In this project, Elena Guzman explored the way Black women and non-binary people through the Caribbean and its diaspora use spiritual and ritual performance within African Diasporic Religions, including Santeria, Haitian Vodou, Puerto Rican Espiritismo, 21 Divisions, and Obeah, as a means to forge interstitial geographies of the African diaspora. Elena Guzman is an Afro-Boricua filmmaker, educator, and scholar raised in the Bronx with deep roots in the LES. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Cornell University and is an Assistant Professor in the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department and Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington. Her manuscript, "Chimera Geographies: Black Feminist Borderland Performances," focuses on the way Black women and non-binary people throughout the African diaspora use ritual performance in African diaspora religion as a means to forge Black feminist borderlands through spiritual crossings. Her work has been published in Feminist Anthropology, NACLA, and Cultural Anthropology’s Screening Room.
This event took place October 31, 2023.
Full transcript:
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: Honoring the Dead, Black Film as Ritual Praxis. October 31, 2023.
SPEAKER 3: And I thought, what am I going--
ANN BRAUDE: Good afternoon. Please keep enjoying your lunch. And get some food, if you haven't gotten some food already. But I'm going to go ahead and, while you're munching, give an introduction so that we can get to the event of the day.
It's not that often that the Women's Studies in Religion Program actually manages to line up with the calendar. But here we are on the eve of the Day of the Dead and all Hallows' Eve and all those other things that people are celebrating to honor the dead in this talk by Elena Herminia Guzman.
And we're so happy to have Elena with us this year in the Women's Studies in Religion Program. She is assistant professor at Indiana University, Bloomington in the Department of African-American and African Diaspora Studies and Anthropology.
But if they have a film program, I predict they will shortly be coming after her for a joint appointment because she did her doctorate at Cornell in sociocultural anthropology, with a specialization in ethnographic film. And in addition to quite a few peer reviewed publications, she has also made two feature length-- is that right? Feature length films.
The first one that she did while she was at Cornell is called Bronx Lives. And it is a collaborative film project exploring the urban landscape of homelessness in the Bronx area of New York City. And the second one, which I believe she's going to tell you about today is called Smile4Kime. And it came out this year. And it's a collaborative feature documentary that explores the intersections of race, gender, and mental health.
So thank you so much. I hope-- I don't know if I messed up your slides here. But I return the power to you, Elena.
[APPLAUSE]
DR. ELENA HERMINIA GUZMAN: Here we go. [LAUGHS] Wonderful. Thank you, everyone, for being here. As we celebrate this particular moment, it just so happened to align with the presentation that I'm doing that is called Honoring the Dead, Black Film as Ritual Praxis.
So I started building altars before I even knew what an altar was. My father is a Born Again Christian, but he grew up around the traditions of Puerto Rican espiritismo and Santeria. He would always proudly talk about his mother and grandmother as powerful brujas or witches. Little did he know that this bruja lineage would continue with me.
When I was a child, I would grab my favorite toys, flowers, pictures of loved ones, and put them on a shelf. I had no idea why I was doing it, but something about the collection of all that I held to be precious felt important to me. And now that I'm older and intentionally build altars for my ancestors and spirit guides, I see that the little bruja in me was attempting to demarcate special spaces of reverence.
Unbeknownst to me, my ancestors were guiding me in early practices of altar building, shaping and shifting my interests so that by the time I got older, I would understand the magic of altars.
In Black Indigenous Native cultures throughout the world, honoring the dead is a critical practice of life. The dead are not entities to be afraid of or cast away, instead, the dead, the muertos, the egun are to be honored and lived with in community. Through offerings of music, water, prayers, and more, we make the dead a part of our daily living.
In New Orleans, when a beloved member of the community dies, second line bands with trumpets dancers and performers take to the streets to celebrate life and honor a life that has passed. An inner city neighborhoods, where police brutality takes the lives of Black youth, the flickering light of a candle on the sidewalk holds the memory of a lost future.
In much of Europe and the Americas, this moment that we are in right now, from October 31 to November 2, are days that honor the thin veil between the spiritual and the physical worlds. Altars are filled with pictures, food, and other memories to represent the love and ongoing relationship between the living and the dead during Dia De Los Muertos and Fet Gede, which we'll see-- which is a celebration in Haiti.
In Jamaica and other parts of the anglophone Caribbean, nine nights is a ritual celebration that marks a transition of a person's spirit from the physical to the spiritual world.
We honor our dead because death does not mark an end, but simply a new beginning. It is a sacred moment within the circularity of life that marks a transformation. These performative and material rituals that I shared with you are altars to the dead. They provide us a framework for navigating the immaterial and the internal, death, grief, and the divine.
After death catapults those left behind into a state of disassociation and fragmentation, the creative work of culturally specific rituals offers a guide for putting the pieces together in a new form. Altars marked for the dead are worlds of being. It's not simply an ordering of objects, but an intentional marking of space, fire, water, air, Earth. Candles offer light. Water acts as a portal. Air delivers messages. And Earth ground spirits in their journey to the physical world.
Altars not only honor but hone and evoke sacredness. They serve as transcendent spaces between planes of existence, crossing from this plane of existence to a spiritual one, where ancestors spirits, Lua, Egun, and Orisha connect us to different times and spaces. We gain access to sacred knowledge of the past, present, and future. We remember, we connect with those who have passed but are no longer in the physical world. We transcend and we act.
In this lecture, I will be focusing on film as a multi-sensorial altar that transcends linearity and localities, allowing the dead to be active agents within different time spaces. In particular, I will define the concept of Black ritual film, which I argue is a specific genre of film made by and for Black artists and practitioners that seek to create ritual space through their art.
Critical to Black ritual filmmaking is what I call a multi-sensorial theory of the flesh, by which creators and the dead use the senses as a way to create affective and spiritually charged environments with their films. In creating ritual space through film, artists use the dead to facilitate spaces of healing. By embracing a praxis of dreaming, healing, and creation, Black ritual films have the power to visualize and create non-linear time spaces of Black being, belonging, and liberation.
The definition purpose and structure of ritual has long been debated amongst anthropologists and religious studies scholars. From being a tool of community unity to representing a culture's moral ethos to the mundaneness of habitual everyday action, the importance of ritual has been approached from many angles. However, at its most basic, I see ritual within the religious and spiritual realm as the doing of the sacred, that is, actions done with the intent to bring a person in alignment with an aspect of the sacred and the divine.
Whether through a prayer, a gesture, or a communal activity, ritual seeks to use forces of energy, Earth, and spirit to bridge the divide between the spiritual and the physical worlds. When a person opens a holy book to pray, they use breath and air to align with and embody the knowledge of the sacred. When a person lights a candle to honor a loved one who has passed, they use fire to activate spiritual energy to serve as a space of memory and to bring the dead in community with the living. This is the work of ritual.
