DRYLONGSO. 1998
DRYLONGSO
1998. 16mm. color / sound. 72:00.
Stills from Drylongso.
Cinematography: Andrew Black.
Starring: Toby Smith and April Barnett.
Shot on Location in Oakland, CA.
A snapshot of a young woman who feels deeply the value and vulnerability of everyone's life but her own. Pica, our hero, is a girl with a mission. Armed with a Polaroid camera, and charming savvy, she is determined to document the existence of young black men. She, like many, is convinced that they are an endangered species - soon to be extinct. Her obsessive snaphots lead her to many eccentric neighborhood characters who force her to recognize the value of her own life and work.
writer Cauleen Smith
cast (in credits order)
Toby Smith--Pica Sullivan
April Barnett--Tobi
Will Power -Malik
Channel Schafer - Gloria Sullivan
Salim Akil - Mr. Yamada
associate producer -- Christine Gant
original music by Curt Harpel & Pat Thomi
cinematography by Andrew Black
editing -- Cauleen Smith
production design -- Richard Bracho & Gabrielle Stover
costume design by Rullette Mapp
production management -- Stacey NyKhole Marbrey
sound designer -- Kerry Carmean
camera and electrical department -- Robert Hubbard
first assistant camera -- Jason Wolos, Robert Banks
Shot on Location in glorious Oakland, California.
From "The Bay Area as Cinematic Space in Twenty-five Stops or Less." By Michael Sicinski
"1999: Drylongso is possibly a surreptitious inclusion, since it is a narrative feature, strictly speaking. But in this context it's worthy of mention for two important reasons. First, Smith began her career as a committed experimental filmmaker. Her dense caustically hilarious Chronicles of a Lying Spirit by Kelly Gabron from 1992 brings the properly low gauge languages of collage animation, found imagery, and looped repetition into dialog with radical African-American image politics. In this regard, Drylongso continues Smith's interest in wedding challenging formal procedures with personal content. Second, and more important, Drylongso more than any other film I know, really examines the physical space and toughened, often ramshackled beauty of West Oakland. Let's face it, even among radical media practitioners, Oakland tends to be treated like the Bay Area's "dead zone," a conduit for transfer between San Francisco and Berkeley and not much else. Smith thematizes the act of looking at the various spaces of black Oakland through her protagonist, Pica (Toby Smith), a photographer committed to the documentation of that most endangered urban species, the black male, before his systematic elimination. Smith takes us from upper-middle-class neighborhoods just off downtown to the run-down postindustrial zones of the port. In so doing, she generates inner-cityscapes whose rigorous depiction rivals the best work of James Benning."
~ from Radical Light: Alternative Film & Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-2000. Edited by Steve Anker, Kathy Geritz, and Steve Seid.
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