Drylongso
1999 · Cauleen Smith
A young woman in a photography class begins taking pictures of black men out of fear they will soon be extinct.
dir. Cauleen Smith · 1999
Convinced that young Black men are becoming an endangered species, Pica — an Oakland community-college photography student — starts shooting Polaroids of every one she meets, an archive against disappearance, while navigating friendship, family and a neighborhood shadowed by violence. Cauleen Smith made Drylongso as her UCLA thesis film, on 16mm, with community actors and visible seams, and the seams are the point: it carries the handmade, neighborhood-rooted ethos of the L.A. Rebellion filmmakers north into the late-1990s Bay Area. The title is Gullah for 'ordinary,' and the film's radicalism lives exactly there — in its insistence that ordinary Black life, rendered in sun-washed color and casual humor, is subject enough for cinema. Smith went on to become one of America's most celebrated moving-image artists, working mostly in galleries, which leaves Drylongso her sole narrative feature — long nearly impossible to see until a 4K restoration returned it to circulation in 2023. The Polaroid, instant and unrepeatable, remains its perfect emblem: proof that someone was here.
Lines of influence
- Killer of Sheep (1978) — The founding L.A. Rebellion template Smith inherits at UCLA: nonprofessional neighborhood cast and unforced, plotless vignettes of ordinary Black life shot on grainy 16mm as ethnographic tenderness rather than melodrama.
- Daughters of the Dust (1991) — A Black-woman-authored L.A. Rebellion feature built on painterly, sun-saturated color and the image-as-heirloom — a griot/photographer preserving a people on the verge of vanishing, which Drylongso literalizes in Pica's Polaroids.
- Bless Their Little Hearts (1984) — Observational long-take realism about endangered Black manhood and joblessness, with Burnett's script and nonprofessional performances — the direct forebear of Drylongso's worry over disappearing Black men.
- Bush Mama (1979) — Guerrilla on-location shooting in the Black neighborhood that leaves its seams visible — production texture as politics — the L.A. Rebellion habit Smith adopts in her staging/visible-seams approach.
- La Jetée (1962) — A narrative built almost entirely from arrested still photographs, positing the frozen image as a hedge against death and disappearance — the exact conceptual charge Drylongso gives the Polaroid.
- Blow-Up (1966) — The photographer-protagonist whose prints are scrutinized as evidence of a reality the naked eye missed — photography-as-investigation, which Drylongso recasts as a photography student cataloguing men she fears will be erased.
- Bicycle Thieves (1948) — The neorealist method the L.A. Rebellion explicitly built on: nonprofessional actors, real streets, and the dignity of everyday poverty rendered without genre machinery.
- Losing Ground (1982) — An early independent feature authored from a Black woman intellectual-artist's point of view, modeling the interior, image-making female protagonist Smith centers in Pica.
- She's Gotta Have It (1986) — The low-budget 16mm Black-indie feature blueprint — a self-financed debut whose scrappy monochrome/color economy proved this scale of authorship was viable outside the studio system.
- Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. (1992) — A Black woman director's shoestring realist portrait of a young protagonist speaking in her own vernacular and framing — the same first-person neighborhood authorship, contemporaneous with Drylongso's making.
- Smoke (1995) — Auggie's daily photographs of one street corner as an obsessive archive of ordinary life against loss — the same emblem of photography-as-preservation that drives Pica's project.
- Medicine for Melancholy (2008) — A desaturated, sun-washed Bay Area two-hander of Black interiority inside a gentrifying city — inheriting Drylongso's regional specificity and intimate, indie-scale neighborhood realism.
- Fruitvale Station (2013) — An Oakland-specific docu-realist portrait that turns the film itself into an archive mourning an endangered Black man's last day — Drylongso's archive-against-disappearance made literal and biographical.
- Moonlight (2016) — Color-forward, tender portraiture that treats Black manhood as fragile and worth preserving, with naturalistic near-nonprofessional performance — the emotional and cinematographic extension of Smith's endangered-manhood theme.
- Pariah (2011) — Bradford Young's expressive, warm-hued color cinematography wrapped around an intimate first-person Black coming-of-age — the same authored gaze and painterly-realist palette Smith pioneered on 16mm.
- An Oversimplification of Her Beauty (2012) — A moving-image artist collapsing photography, personal archive, and essay into a hybrid feature — extending Smith's dual identity as gallery artist and narrative filmmaker.