Pica (Toby Smith) is an Oakland college student taking Polaroids in a photography class devoted to 35 mm. “I came here to learn how to express myself,” she tells the teacher (Salim Akil). “You gotta have a 35 mm camera to be expressive nowadays?”
He’s interested in theory, but Pica is trying to capture the faces of young Black men. They’re “an endangered species,” she tells Tobi (April Barnett). Between the crack epidemic raging around them, and a serial killer at large, indeed they are.
But photos only accomplish so much. So Pica builds handcrafted totems, gravestone-like sculptures for the fallen, in a vacant unkempt patch of grass in the middle of her neighborhood. They’re offerings from the heart. So it is with 1998’s Drylongso, the lone feature from multidisciplinary artist Cauleen Smith. The title, a Gullah Geechee word meaning “everyday folk,” is exactly what Pica and Smith are after — Pica with the residents of her neighborhood, Smith with Pica and Tobi, two young women trying to find their place in the world.
But many critics and audiences didn’t necessarily see the movie. As Smith explains in an interview with scholar Michael B. Gillespieon Criterion’s newly released disc, those viewers in ’98 focused more on the movie as a social document rather than a piece of artistic expression. It turned Smith off narrative work, and she hasn’t made a feature since. She’s directed many fascinating shorts, including the seven featured on Criterion’s set. All examples of a cinematic career that could have been.
Smith is far from the only filmmaker backed into a creative corner. Criterion’s other newly released set, The Ranown Westerns, shows that the laser focus of success often obscures the multiplicity of artists.
Released in a prolific fever of four years, 1957-’60, the Ranown cycle (The Tall T, Decision at Sundown, Buchanan Rides Alone, Ride Lonesome and Comanche Station) are some of the best entries into the Western genre: spare, sincere, tough. Randolph Scott stars in all five, with Budd Boetticher directing with an aesthetic sensibility that keeps them from being simplistic or forgettable.
Criterion’s set includes stunning restorations of all five movies and a handful of documentaries about Boetticher. In all but one, Boetticher gets frustrated with the interviewer trying to paint him as a cowboy, the movies as a form of autobiography.
Boetticher directed over 30 features in a career spanning four decades, and yet it will always be these five movies made in four years that land him in the history books. Smith directed only one. The significance of their films cannot be denied, for reasons they intended and a few they didn’t. Artists don’t necessarily get to choose what history remembers them for, but, in the end, it is the work in all its dimensions that lasts.
ON SCREEN: Drylongso and The Ranown Westerns are available on Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection.