As M Jacqui Alexander explains, in practice, the daily living of the sacred ideal or the daily living of the sacred in practice occurs in the most simple of X of recognition, such as pouring of libations for and greeting the Lua, attending to them on days of the week that bear their signature, feeding ancestors first with the same meal we feed ourselves as a way of placing the purpose of our existence back with its source, as a gesture of mutual exchange, and as a way of giving thanks, and asking to be sustained. Building an altar to mark sacred ground and focus energies within the home. Constructing a place to work to touch down, discard, pull in, and practice reciprocity. And participating in collective ceremony.
Altars open up sensory worlds, whether the smell of sweet cologne, the feeling of heat from a candle, the taste of rum and spirits, the sound of a whispered prayer, the sight of an ancestral apparition. It is through the senses that an altar comes alive. It's a synesthetic environment where sight may come in the form of a smell or the feeling of goosebumps, where touch may reveal sounds. And this is why art plays an important role within ancestor revering.
Art is the making of the divine. Within the religion of Ifa, each human, animal, plant, and inanimate object is imbued with the power of the supreme being. Ashe, as it is known, is a life force. When one exclaims ashe, they are saying the divine into being.
The concept reflects the African diasporic ethos of divine utterance in which words have the power to bring things into reality. Not only can words bring divinity into reality, but so can creation. In many African diasporic religious traditions, art is an outward manifestation of the divine, and thus, has the power to bring realities into being. Divine art foregrounds the sensory as an entryway into divine realms.
Within this framework, I see Black film as an expression of the divine that uses the sensory to bridge spiritual and physical realms. Black ritual film is a particular genre of experimental film created by and for Black creatives to open spaces of sacred knowledge, community, memory, history, and healing.
At the core of Black ritual film is what Tina Campt calls a Black gaze, which is quote, "neither a depiction of Black folks or Black culture. It is a gaze that forces viewers to engage blackness from a different and discomforting vantage point," unquote. Black ritual film doesn't just show ritual, it does the work of ritual.
Unlike ethnographic films that explore and analyze ritual within a sociocultural framework, Black ritual films create sensory spiritual worlds that allow people to remember, pray, be in community, and heal.
Critical to the creation of Black ritual film is what I call a multi-sensorial theory of the flesh. It is both a theory and a method in which the sensory is used to relay the sacred knowledge of the flesh and service of spirit.
Within a religious context, both the Torah and the Christian Bible have defined the flesh as a site of sin. In his part-- and it is this part of us that becomes alienated from the divine. And here are some examples of different Bible passages-- different passages that define the flesh as sinful. And I'll focus on the last one. "The flesh fuels sin. The acts of the flesh are obvious, sexual immorality, impurity, and debauchery, idolatry and witchcraft, hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy, drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the Kingdom of God."
Within religious texts, the flesh is viewed as a part-- as the part of ourselves and desires that alienate us from the divine. But women of color feminist scholars have attempted to reclaim definitions of the flesh. Feminist Chicana scholar Cherry Moraga defines the flesh as quote, "one where the physical realities of our lives, our skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longings all fused to create a politic born out of necessity," unquote.
For women of color feminist scholars, the flesh is one that is political. It is embodied and is bound to the land. This represents a distinct break within Cartesian notions of-- in which the body mind are split, and instead, recognizes land and the systems of power as co-constitutive of the body.
It is what Anna Maria Laura calls body lands, the Afro-indigenous belief that our bodies are not separate but a part of the land and the spirits around us. This is a theory of the flesh. It is a space of empowerment rather than alienation.
Black feminist scholars, such as Hortense Spillers and Tiffany Lethabo King, have attempted to understand the flesh by considering the experiences of the flesh within the framework of the transatlantic slave trade. The flesh is the pre-discursive Black body before it has been contained and defined by the schemas of racism, gender, sexism, patriarchy, and other systems of oppression.
Black flesh is the location at which whiteness wages its struggle for power and captivity of the Black and Native other. And because of this, the flesh becomes also a site of liberation. A multi-sensorial theory of the flesh is one that creates sensory spiritual worlds to both recognize and bring into being spaces of liberation and healing, where sensory feelings of pleasure, ecstasy, and joy are not sinful, but instead, bring us further in alignment with the divine. I see the flesh not only as the physical materiality of the body, but also the site of the metaphysical, that which exists within and beyond the physical body.
Black ritual films employ a multi-sensosy theory of the flesh as a way to foreground the sacred knowledge that emerges from the sites of our minds, lands, bodies, spirits that are deemed sinful, contaminated, and in need of being contained. The sensory rendering of the flesh thus becomes a visual mapping of freedom.
I came to the idea of virtual filmmaking in my own practice making the film called Smile4Kime. Smile4Kime is a short hybrid documentary that uses animation and live action footage to tell a story of how two friends transcend time, space, and their struggles with mental health to find that even beyond death, their friendship lives on.
The film is deeply personal and shares my own story, grieving my friend, Kime, after she passed away in 2016. In many ways, the film became the medium through which I was able to express my grief and to visualize futures-- to visualize futures that weren't going to happen and honor her memory.
The film draws from my own spiritual practice as an espiritista within the practice of Puerto Rican espiritismo, which is also known as spiritism. Spiritism is a practice that is made popular throughout the Latin America. And it was made popular through the writings of Allen Kardec.
Throughout Latin America, believers create what are known as bovedas or sacred altar spaces. And these bovedas are used as a way to communicate with the dead and spirit guides. The altar is a space that allows us to make the dead a part of our daily living.
After my friend, Kimberly, passed away, my boveda was a place that I would honor and commune with her. I would put out coffee and M&Ms, which were her favorite candy, as libations and offering to her spirit. Soon, my boveda practice would move from a physical altar space to a visual one to this film.
So here is a short animation that shows the altar that was animated in the film itself.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
- Was there ever a time when you just felt like it was too much?
- Too much in terms of?
- Like with everything that I was dealing with and just the idea that I could possibly not be here anymore, and what that would mean, and how different that would be for you in your life and stuff. Was there ever a time when you just wanted to give up or you felt like it was just too much?
- It wasn't fair that people could come in and out of your life to the extent that they wanted to or interact with you only in a kind of distant way or whatever it was more convenient to them. I wanted you to be in my life because I appreciated everything that you brought to my life. And I was going to do it in a way that wasn't half in, half out. It was going to be like all in.
[MURMURING]
- I always feel like I'll feel better if-- but all those ifs are so far away, like if I have my two year degree, if I have a husband, if I have kids, or something like that. And I just don't know what it feels like to be happy for long enough to accomplish any of those things.
