The Volcano Manifesto: Films by Cauleen Smith
Presented by Velaslavasay Panorama & Los Angeles Filmforum
**Filmforum 50th Anniversary, program 10 & Velaslavasay Panorama 25th Anniversary**
Friday March 20, 2026
Doors Open 7:00 pm, Program starts 7:30 pm
Velaslavasay Panorama, 1122 W 24th St, Los Angeles, CA 90007
In person: Cauleen Smith
**Los Angeles Première of The Deep West Assembly**
Tickets: $15 general, $10 students/seniors, free for VPES & Filmforum members
(email panorama@panoramaonview.org for VPES code / email lafilmforum@gmail.com for Filmforum code)
Cauleen Smith is one of Los Angeles’ leading artists, working in a variety of media. The Volcano Manifesto is a screening of five of her films from the past decade, including the Los Angeles première of her latest, The Deep West Assembly, the third in her Volcano Manifesto 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, a moving panorama made by John J. Egan and housed at the Saint Louis Art Museum, with its imagery manipulated by Cauleen Smith 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.” While the St. Louis Art Museum conducted a major restoration of the John J. Egan painting in recent decades, the painting is no longer on view to the public but remains in the museum’s collection.
Premiering The Deep West Assembly at The Velaslavasay Panorama (the only museum dedicated to the creation of contemporary heritage-style panoramas) adds insightful context to Smith’s multi-layered film, which finds new ways of engaging with Egan’s moving panorama — an incredibly rare existing example of 19th century media technology.
The Deep West Assembly, 2024, film by Cauleen Smith.
The Volcano Manifesto is a triptych of films including My Caldera (2022), Mines to Caves (2023) and The Deep West Assembly (2024), and will be preceded by two more thematically linked films: Songs for Earth and Folk (2013)and Triangle Trade (2017).
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, the land, landscape, and community. It also helps set up the varied set of concerns that arise in The Volcano Manifesto that followed.
The Volcano Manifesto 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
A short Q&A with Cauleen Smith and reception will follow the screening. This event is put together as part of the celebration of Filmforum’s 50th Anniversary and Velaslavasay Panorama’s 25th Anniversary.
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.
Films included in Screening
Songs For Earth and Folk
2013, digital, color, sound, 10:39
Made in 2013, this short by Cauleen Smith is composed entirely of 16 mm and Super 8 found footage and is structured like a blues song, with a live-improvised electro-organic soundtrack created by Chicago-based band the Eternals. Made for the Chicago Film Society and the Music Box Theater.
Triangle Trade
2017, digital, color, sound, 14 min.
Picture/edit/sound – Cauleen Smith, Text/lyrics – Jerome Havre, Cauleen Smith, Camille Turner, Puppet design & build – Jerome Havre, Score – Justin Hicks
Triangle Trade is a video that was created collaboratively by Jerome Havre, Cauleen Smith and Camille Turner during a year of cross-border conversations about Blackness, land, home and belonging. The artists created three puppet avatars—performing themselves. At first, each is isolated in their own world. Later, they discover each other and come together to explore the possibility of community. This project was supported by Partners in Art and commissioned by Gallery TPW. – Camille Turner, https://www.camilleturner.com/triangle-trade
The Volcano Manifesto
My Caldera
2022, digital, color, sound, 5 min.
“The imagery of the film is of volcanic scenes in various life stages, from pouring magma to inert mountain, with colors unnaturally saturated – purple, blue, and orange. The scratchy, chaotic aesthetic is created through Smith’s proprietary process of placing TikTok video stills onto 35 mm film, then rendering it in 4K as an artifact of the original footage. A driving, heavy metal soundtrack provides an apt audio accompaniment to the visual onslaught of nature’s rage. A common thread in Smith’s work, this exhibition looks to nature for an alternative – to draw an analogy to human dynamics.” – Morán Morán Gallery, https://cdn.contemporaryartlibrary.org/store/doc/33855/docfile/6656146a63a42e6f79ffb59c7d0f9c62.pdf
Mines to Caves
2023, digital, color, sound, 10 min.
The Deep West Assembly
2024, digital, color, sound, 35 min.
"Smith’s most recent film The Deep West Assembly delves into the concepts of geological time and Blackness as camouflaged in image, song, and word by Black and Brown creators (after thinkers such as Suzanne Césaire and Ryan C. Clarke). Incorporating images of geological formations like lava caves, calderas, and salt domes, as well as human-made landforms such as ancient Choctaw burial mounds, The Deep West Assembly paints a view of the American South as a horizontal “Deep West” (a term borrowed from poet Wanda Coleman). Smith situates this cultural Deep West in the Mississippi River Delta, exploring Black cultural practices as kin to Indigenous traditions. Actor Dionne Audain embodies multiple voices—guides—reading, among other texts, Smith’s recent Volcano Manifesto (F Books, 2022) for the camera." -- Rhea Anastas and Mia Locks, https://www.afmuseet.no/en/exhibitions/cauleen-smith/. Commissioned by Astrup Fearnley Museet.
----------------------
Los Angeles Filmforum is the city’s longest-running organization dedicated to weekly screenings of experimental film, documentaries, video art, and experimental animation. 2026 is our 51st year. Website: http://lafilmforum.org.
Velaslavasay Panorama is the city's only 360-degree panorama museum, located in LA's oldest purpose-built movie theatre (Union Theatre, 1910), with an adorned garden of arboreal wonders, public programs and exhibitions that celebrate media technology, landscopic art, visual entertainments, immersive environments and experimental cinematic devices. 2026 is our 26th year. Visit: http://www.panoramaonview.org/
