Earlier this year, I bought tickets to watch the contemporary artist Cauleen Smith’s feature debut Drylongso (Ordinary) at one of my favourite cinemas in London, Close-Up. (Come for the screenings; stay for the rentals, including a staggering collection of foreign films on DVD. Pay ‘em a visit.) Rarely screened in the United Kingdom, a print restored by the Academy Film Archive was scheduled to play as part of this year’s Essay Film Festival. Then everything, everything happened.
Cinemas have started reopening around the UK, although I don’t feel comfortable stepping into one right now. At the risk of being dramatic, I miss the cinema desperately. While I am a homebody, I can’t deny that watching everything through the same screen I just watched capybara videos on is a little dispiriting. That’s the joy and the frustration of beginning my IFC project at this moment in time — all cinema demands the cinema. While YouTube may be a balm for semi-lost films, it can mush everything together into a type of streaming paté.
Which is the case for Drylongso. There’s a VHS rip on YouTube that I earmarked following the screening’s cancellation; Smith’s Vimeo account has a slightly better version streaming for free, which seems fuzzily ripped from an original 16mm print. I haven’t been able to find any news on what will happen with that restoration, so we have 360p to work with.
Anyone that’s seen Smith’s experimental shorts like Sojurner (2018) or The Green Dress (2005) knows that she’s a real visual stylist. Her eye is evident in earlier works like Drylongso, even when gruffly encoded and compressed into YouTube. It’s astonishing how much Smith and cinematographer Andrew Black pull out of the every day, finding candy-ish colours in the film’s West Oakland neighbourhoods without ever betraying the world’s reality. In the opening minutes, a front porch turns bubblegum pink, the roads a dark blue hue, a yellow cab luminous. One sequence makes hanging up the wash look gorgeous, something I’ve never seen done before.
It would be disingenuous to claim that a film like Drylongso has never been done before, mostly because there seem to be several different films operating at the same time. You have a warm-then-tragic love story, a class-clash friendship, coming-of-age tale and — sure, go for it — occasional slasher movie. Smith and co-writer/actor Salim Akil’s script doesn’t always work, with plenty slipping out of their control, but the result is quite often beautiful.
The coming-of-age aspect of the film focuses on Pica (Toby Smith, charming, frustratingly un-Googleable thanks to an English actor with the same name), an art student living in West Oakland, California. She attends a college photography course but her work, taking Polaroid photos of Black men “because they’re an endangered species”, isn’t in lieu with the classes’ 35mm requirements. Eventually, Pica’s photography project evolves into making makeshift shrines to commemorate her neighbourhood’s Black men that had lost their lives. Designed by artist Wura-Natasha Ogunji, the memorials are an installation type you don’t see enough in film: hand-made in the truest sense of the word, the creators (both fictional and factual) combine tins, bikes, crates and other loose ephemera into a space for remembrance. Polaroids are applied last, marking each structure as a tribute to those lost.
There’s a democratic approach to Pica’s Polaroids, as she mentions being able to show her subjects how they look immediately. The shrine exhibition, Evidence of Existence, takes place in an open-air lot on the corner of Magnolia Street in Oakland, placing it in reach of the surrounding community. Accessibility is at the core of all of Pica’s endeavours, and, ironically, Smith’s film was inaccessible for so long. Until its gloriously restored format can be distributed to the world, and we can sit worry-free in cinemas again, I’m glad that Drylongso is available online, streaming paté or otherwise. Given Pica’s onscreen work, it feels oddly appropriate.
ELSEWHERE ON YOUTUBE:
How Bon Iver Wrote ‘iMi’: 5 Years, 28 People and a Piece of Cardboard
‘iMi’ was the song that randomly, finally unlocked Bon Iver to me after years of grudgingly distanced appreciation. (I heard it on former Beastie Boy Mike D’s radio show, mixed out of a track by London alt-jazz outfit The Comet Is Coming. Wild shit.) It’s a phenomenally weird, beautiful collage of happy accidents and intricate, almost-obsessive songcraft. I still don’t understand how this song got made, and I watched this New York Times mini-doc on how they made it happen.
Adam Kimmel by Benjamin Morsberger
Every morning since lockdown began, I drop into my down dog, make a coffee and search eBay for Adam Kimmel designs. For the uninitiated, Kimmel was a favourite of the menswear set in the late noughties for tailored treatises on American clothing history, mixing up cowboy leather, union work-clothes and Los Angeleno streetwear into something special. This short film, narrated by Kimmel and directed by filmmaker and musician Benjamin Morsberger, walks us through a number of his presentations over 2010. I am very happy to have recently found this shirt from the spring/summer 2012 for stupid cheap. I’m a size medium. HMU.