I figured if I couldn't give anything to the world or make anybody proud or feel good about myself, then there was no reason for my existence. I mean, whatever energy I had when I woke up was spent figuring out how I was going to kill myself.
I get frustrated for myself and other people because I feel like everybody's trying to fix me. And I'm unfixable. It ends up becoming more about them than it is you because they want to be the hero. And if you die, then they're going to feel guilty. And my depression is not about anybody else, it's about me.
- Was there ever a time when you just wanted to give up or you felt like it was just too much?
[END PLAYBACK]
So in making this film, I made the intentional decision not to show the physical altar that I dedicated to Kime, but instead, to render it through animation. This decision has much to do with the limitations of camera and technology to capture that which is sacred and spiritual. Had the camera actually captured the altar space, what we would have seen is a staging of objects, a representation of an altar.
But when I create an altar space, just like we saw in this animation, an entire new world opens up for me. When I light a candle at my altar, it is not simply the act of striking a match and lighting a wick, but instead, an entire world opens up for me.
While live action footage can capture a moment in time, it is unable to capture the unseen. By using animation, Smile4Kime represents the lived and affective experiences of these ritual and spiritual worlds.
In making Smile4Kime, I began to realize the kind of film that I was making was a different kind of film. In the same way that I collected items as a child and built altars unknowingly, in this film, I was engaging in a praxis that I didn't have words for. I began searching for other kinds of films that did the work of ritual. And I slowly began curating a list of films, talking to film makers, and soon realized that the kind of filmmaking that I was engaging in was not a singular experience but a collective one.
I saw other Black women filmmakers from different locations within the African diaspora, creating ritual films as a way to change the visual landscape in which practice-- in which our practices are represented and also visualized geographies of liberation and healing.
To further illustrate the potentials of Black ritual film and its use of sensory theory of the flesh, I will examine two films made by Black women and non-binary artists. In reading these films together, my goal is to demonstrate a particular practice of film making that uses ritual to create alternative geographies of diaspora. Within these borderland spaces exist freedom and liberation created through ritual practice.
The first film is water ritual number one, an urban rite of purification by Barbara McCullough. It is a short experimental film that follows a young woman performing a series of rituals on a desolate urban landscape. Shot in black and white 16 millimeter film stock, the film itself is accented, as we see in this photo right here, with infrared color contrast, creating an otherworldly ethereal aesthetic and spiritual present.
The soundscape has jazz motifs and improv in the background, and serves as a ritual landscape accentuating the diasporic significance of improv and ritual practice. The film focuses on gestural and embodied aspects of ritual. Rather than representing a particular religion or practice, the rituals in the film represent a mosaic of African spirituality and culture that took its own shape in the new world. From the soulful jazz of Stevie Wonder to the grinding of maize or corn, each item is a sacred calling to the vast geographies of the African diaspora.
Explaining how she decided upon the ritual shown in the film, the Director Barbara McCullough states, quote, "I wanted to manifest what was going on in my consciousness and also unconscious level, but I wanted to do this by way of honoring my ancestral cellular memory, because I felt very much that there were entities around me, thrusting me in a very gentle way, but to do more, to seek more," unquote.
And the background of a desolate urban landscape in Los Angeles, we see a series of decaying buildings that hold the memories of African-American communities who were evicted by the city through eminent domain. This location was the site of a freeway building project of I-105 in Watts, California, and remained abandoned for decades. The location served as inspiration for the Director McCullough because it visually represented the paradoxes of modernity.
In the film, a young woman sits open leg on the cement floor around a circular sacred space of objects. We see cowry shells, coconuts, a Stevie Wonder record, and other random objects belonging to the desolate space itself.
And within this sacred circle are remnants of memory, ritual, and history. The woman picks up mais and begins to grind it into dust. As a ritual action, the grinding of mais is a manipulation and extraction of the powers that reside in the natural world for ritual purposes. The young woman then claps the mais in her hand, activating the sacred power of the mais by creating friction with the Earth and in doing so, releasing energy.
Bringing her ritual to a close, the camera then focuses in on the young woman as she squats down and urinates on the ground. The close up image is slightly distorted with infrared colors and uses negative contrast to-- so that we're not able to see the full picture. We see a stream of urine coming from the woman's body. This particular ritual foregrounds how the flesh, and in this case, fluid are critical to ritual practice. Urination is the body's own internal purification process. Yet, at the same time within this ritual, the woman's bodily fluids represent the purification of the urban landscape that was allowed to decay in the name of urban modernization.
Water and fluids are a critical part to ritual practice because it also feeds the dead, it contains power of various entities and spirits, and it can act as a portal between the living and the dead. The focus on urine as a purifying force challenges religious notions of fluids being a site of disease and contagion, and instead, a site of healing and purification.
As Mary Douglas notes, Christian theology sees impurity and uncleanliness as belonging to the realm of the wicked. Many Abrahamic religions take up this ethos whether through the practice of washing certain body parts before prayer, restrictions around menstruation, or rules around sexual hygiene. Bodily fluids like sweat and urine are understood as sites of impurity and contagion.
Yet, in water ritual number one, the flesh, or in this case, the urine is presented as a site of liberation. From Ocala, urine serves as a purification of the urban landscape that displaced hundreds of families in the name of modernity. Within the site of the flesh, Black women's bodies and excrements purify landscapes of urbanization in order to foreground the history of African-American communities that live there.
In this film, the camera is not a spectator, but rather a participant in the ritual, inviting the viewer into the ceremony to remember a history that was erased. When a ritual film is created, the relationship between audience and filmmaker changes. No longer are the audience members passive observers, but they are invited into the ritual.
Every screening of the film involves a ritual act of remembering and connecting to sacred knowledges. It requires an embodied response that engages your various sensory registers in the same way that an altar does. Ritual film not only asks you to participate, but also to act. The sacred knowledge in which you are given requires action.
When one engages in ritual to access sacred knowledge, the expectation is that the messages you receive will be applied to your life. For example, if you go to a spiritual store or how they're referred to botanicas, and you get a reading, the person divining the messages will offer you a series of advice for your life, ranging from your love life, job, health, your past experiences, and possible futures that can be diverted.
And at the end of the reading, the diviner might give you what I call a spiritual prescription. So they'll say something like light a candle for seven days to this saint, and wear this stone whenever you're outside.
While these messages and these kinds of readings are individualized to the person's past, present, and future, and destiny, a Black ritual films offer scripts for community action. It visualizes Black diasporic belonging, mapping landscapes in which we are loved, and community, and healing the landscapes around us.
This film posits Black women's bodies as a site of healing and purification. Water ritual number one uses fragmentation as a practice of sensory world building. The fractured images created by close ups and particular angles move us in and out of the ritual space of the film.
