Cauleen Smith

Since making her first feature while a student at UCLA, Los Angeles–based artist Cauleen Smith (born 1967) has rooted her work firmly within the discourse of mid-20th-century experimental film. Drawing from structuralism, moving images and science fiction (combined with elements of the more recent Afrofuturist movement), her works offer a phenomenological experience for both its participants and its audience. A portable, introductory volume, Breaking Cinema is a quick yet thorough guide to Smith’s filmmaking. It features stills from a decade of works, including Space Is the Place (her tribute to the Sun Ra Arkestra), Remote Viewing and Lessons in Semaphore. Art historian Romi Crawford, professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, elucidates this critical phase of the artist’s career, and how Smith recasts film history in the context of the artistic and cultural ferment of Chicago’s South Side.

Through films, objects, and installation, Chicago-based filmmaker Cauleen Smith (born 1967) offers an emotional axis by which to navigate four distinct universes: Alice Coltrane and her Sai Anantam ashram; a 1966 photo shoot by Bill Ray at Simon Rodia's Watts Towers in Los Angeles; Noah Purifoy and his desert assemblages in Joshua Tree; and black spiritualist Rebecca Cox Jackson and her Shaker community in 19th-century Philadelphia.

These locations, while not technically utopian societies, embody sites of historical speculation and radical generosity between artist and community. In reimagining a future through this mix, Smith casts a world that is black, feminist, spiritual and unabashedly alive.

This volume, wrapped in a frosted and foil-stamped dust jacket, contains full-color photographs of the multi-room installation and provides further insight into Smith's creative process and myriad influences through two interviews and a manifesto written by the artist.