print.

Experimental Cinema

In his book The Most Typical Avant Grade: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles, author David E. James discusses the contradiction inherent in the idea of “popular culture as it applies to Los Angeles: on the one hand, popular culture refers immediately to the Hollywood industry and on the other, it should also describe the presence of avant-garde independent filmmakers, i.e, a popular culture “produced by the people themselves. He writes, “independent filmmakers in the company town live both the hegemony of the entertainment industry and the social segregation of cultural alternatives in hyperbolic terms” (James 11). In the introduction to his book, James notes the important mixture of geography, economics, and cultural differences that led to the rise of experimental and avant-garde filmmakers in Los Angeles, who made films while existing in these contradictions, perhaps commenting on them. As Jacqueline Stewart notes in her essay “Defending Black Imagination: The L.A. Rebellion School of Black Filmmakers,” “But for artists working in the entertainment capital of the world, the stakes would seem to be especially high either to reject the aesthetic and business models exemplified by Hollywood or to assimilate them. For Los Angeles-based artists who are black, furthermore, the complex legacy of black performance (so aggres­sively confined to modes aimed at pleasing white audiences) complicates efforts to be taken seri­ously as creative agents and to develop affirming creative practices that are financially sustainable, let alone autonomous.” (Stewart 1) Hollywood was the epicenter of the film industry, overtaking New York in the 1930s and establishing itself as the place to make movies because of its weather and financial advantages. However, based on the racial politics in America, marginalized groups of people, specifically black people, did not have as many opportunities to act in, produce, or create cinema that reflected their unique experiences. Black independent filmmakers also dealt with the discrimination and power of the film industry and its capitalistic practices that mirrored their own oppression, which may explain why avant-garde or experimental aesthetic practices became a necessity in their films. The combination of racial oppression from a white supremacist society with the economic and classist oppression from the film industry and society in general led to films that both made political statements and strayed away from conventional Hollywood practices. As Kelly Jones notes in her introduction to Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980, this change in aesthetic practices also occurred because of the changing demographic in Los Angeles: “Yet we can also ascribe this social energy to changing demographics as the number of black citizens migrating to California rose during the twentieth century, creating growing majorities in places such as Los Angeles. These new city users (as scholar Saskia Sassen calls them), fleeing old lives, laid fresh claims to the possibilities of democratic change and social freedoms.” (Jones 2) Without the big budget technology or studios supporting them, these filmmakers found a unique stylistic approach that led to films such as Barbara McCullough’s Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification (1979). A film which utilizes an abandoned urbanized area in Watts, a jazz soundtrack, African cosmology, and nature, it is indicative of the experimental cinema that was created from this paradoxical arena of avant-garde filmmaking in Los Angeles. In addition to viewing Barbara McCullough’s work as a notable contribution to black, feminist, and political cinematic discourse, we must also situate this work as a highly reflexive, experimental body of work, one that consistently points towards broadening the uses and functions of the apparatus. Why do we refer to some works as experimental cinema while others with distinctly experimental qualities find themselves located in predominantly social categories? To bridge this gap first requires understanding the properties of experimental cinema.

Akira Mizuta Lippit conceptualizes experimental cinema in relation to an exergue which “refers to a space outside the work, outside the essential body of the work, and yet part of it, even essentially—a part and apart” (1). The exergue, like a liminal space, is simultaneously the form that constitutes the work and the meta-examination of that very form, criticizing conventions and suggesting a movement beyond. It is situated at a point invested in the text but also external to it. He describes this position much like a place of suspension: the text is temporarily suspended to explore its very existence and returns with the possibility for new direction and sensibilities (Lippit 3).

Lippit sees it as a continual crossing in and out of the threshold of intra/extra text. The experimental work, then, is situated on this boundary of participation and reflection, fragmenting meaning to multiply the available stylistic choices and pave the way for new opportunities. To better relate this to the broader social question at hand, I find it important to take a step back from the single event of reflection and envision this as a continual loop, much like stitching. If we conceptualize it this way we must sustain the idea of an eventual whole, implying the process simultaneously creates limits while it liberates, sealing off certain potentialities to move forward into unexplored territory. This similarly demands a cyclical approach that becomes a repetitive, rhythmic process where meaning continually fragments in new directions to be selected or omitted in the creation of the whole. It is the repetitive movement from content to reflection that binds a text to its larger scope and direction.

How might we liken this movement to the experimental cinema of Barbara McCullough? When we view this as an intra and extra-textual examination of what is past and what is possible, we can see how this is especially pertinent to black and feminist cinema. Placing these bodies in contexts that clearly deviate from preconceived categories requires a re-working of past notions and their gradual expansion going forward. This creates a doubled examination in addition to the doubled body of work. Experimental cinema reflects on a consciousness of cinema, pushing its boundaries and conventions as a separate, outer text, while simultaneously internal to the cinematic space. This is a necessary push in an uncharted direction, revealing options for the cinematic future. At the same time, the terms “black” and “female” have specific implications and more narrowly constructed definitions. With social modifiers, experimental cinema inherently attends to social notions. We see this in multiple ways in McCullough’s work, particularly in her movement from Water Ritual Number 1: An Urban Rite of Purification (1979) to Shopping Bag Spirits and Freeway Fetishes: Reflections on Ritual Space (1980) that takes her own experimental work and pushes beyond cinema’s newest advancements. The latter begins with the former, blending colors into the film using video effects. In these instances, she not only reflects on a consciousness of cinema but also pushes the boundaries of social constraints, placing herself and her textual subjects in spaces beyond the dominant narrative and showing the social apparatus what it can do.

The outcome of this research is the October 2017 issue of liquid blackness, “Holding Blackness: Aesthetics of Suspension,”which includes writing on Joseph’s work and several other artists and films that help crystallize the concept of suspension through their artistic practices (modes of production and exhibition), fluid visual styles, and ethical commitments. 

Contributions From Corey Couch and Reggie Hill  

David, James E. The Most Typical Avant Grade: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles. University of

         California Press. 2005.

Jones, Kellie. “Now Dig This! An Introduction.” Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960–1980. University of

         California, (2016): pp. 1-18.

Lippit, Akira Mizuta. “Exergue Ex-Cinema.” Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of

          Experimental Film and Video, 1st ed., University of California Press, Berkeley;

          Los Angeles; London, (2012): pp. 1–14. JSTOR, 

Stewart, Jacqueline. “Defending Black Imagination: The L.A. School of Black Filmmakers” Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980. The Regents of the University of California 2016.

Walton, Saige. Cinema’s Baroque Flesh: Film, Phenomenology and the Art of

         Entanglement. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, (2016).

https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/la-rebellion/films/water-ritual-1-urban-rite-purification

https://www.filmpreservation.org/preserved-films/avant-garde-masters-preserved-films