Water Ritual, 1 An Urban Rite of Purification (1979) Barbara Mc Cullough
Made in collaboration with performer Yolanda Vidato, Water Ritual, 1examines Black womens ongoing struggle for spiritual and psychological space through improvisational, symbolic acts. Shot in 16mm blackandwhite, the film was made in an area in Watts that had been cleared to make way for the I105 freeway, but ultimately abandoned. At first sight, Milanda (Yolanda Vidato, wearing a simple dress and scarves on her head and waist) and her environs (burntout houses overgrown with weeds) might seem to be located in Africa or the Caribbean, or at some time in the past. This layering of locations and temporalities continues to the films striking conclusion, in which a now nude Milanda squats and urinates inside an urban ruin. By making water, Milanda evokes the numerous female waterbased figures in AfricanDiaspora cosmology as she attempts to expel the putrefaction she has absorbed from her physical environment, while symbolically cleansing the environment itself. Jacqueline Stewart
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