Filmforum 50, program 10: The Volcano Manifesto: Films by Cauleen Smith

Cauleen Smith, photo by Joshua Franzos

Los Angeles Filmforum and the Velaslavasay Panorama present

Filmforum 50, program 10: The Volcano Manifesto: Films by Cauleen Smith

Friday March 20, 2026, 7:30 pm

At the Velaslavasay Panorama, 1122 W 24th St, Los Angeles, CA 90007

In person: Cauleen Smith

Tickets: $15 general, $10 students/seniors, free for Filmforum members. Link coming soon.

One of our city’s leading artists, Cauleen Smith works in a variety of media.  We’re delighted to host a set of five films of hers from the past decade, including the Los Angeles premiere of her latest, The Deep West Manifesto. The Deep West Manifesto is the third in her Volcano Trilogy, in which she mines a realm of imagistic possibilities on geology, vulcanology, cinema, and more.

The new film incorporates images from the remarkable Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley made by John J. Egan and housed at the Saint Louis Art Museum, with its imagery manipulated to add peoples underrepresented or forgotten - Indigenous and Black workers and populations of the Valley.According to the Museum, “This particular panorama functioned as a scrolling slide show for archaeologist Montroville W. Dickeson, who lectured from town to town about his excavations. It imitates the perspective from a steamboat deck, transporting the audience on an imagined journey down remote waterways.  The Museum's work is the only known Mississippi River panorama to survive.” Assuming you haven’t had a chance to go to St. Louis, take this chance to view that panorama in the context of one of Los Angeles’s wonders, the Velaslavasay Panorama!

The Volcano Trilogy will be preceded by two more thematically linked films by Smith.  Songs for Earth and Folk is a rumination, a conversation between planet and people, utilizing found footage drawn from a collection of films at the Chicago Film Society, primarily amazing natural history films.  For Triangle Trade, Smith worked with puppeteer Jerome Havre and artist Camille Turner for an unique video looking at Blackness, land and landscape, and community.  It also helps set up the varied set of concerns that arise in the Volcano Trilogy that followed.

The Volcano Trilogy is “an astonishingly ambitious, densely woven meditation on geological and cinematic time, on the wild abyss of volcanoes and the womb of mines and caves (pregnant with meaning!), and on the prelapsarian and the postdiluvian (Deluzian?).” – MoMA, https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/10332

About the Filmmaker

Cauleen Smith was raised in Sacramento, California and lives in Los Angeles. Smith is faculty in the UCLA School of Arts and Architecture. Smith holds a BA in Creative Arts from San Francisco State University and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles School of Theater Film and Television. Smith is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a 2022 Heinz Award; Guggenheim Fellowship; Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize; Ellsworth Kelly Award; The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts; and a Rauschenberg Residency. Smithʼs works have been featured in solo exhibitions at institutions such as Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX; and Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA, among others. Her work is included in many public collections, such as the Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Studio Museum Harlem; Smithsonian Museum of American Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art.