Rather than presenting the ritual as linear or as a particular set of movements, the film fractures our view and presentation of coherent time space. The focus on gestures of ritual like grinding, clapping, and prayer allow us to be enmeshed within a synesthetic affective environment. The sound of a clap activates energies and feelings of touch for the viewer. The sight of being-- the site of power being-- powder being blown into the air activates a sense of touch and smell.
Like any ritual or ceremony, what the audience takes from the ritual depends on the person's own embodied response and history. But collectively, in watching this film, we are being asked as a community to remember and consider the purification that we may need individually and collectively.
Explaining the ritual intention of the film, Barbara McCullough states, quote, "I wanted to discover my link with the female person to ritual, but also to practice that would really enable me to go through a cathartic practice, whereby I was cleansing and going through that ritual process. So that was really the beginning for me to open the idea of this film. Maybe I can perform my own ritual, and I can go through my own cleansing, but not just for me, for my society, other Black people to enable us to move from one space of maybe lack of clarity to another space, where we can purge and clean and clarify and dispel societal ills and not be stuck in them," unquote.
And watching water ritual number one, looking becomes a political act. It's not simply a matter of seeing, hearing, sensing, and understanding, but instead, it's a conversation by which the viewer and the filmmaker engage in a dialogue, one that is deeply personal and dependent upon the viewer's own embodied engagement, and one that is communal as well, a dialogue that the audience takes away from watching film.
Water ritual number one is a ritual purification and remembering whereby the flesh is a sight to remember those who have been dispossessed, but also a sacred place by which these toxic histories and systems of power can be purified, ejected, and cleansed on an individual and communal basis.
The second film I'll be analyzing is called Between Starshine and Clay, and it's by an organization called Lead to Life, which is a racial, and environmental justice organization that uses ritual and ceremony to create spaces of Black wellness.
The title of the film takes inspiration from Lucille Clifton's poem called Won't You Celebrate With Me? In the poem, she says, "What did I see to be except myself? I made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay. My one hand holding tight my other hand. Come celebrate with me that every day, something has tried to kill me, but failed-- and has failed."
The poem represents the core mission of the ritual at the heart of this film. Between starshine and clay, between the heavens and Earth exists a horrid reality in which Black people are constantly faced with the possibility of death. Structural and state violence are constant realities, yet, Lucille Clifton still asks us, won't you celebrate with me?
The ceremony in this film is a collective community ritual that took place in 2019 on Martin Luther King Junior Day at Oakland City Hall to commemorate the life of Oscar Grant and the countless other people who have been murdered by police.
Using Christina Sharp's definition of the wake as interludes, Between Starshine and Clay uses ritual to do the work of the wake. Sharp sees the wake as quote, "Living in the afterlife of property," unquote, by which Black people must exist within the imminence of death/dying. Thus, wake work is work that seeks to depict and disrupt the paradox of Black being within the afterlife of slavery.
The film states, quote, "In collaboration with community members across California who have been impacted by police brutality, domestic terrorism, gun violence, Indigenous displacement, and environmental racism, we gathered to imagine our people in the land well and cast our prophecy into the stars."
The film is a ritual remembrance that seeks to illuminate the violence of police brutality while also creating a space for people to celebrate Black life within the paradox of Black death. Throughout the 12-minute film, we are moved between multiple time spaces. The first is the ritual space and the ceremony that took place in Oakland, commemorating the lives lost to police brutality and gun violence. In these clips, we see community members gathering, altars erected to memorialize the dead, songs, dancing, and storytelling. And we also see the ceremonial destruction and transformation of a gun.
Audience members who are watching this community ritual are invited-- through the film itself, audience members who are watching the film and the community ritual are invited to a moment of the past within the present in order to imagine alternative futures free of police and state violence. The ceremony is a call to action for both the people who attended the ceremony in person and the people who are participating in this ritual virtually on the screen. The audience members, again, are called to action not as passive viewers, but instead, as active agents.
When a ritual is performed, a series of spiritual currents or what are known as corrientes are conjured and coexist within a ritual space. These spiritual currents represent the presence of spiritual entities. Corrientes or spiritual currents can be a felt phenomenon, for examples, a tingle or a strange feeling in the body, a whisper that you may hear. By some, it might be heard or spoken through a person, and sometimes, it might be shown in a flame or in water put on the altar.
In her book, Electric Santeria, Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesus explores how media and technology are changing the religious landscape of Santeria transnationally. She argues the filming and transmission of rituals allows practitioners to partake within the ritual from afar.
Through technology, electrical currents of the film allow viewers to also experience the spiritual currents of the ritual space of the ceremony that was recorded. In other words, technology has the power to transmit the visual sonic and spiritual currents to the person watching the film. Therefore, there is a residue of the spiritual currents that can be felt by viewers.
In watching Between Starshine and Clay, viewers become active participants of this ritual through the spiritual currents of the ritual itself. The sensory environment of the film creates a spiritual space in which the viewer can feel and participate in the act of remembering the dead.
In addition to the ritual we see on screen, the film offers an alternative visual space filled with ritual performance. In this space, we see four people dressed in all white with their faces painted, holding shovels, moving and dancing in ceremony together towards the beach.
The shovels represent the disconnection and dispossession of Black and Native people from the land. The ceremony uses shovels as a hope for a future in which we are connected to the land.
Within African diasporic religions, land is a critical part of our practice. We protect the water because it feeds and nourishes the land and our bodies, but also because in the water exists symbis, [INAUDIBLE] The water is where the spirits of our dead go. To protect the land is to protect our spirits is to protect our ancestors and is protect our futures and past.
As they reached the water in the ceremony, they hold a metal star. The metal stars being used in the ceremony are the stars that were created during the Oakland Community ritual when they ceremoniously transformed the metal of a gun into stars.
The use of fire ritually transformed the violence of the gun into the stars of Clifton's poem. The gun representing state violence and land dispossession is ritually cleansed with the waters of the ocean.
Describing the goal of the film, the artist write, "May this film inspire you to return to ceremony the healing power of community, the divinity of Black people, and the sacredness of all life. May it give respite and hope to other families mourning their beloved ones. We will continue to speak their names. Ashe," unquote.
The sacredness of the film seeks to inspire, give respite, and hope, and serve as a space of memory for the dead. In this rendering, the flesh is the site at which we recognize the paradox of Black life and death, and the dead who are taken away by state violence. The flesh is also the site in which we heal this immense paradox through ritual.
So to offer concluding thoughts, I'd like to make a brief offering to this ideal, this altar here-- this visual altar here, about the concept of Black ritual film. Liberation is a battle that's fought on multiple fronts. As a practitioner of different African diasporic religions and practices, I see the role that ritual art and film plays in our path to liberation.
