At the beginning of “The Oppositional Gaze,” [PDF] bell hooks writes: “There is power in looking.” Throughout the essay, she explores Black female spectatorship by first identifying how dominant media, film theory, and Black film criticism have erased it by not acknowledging it. For Black women, they have always had an oppositional gaze because they never identified with the images depicted of them, of white women, or of Black men.
In Cauleen Smith’s film Drylongso, Black men are disappearing at an alarming rate as a result of being killed by the “West Side Slasher.” Throughout the film, the protagonist, Pica, uses Polaroids to capture Black men as a method of looking and remembering. She explained to her professor, who admonished her for not using a 35mm camera: “I am capturing and preserving their image,” and, as such, the evidence of their existence. In this way, Pica renders Black men hypervisible throughout the film in opposition to their invisibility by death and disappearance.
Due to Pica’s financial situation, the Polaroid camera is the only apparatus she has to capture these photographs with, to the disappointment of her professor—he diminishes their value by calling them “snapshots” instead of photographs. His admonishment feels confining, yet it does not dissuade her from using her Polaroid. In this way, I think about hooks’ essay, where she writes about Black female spectators’ gaze being more than resistance.
“We create alternative texts that are not solely reactions. As critical spectators, Black women participate in a broad range of looking relations, contest, resist, revision, interrogate, and invent on multiple levels.” — hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze”
Pica’s artwork and her commitment to Black men’s life and memory create an alternative space to give reverence to the social and economic oppression Black men face. In contrast, a young Black woman in her photography class with access to a 35mm camera creates work that lacks depth and authenticity in comparison to Pica’s Polaroid “snapshots.” Likewise, hooks speaks to the ways some Black women would rather submit to the dominant White male gaze than resist it. Pica personifies hooks’ definition of “critical Black female spectatorship,” she is not a perfect subject but one who is intensely flawed, human, and critically engaged in the world around her. She uses her artwork to create sites of inquiry, reflection, and opposition.
In form, Drylongso is a genre-bending film. Throughout the film, Cauleen Smith interweaves thriller and horror elements with comedy and drama. In form, this film does not fit into any of these categories through its mise-en-scéne or cinematography. Instead, Smith illuminates the everyday horrors that Black folks live within, love within, and create within. In the background of the narrative is the violence Black men inflict on Black women. While Pica preserves their image, she also witnesses her new friend Tobi be assaulted by her boyfriend, which causes her to dress as a man to avoid further violation. Pica and Tobi are the only ones who really see each other in the film–they come from different backgrounds yet connect over their complex relationship with men and love for art. Their friendship itself is a type of opposition to social expectations around class that groups people based on their financial backgrounds. Smith creates a warmth around these two that feels protective and caring.
One narrative strategy that I really enjoyed was toward the end of the film, during Pica’s exhibition. Smith focuses the camera on the artwork itself, rendering it space to breathe and allowing it to become a character itself. The audience is allowed to experience Pica’s work as if they were there in real life. As we view the artwork, we hear the sounds of laughter and talking of the cookout, and it is at this moment, Smith uses mise-en-scéne to invite us into that space. It communicates: “You belong here, too.” This resists the mainstream narrative strategy that props are just story anchors. Instead, Pica’s art has its own story arc, it becomes a site of remembrance of Pica’s innovation but also a site of reverence for Black life. The end of the film perfectly illustrates what hooks calls “counter-memory.” She writes: “Looking and looking back, Black women involve ourselves in a process whereby we see our history as counter-memory, using it as a way to know the present and invent the future.”
In a Criterion Channel interview with Michael B. Gillespie, Cauleen Smith explains her own experience living through the early 90s, through the peak of the crack epidemic, violence, addiction, and other forces impeding the well-being of Black folks. In the interview, she says that the genre-bending nature of Drylongso reflects the “poly-genre” nature of Black life. “It’s a horror show, it's a comedy, it’s surreal, it’s a love story. All at once, all the time.” And I think it reflects her authentic filmic voice and her love for Black people to portray our lives with such realness and care.