This event is part of the Interseminars event series for “Collisions Across Color Lines.” Supported by the Mellon Foundation.
This multimedia presentation explores the practice of cinéritual by African diaspora women and non-binary filmmakers. As M. Jacqui Alexander notes, “There is no dimension of the sacred that does not yearn for the making of beauty, an outer social aesthetic of expression whether in written or spoken word, the rhythm of a drum, the fashioning of an altar, or any of the visual arts. The sacred is inconceivable without an aesthetic” (323). In response to this provocation, I am interested in mapping the potential of film as a sacred aesthetic that possesses the ability to bridge the physical and spiritual worlds. I define cinéritual as an experimental genre of film that Black creatives have developed with the aim of opening up spaces for sacred knowledge, community, memory, history, and healing. In doing so, I highlight three core techniques of cinéritual: remembrance, poetics of the sacred, and ancestral collaboration. Sharing clips from my own film work and practice of cinéritual, I reveal a multi-sensory world of remembrance, collaboration, and action.
About the Speaker
Elena Herminia Guzman is an Afro-Boricua documentary filmmaker, educator, and anthropologist raised in the Bronx with deep roots in the LES. She received her Ph.D. from Cornell University and is now an Assistant Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington. Her previous positions have included a postdoctoral fellowship at Haverford College and a Research Associate fellowship at Harvard University with the Women’s Studies and Religion Program in the Divinity School. She is currently writing her book manuscript tentatively titled, Chimera Geographies: Spiritual Borderlands of the Afro-Caribbean, which focuses on the way Black women and non-binary people throughout the African diaspora use ritual performance in African diaspora religions to forge geographies that counter landscapes of oppression. As an educator, she teaches Black feminism, performance, feminist filmmaking, Black cinema, autoethnography, border/land studies, and visual anthropology. In addition to her work as a scholar, Elena is also a filmmaker whose work explores the transcendental and spiritual experiences of African diasporic religion and spirituality in addition to its intersections with race, gender, and mental health. She is the director and producer of the film Smile4Kime (2023), a short experimental hybrid documentary that uses animation and live-action footage to tell the stories of how two friends transcend, time, space, and even death to find that their friendship lives on. Her new film project, Oríkì Oshun, is currently in development and is an experimental visual praise poem to the Orisha Oshun, the mother of the sweet waters.