Through film, we have the potential to enact the sacred, to bring our minds and bodies closer to the divine, to recognize Black as divine, to honor the dead is not to focus on death but instead, in the case of Black ritual film is to focus on Black aliveness.
Black ritual films about community and it's about healing. Collective grief is all around us. What I see as the power of Black ritual film is that it allows us to engage in ritual in order to envision futures of Black liberation. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
ANN BRAUDE: Will you take questions?
DR. ELENA HERMINIA GUZMAN: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.
ANN BRAUDE: Do you want to moderate it yourself?
DR. ELENA HERMINIA GUZMAN: Should I-- yeah, sure.
ANN BRAUDE: OK.
DR. ELENA HERMINIA GUZMAN: Yeah, [INAUDIBLE]
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] are visiting. All right. I got a mic. Yeah, thank you for this really insightful presentation that brings us both into your work and how it's connected to other work that exists out there, and that's doing similar labor, if you will.
I wanted to know if you could speak to this notion of the dead as collaborator that I feel like you bring up. I'm wondering, like, did it come up for you in the making of this film? And then beyond that, how can we think about it in relationship to Black film as ritual?
DR. ELENA HERMINIA GUZMAN: Thank you for that question. So it's interesting because this is the exact topic that we're talking about in my class this week. So it's fresh in my mind. But we are reading the book, Solimar Otero, who's actually a WSRP fellow here. Her book is called Archives of Conjure.
And I had mentioned in class, I think one of the biggest contributions of that book is that she posits the dead as active agents within our scholarship. And I think that's really important because if you think about history, if you think about the archive, oftentimes, we piece together these stories of people who have passed with the limited information that we have.
And so what-- in thinking about the dead as active agents, it's really not only piecing together what is left in the material world, but also, how can we bring the spiritual in it as well? And so how can spiritual methods, such as divination, spiritual materiality, material culture, how can all of these things come in to create a more fuller picture?
And so I see the dead as active agents because in all of these films, the dead are an active part of telling their story. And so for people who practice within these religions, it's very well known that if you're going to be doing anything on the dead, you have to ask permission first. And so I couldn't give this presentation about my film or talk about my film or I couldn't have done this film without the permission of my friend who passed, not only in the time when she was living, but also afterwards as well.
So this permission, I think, people get in a variety of ways but is primarily through divination. And so when I was making this film, it came to me in a lot of different ways in Smile4Kime. So as I mentioned, the film became a site for me to both mourn and grieve her and also became like a living altar to me. And so because of that, I started receiving lots of messages from her that helped guide the making of the film.
So the first one that's in the film that I didn't show but is an important part of the film is a dream that I had after she passed away. And for me, this represented the message that she gave me about the conditions of her passing because at that point, I didn't know. I just knew that she passed away. But it represented a really important spiritual message for me.
And so I decided to include that in the film as a alternative site of knowledge and thinking about the dead, and also the messages that the dead are giving us as well. And so we use animation to render that because it was-- obviously, it's a dream so it's hard to recreate through just a performance or acting or something like that.
So there were many moments in the film in that sense. And then there were also moments where myself and other people in the film who were practitioners as well would do divination and commune with Kime, my friend, just to be like, OK, how are you thinking?
So throughout the making of this film, just dreams and messages I would get sent. And so that is the practice of I think making the dead active agents within the making of the film. And I think within-- more broadly, within Black ritual filmmaking, it's also a critical practice as well because the dead are not so much a haunting in the kind of negative way that we think. We think of haunting as, oh, this scary thing that we don't know what to do with. But it's more so a haunting on the conditions of colonialism and racism. It's a haunting that is trying to bring those to light. Rather than the dead being the hunted, it's the conditions which allowed them to be in the position of having to transition, that is the haunting that is being illuminated through Black ritual film.
Yeah. Sorry.
AUDIENCE: The microphone is already there. Sorry.
AUDIENCE: Thank you very much, Elena. It was really interesting, especially after I watched that movie. I couldn't-- I hardly could concentrate on what you are saying. My mind invited me to come back to those images. It was really beautiful. Thank you.
My question is about the very rituals that you talked about and the metaphysics behind the rituals. You said that the community categorizes people into bad, good, or moral and immoral when you speak about purifying and the impure people. But when it comes to the dead realm, the realm of those who have passed away, it seems that everything is completely bright, everything is completely-- entirely good, and there is no talk about someone who has died and she or he has been impurified.
How does the community encounter when I die and I'm not purified before I die? How do they encounter this? And is there any metaphysics about my body when I die? Is my body a site for any continuation of being purified? Or is it regarded as something dark or something that should be purified?
DR. ELENA HERMINIA GUZMAN: Yeah, thank you. I think it's-- the answer to that is very much going to depend on the spiritual tradition. What I would say in my own practice of Puerto Rican espiritismo, there are these ideas of-- there's this idea that there's all these spirits that are around us. There's elevated spirits. There are prophets. There are spirits that haven't transitioned, that are still trying to stay on this physical realm. There are spirits who are malignant and just seeking to take your light and life force. So there's lots of different kinds of spirits.
And so they're not seen as good or bad. They're just seen as entities. And then it's up to us to determine how exactly we navigate that relationship. And so let's say that there is a malignant spirit that is causing me issues for some reason, it's not like this is a bad spirit that needs to be cast to hell, right? It's not like that kind of idea. It's more like, maybe this is a spirit that needs water. Maybe this is a spirit that needs light in prayer.
And so I think that the idea of purification in the dead, that divide or that binary of good and evil doesn't necessarily exist. And so when someone passes away, they're not necessarily absolved of everything that happened to them in life. It's their mission in the afterlife to seek an elevation-- to seek elevation, essentially. And so there's two different spaces.
And the spirits who seek elevation and are able to get elevation, those are the ones that can guide us in this physical realm. Everyone else, we have to be a little bit more careful. [LAUGHS] So that is just, like I said, dependent on the tradition. But I do think that there is something important about the moral judgment that comes with this idea of purity and contagion or whatever the kind of ways that we've been taught to think about the dead that that's not necessarily something that exists within the spiritual practice itself, it's more so just the kind of continuum of what is possible.
And then the body itself is seen as the physical vessel. And once that body-- once the spirit has been ritually allowed to ascend, then those ideas of purification are not-- excuse me, not placed onto the body anymore, that's just the vessel in which it no longer exists in.
AUDIENCE: Thank you so much for this presentation, Professor Guzman. My name is Rebecca. I'm a student in Professor Guzman's class. I'd love if you could speak more to the idea of the camera as not a spectator but a participant in ritual practice. And what responsibilities that puts on the filmmaker when you are bringing the camera into a sacred ritual space? Because I think one of the recurring themes that came up in the presentation is that we don't want to be like a voyeur, especially with sacred rituals and practice that-- practices that not-- that aren't, sometimes, aren't meant to be seen. I think that's why you use animation in certain spaces. Yeah. I'm thinking of talking more to this idea of the camera as an active participant in ritual practice.
DR. ELENA HERMINIA GUZMAN: Yeah, absolutely. I think that-- so I guess, thinking in my own experience of the films that I've seen that present ritual from an ethnographic perspective is that I started to get very frustrated because its goal was to create or attempt to recreate the massiveness of what a ritual is. And so I noticed that even though it could show-- it could be a five-hour film if it wanted to, and it could show every single aspect of the ritual, but it can never fully capture actually what that ritual was and the worlds that opened up.
And so with the animation that I showed, what I wanted to show was how when I sit at my altar, a whole world opens. And so that's why the flowers go into these memories and these worlds. I wanted to use this kind of alternative means of representation for that. And so I think that there's limitations when it comes to documentary ethnographic films because they are-- there's a concern, as with any science, with a real-- quote unquote, "real representation."
And so in making this, I was less-- I was less concerned about what real meant in that sense and more about what real meant to me. And so in making the choice to not actually document my camera, there was a refusal that happened there on my part.
And I think with the case of other films as well, really, the ideal, I think, for the camera is to be aware of where you're invited, where you're not invited, but also to have a deep understanding of how this representation could be very limited, and what can you do to try to make that more robust or try to represent another kind of aspect of it. I think that's the big question that I think filmmakers people who are going into ritual spaces need to ask because these spaces are-- they're hidden for a lot of different reasons. And there needs to be a respect for that. And at the same time, I think there are other ways we can represent aspects of the ritual without directly filming them.
So for me, I see it as a kind of refusal that takes part on the part of the filmmaker or the filmer but also-- the person that's filming, but also I think it's-- you need to know or have a bit of a deeper knowledge about the religion itself, whether as an insider or outsider, whatever that means, but understanding what exactly it is that you're representing, how people understand it. I think that's where the value of ethnography can come in. And then after that, making decisions from that ethos rather than an ethos of a Western extractive point of view.
AUDIENCE: Thank you. This was-- this is really beautiful. So I had a couple of related questions. But first, I'd love to hear about the maker of the illustrations.
DR. ELENA HERMINIA GUZMAN: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: So yeah, so I was wondering if in some of the rituals, are there remnants or elements of Catholic or Christian traditions or maybe even-- maybe even from Islam? And then I'm already anticipating teaching your work in my sociology religion class, so I'm excited about this.
How or where do you distinguish between religious versus spiritual, since we're always brushing up against that binary? Because sometimes, you call them afrodiasporic religions, and other times, spiritual practices. So yeah, how do you-- how do you think about that?
AUDIENCE: Elena, can I just add in while you're helping us situate espiritismo. Allen Kardec, that just seems so out of context. So where does the dissemination of his ideas fit into this?
DR. ELENA HERMINIA GUZMAN: Yeah. So the illustration here is from one of the animators of my film, their name is Malachi Lilly. And they're a Black non-binary spirit worker. And so this illustration was-- is concept art for early part of the film when we were talking about what we wanted the altar to look like.
And so without telling them anything, I just asked them to make an altar space because it was just a concept art so it wasn't anything that needed to be accurate. And they made this. And it's something that I just fell in love with thereafter because it's-- they use their own kind of divination practice to think about what would be on the altar. And one of the figures that they present here is Our Lady of-- Our Lady of Regla. Sorry, I don't the word in English, a Catholic Saint. Our Lady of Regla, who is syncretized to the Orisha Yemaya. And so that is my spiritual mother in Santeria.
So before even knowing or asking me something that she was able to put into the altar. So this is a deeply kind of multifaceted history that's just here, all the layers of this film here. So I think that part also speaks to your second question about the kind of Christian Catholic aspects, which is that, of course, because of the slave trade and because a lot of African people and African descended people were banned from actually practicing their religions, a lot of practitioners, whether in lots of parts of the Caribbean and Latin America, but in Lucumi, Santeria, and Vodou, use Catholic saints as a mask for the African gods that they were praising.
And so Our Lady of Regla became-- was Yemaya. Jesus was syncretized to-- so people would put crosses on their altars, but it was actually supposed to be in praise of another Orisha named Babalu-Aye, who is like the Orisha of health. So all of these kind of aspects got hidden, I would say, within these altar spaces that looked very Christian Catholic, but held a different meaning to it.
So those parts were a secret language, but also, it became very much incorporated within the religion as well. So a lot of people who practice lucumi, espiritismo also have their other religious faiths as well. And so a lot of people are Catholics, they go to church, and then they have their sacred boveda altar as well. They don't see them as going against each other.
And so I think the interesting thing is with espiritismo, it's seen as a practice that goes very much in alignment with a lot of the major religions of the world because the idea is that we do not know the expanse of knowledge of this world. And so God create-- God not only created us, but they're spiritual entities as well. And then some people have the power to be able to relate to them and be in communion with them.
So people's bovedas, there's-- or at least in espiritismo, there's these ideas of you have-- every person has a court of spirits that guide them in particular. And they're broken down by race and culture. So there's the commission of-- that are called Gitanas, which is like means gypsy, but it's for the-- it talks about the Roma people.
So there's the commission of Gitanas. There's the commission of Native Americans. There's the commission of Congo. There's the commission of Arab, Asian. There's all of these different commissions. So you can have someone who has a Buddha on the altar right next to their cross. They're like a Christian cross. So that is not seen as contradictory in any way because of this history of just the international or the transnational world that these religions are coming from.
And so going to the question of Allen Kardec, I think that also is very similar. He falls in line with what I'm saying here in that Allen Kardec, he wrote these books and teachings, thinking about the science of spiritism and communicating with spirits. And they became so popular in Europe that they became then disseminated throughout Latin America, had their Spanish translations in Latin America, and became a practice, a kind of Creole practice, I would say, a creolized practice within Latin America.
So espiritismo is practiced in conjunction with a lot of other religions, African diasporic religions, including Santeria, Lucumi, Hoodoo, conjure, people will use these religions in conjunction, or Christianity, like I said, go to church and then go pray onto their altar. So that just became one of those things that because it was like such a-- because it was a practice that used the Bible so significantly within the praise of or within the communication of spirits, it became very popular throughout Latin America. So that's where Allen Kardec comes in.
And then to the question of religion versus spirituality, I don't have a good answer for that. What I would say is I was-- I am rifting off of what an African diasporic religion studies is known as ATR, so African traditions, religions, spiritualities. And so traditions are more those that are considered to be-- sorry, religions are considered to be those that have that kind of historic practice, where spirituality is more espiritismo, more so a practice that uses other religions as a background.
So-- but yeah, that's the only answer I have to that. I can't answer that. That feels like a big philosophical question that I don't have the answer to.
AUDIENCE: So in a lot of ways, you actually answered my question in answering verrines. But I wanted to ask a little bit more about how these traditions are situated in community, particularly, given community members who may have really strong allegiances in areas of Christianity that it's one thing--
I guess, I'm interested more about how Christianity, sometimes, boundary polices. And so what that looks like in family contexts, is it the case that basically practitioners don't see there as being a contradiction and so across families, that's the case. Or are there moments when somebody, because of their relationship to an evangelical or born again form of Christianity or to the Catholic Church where tension is created, how is that navigated?
I'm also interested in the tensions and dynamics between the liberatory aspects and mission and hope of the practices that you're talking about that are also part of Christian traditions, but Christian traditions also as part of a colonizing power and often, patriarchal power structure. So I guess, the last piece of that would also then be the gender dynamics of those spaces, and how those play out.
So basically, say more about what you were already talking about is I think the best way to put that.
DR. ELENA HERMINIA GUZMAN: One thing I will say is that with these practices that we see the use of syncretized creolized religions, where we see the use of saints and different Christian iconography, it was primarily in countries that had-- that were Catholic. And so I think there was this idea that the Catholics were like, OK, we'll turn our head and let you have your carnivals, [LAUGHS] but make sure you come back to church.
So I think that that is an important aspect of it. And so-- or sorry, excuse me, Catholicism, the reason why there was the ability to create that syncretizing between, let's say, Lucumi or Vodou, is because of the prominence of saints within Catholicism.
And so if you're praying to a saint, nobody's really going to ask a question, whereas in other religious sects, praying to saints is not something you just pray to God. So that-- I think that's-- that's, I think, an important distinction to make for sure is that Catholicism plays a really big part within the Christian aspect of a lot of these African diasporic religions.
And then let's see. Oh, in terms of the distinction, yeah, I think that is actually going to depend too, I think, evangelicals, depending on the-- I would-- I'm just going to give my family as an example. They absolutely never condone what I'm doing. They think of me very negatively, the evangelical part of my family, because of my religious beliefs. So I think that, of course, there's going to be that distinction within families. And I think a lot of it has to do with the teachings and beliefs of whatever specific Christianity that person subscribes to.
And then thinking more so about the tensions of the liberatory potential of these religions while also taking-- or also being connected with these religions that were used as tools of colonization, I think that makes me think of Christina Sharpe's work in thinking about the wake and the paradoxes of Black life.
And I think it's just a condition that seems like a paradox. But in reality, it's not a paradox. It's just how we've had to live and survive. And so these paradoxes become sites of liberation as well in the same way that the flesh was taught in such a negative way, the flesh then becomes a site of liberation as well.
So it's almost like a reclamation that happens through Christianity and through Christian ideology. And even if you think about Black Christian churches, the reclamation of these particular religions that were used for colonization, racism, white supremacy, there still is a power of liberation within those spaces as well.
So that's something that I talk about within the broader chapter, but I think it's really important. And I think it goes back to that idea of the paradox that Christina Sharpe talks about of the wake-- living in the wake afterlife of slavery. So--
And then gender was, there a specific? [LAUGHS]
AUDIENCE: Yeah, I was thinking-- I was thinking that one of the realities of Catholic experience is this extremely male hierarchy and this extremely active and powerful female laity that's doing a huge amount, especially as the population of Catholic priests shrink. Evangelical Christianity also has really strong patriarchal tendencies that exist in maybe a little bit less of a gender split there for a variety of reasons.
And so I was curious about where our practitioners of the-- and this could be different and obviously, in various Afro-Caribbean traditions, but how does-- I was wondering if this is-- if this is a space that is more for or controlled by women and non-binary folks, if this is equally shared, how it exists in tension with, again, more male hierarchical Christian spaces that people may also have allegiance to?
And I guess, you got this a little bit in what you were saying about the various forms of Christianity, but I'm thinking about evangelical or born again traditions layering on top, like coming into communities that are historically Catholic. And I'm wondering how that does or doesn't affect people's practices and the rituals that are available to them because it does-- you, in your answer, suggested that it does start forcing a choice. But as the religious tenor of broader communities change in terms of their Christian allegiances, what happens in terms of this aspect of folks ritual lives?
DR. ELENA HERMINIA GUZMAN: Yeah. I think-- so it's also going to primarily depend on the history of the religious practices as well. But in terms of-- African diasporic religions are often framed within having more liberatory potentials for gender and sexuality because there are a gender, non-gender deities, there are deities that have male, female paths, there are-- there's a inclusion or there deities that specifically have queer people as their children.
So it's often seen as being a more liberatory space, but of course, the imposition of patriarchy plays a huge part in it. And so for example, in Cuba, in the practice of Ifa in Lucumi-- of Lucumi, in-- women are only allowed to be priests up to a certain point. And so the highest priests of the religion are known as Babalawos. And it can only be men that are babalawos. And that very much has to do with the kind of Christian Catholic orientation of what Cuba was with Lucumi and then with that practice as well.
And so on the other hand, in Brazil, with Candomblé, which also is an Ifa practice, so they're coming from very similar backgrounds, women are allowed to be high priests. That restriction isn't allowed. And a lot of that actually has to do with the fact that there was a point in time in Brazil's history in which during slavery, a lot of the men were taken and killed. And so the only people left were women. And so they had to do a lot of the divining that, at that point, was only for men.
And so now you see in Brazilian Candomblé Ifa practice where women can be high priests, whereas in Lucumi, still, that's not the case. So definitely, these patriarchal gender hierarchies exist within the religion and are-- just depend as well on the specific region that it's coming from.
AUDIENCE: I wonder if we could-- I could take you in a slightly different direction. So I know, during the pandemic, a lot of religions, in some ways, moved online. We have religious practices, everything from virtually lighting a candle to puja to whole liturgies and masses and things.
Did we-- did you find any of that? And then could you reflect on if those types of practices existed in these traditions, how does that-- how do they fit with what you just said about the camera and then the engagement of the viewer and all these things that were very intentional in your filmmaking, but in these types of-- I mean, are there live streams of altar building or something that don't capture that, but nevertheless, are still acting upon the people participating in them? I'd just be interested to hear about that.
DR. ELENA HERMINIA GUZMAN: Yeah, there was definitely that shift as well. I think more broadly, just within the social media age, a lot of African diasporic religions have seen somewhat of a revival and that these practices which have historically been hidden a little bit difficult to get access to or know about are now online. And there's people who are proudly proclaiming themselves as witches when before, that would have been-- [LAUGHS] nobody would have said that, right?
So I think that that is one aspect as well. And one of the books that I talked about in my lecture, Electric Santeria, she is actually talking about a time of technology that's not even at this point. She's talking about when people would record it and then give tapes. So even through that process of technology, she was arguing that these kind of spiritual currents had the potential to be relayed beyond local locations themselves.
And so with social media, I think there's even more of a proliferation where the sharing of ritual is just so much more easier. And so I do think that that aspect of the technology still applies to it. The intentionality is probably not there in that same way, but I think there is that foundational belief that these rituals will have an effect on whoever sees it.
And so a lot of times, I'll see people who do tarot practice. And they'll say like, if you stopped on this video, it's because it was meant for you. So it's like the idea is that these ritual practices can be relayed even in this kind of social media age. And so I think people are shifting very much to that as well, and also thinking with the framework that the spiritual components can also be shared in liked on Facebook and Instagram. So that's definitely one aspect of it.
And then-- sorry, I think there's a second part to your question that I didn't write down. OK.
AUDIENCE: No, that was pretty much it. Thanks.
DR. ELENA HERMINIA GUZMAN: OK. [LAUGHS]
AUDIENCE: Elena, can-- oops. Can I push the gender question towards your own work? I mean, the clip you showed us was so moving. I mean, I think we were just all on the verge of tears. And that kind of exploration of female friendship is not something that is a common subject of film.
So I wanted to ask just about-- and you showed us only female filmmakers about your sense of gender in relation to the practice that you are documenting of film as ritual.
DR. ELENA HERMINIA GUZMAN: Yeah, absolutely. So the reason why I focus on women and non-binary people is because thinking about this understanding which we know that these religions are not-- cannot escape these systems of patriarchy, and sexism, and transphobia, et cetera, still within these ritual spaces that are supposed to be for liberation, women and non-binary people still find spaces of liberation even within those structures that are suppressing within this liberatory space.
And so I see that as something that's really important to focus on to see how Black queer women, non-binary people are using art and ritual, ritual art in particular. So with the film, I think that the-- yeah, I think that's something that's come up a lot of the ideal that we really don't get to see this kind of intimacy.
And I think I'm drawn to Audre Lorde's work of the erotic and thinking about how we redefine the erotic, not just for something that is like sexual, but what does it mean for a friendship to live within the space of the erotic, where it is not just about the sexual or the romantic, but it's also about the purest feeling of self of the flesh, of joy and ecstasy, and all of those moments that come with friendship.
So rather than limiting that friendship through-- in the film, I talk about the different kind of structures that I had to navigate within our friendship of ableism, and I think what does it mean to even make a friendship, and then patriarchy, and sexism, all of these confine the relationships that we have, and in particular, relationship between women that are not romantic.
And so I wanted to really focus on that, just like allowing it to fully be what it was without being afraid that people might think like, oh, I wonder if people are going to be like, oh, they were-- it doesn't matter to me because what I want to come through is the love, whatever that looks like for people or whatever that means to people.
So that, I think, is a really important underlying of all of the work that I'm doing is that focus specifically on women and non-binary people, queer Black artists, and how we use art to create these spaces, how we use ritual, even when, sometimes, these are not the safest spaces for us, even when people say they should be safe or ideally, they should be safe, how we still are trying to create spaces of liberation. And for me, that is the practice of liberation and the potential of creating liberatory futures.
AUDIENCE: I think you really accomplished that--
DR. ELENA HERMINIA GUZMAN: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: --in the film that we saw. We want to see the rest.
DR. ELENA HERMINIA GUZMAN: [LAUGHS]
AUDIENCE: Thank you. Sorry. My question is some kind of related to what Ann asked. Your movie was a silent movie. And I want to know how much it was intentional and conscious that you made the movie in a silent genre. And is the Black ritual film genre the dominant-- is it dominant that they are silent? Because I think when as an audience, when I watched this movie in a silent mode, I can have more empathy with it. And I think when there is no word, the movie speaks more and more deeply, and invites more audiences to be involved in that movie.
And also, I think that it reflects the historical silence of women and non-binary people who didn't have any voice throughout the history of art. So I want to know if this silent genre-- silent genre the dominant genre in Black ritual movies or your special animation was like that? And I enjoyed it. It-- this dialogical nature would be more effective when there is no word here.
DR. ELENA HERMINIA GUZMAN: Thank you. That was very helpful to think with. So the whole film itself is not silent, it's just that scene. So the film is like 23 minutes. And then that scene that we saw is the ending scene of the film.
And so the film is like-- it's very heavy film. It's a very emotional film. If you just saw that clip and wanted to cry, wait until you see the whole film. It's very heavy. And it's something that I have to have to be very intentional about showing and even doing meditative and breathwork with people after they watch it because of how heavy it is.
So that particular scene, we made silent because we wanted it to just be a space for people to breathe. Even though there's so much going on there, it's still like a space where you could just, after all of what you just taken in, to just kind of [EXHALES] and just think about everything that's happened. And so there was an intentionality with that particular silence for the film, but also at the same time, you hear the music in the background, that's part of the sensory environment, and the visuals, all of it coming together to create a more meditative space rather than trying to overexplain something.
And so I think in a lot of ways, I guess, one aspect of Black ritual film that I see as really significant is that because it's more on the experimental side, it doesn't rely on traditional kinds of storytelling methods to try to overexplain or fit stories within a coherent whole, instead, it's allowing it to be fragmented, it's allowing it to be silent, it's allowing it to be something that-- it's allowing it to be shaped by the audience in a lot of ways.
And so that's one of the aspects that I think is important is that the audience-- the way that the audience becomes more active is that we're not trying to have you take one specific message away. It's whatever it is that you take away. And it's going to be so different for each person.
So there's not a collective audience experience, it's more like an individual audience experience that's going to very much depend on where you are in that moment you're watching it, your experiences, your life, your history, all of those things are going to come into play.
And so I think those are important aspects of Black ritual film is the ability to allow the audience to be more active within the meaning making of the film. Just like when you go to an altar, you may not necessarily get the same thing that somebody else does, but nonetheless, you're getting what it is that you need out of it. And that's what I see as the work of Black ritual film. Yeah.
ANN BRAUDE: We are out of time. The time flew by, Elena. You showed us just a few minutes of that film. And I think we will-- it will grip us forever. So we will have to work out some way for you all to be able to see this film. I think that's an opportunity we can't let you leave without doing that. So we'll get to work on that.
But please join me in thanking her.
DR. ELENA HERMINIA GUZMAN: Thank you, Ann. Thank you. Thank you for your engagement. And happy Halloween, Day of the Dead, Dia De Los Muertos, whatever you-- [LAUGHS] whatever you practice. Thank you.
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