Barbara McCullough

Barbara McCullough (born 1945) is a director, production manager and visual effects artist whose directorial works are associated with the Los Angeles School of Black independent filmmaking.

She is best known for Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification (1979), Shopping Bag Spirits and Freeway Fetishes: Reflections on Ritual Space (1980), Fragments (1980), and World Saxophone Quartet (1980).

Born in New Orleans, McCullough moved to Los Angeles when she was 11 years old.

Her father was a musician and because he was a blind veteran she had scholarship opportunities which allowed her to attend private school.

She attended Bishop Conaty Memorial High School and after taking courses at Cal State L.A. and L.A. Community College, got into UCLA through an undergraduate affirmative action program.

While attending UCLA she would become part of the second wave of the popularly known L.A. Rebellion filmmakers which was dominated by women of color including Alile Sharon Larkin, Julie Dash, Jacqueline Frazier, Melvonna Ballenger, O. Funmilayo Makarah, and Carroll Parrott Blue.

Being a UCLA student, McCullough partook in Project One which was a rite of passage for aspiring film students which had them write, direct, and edit a motion picture during their first academic quarter before they had had a production class.

Project One would be the starting point for many of the filmmakers of the L.A. Rebellion including Julie Dash and Carrol Parrott Blue.

From Project One, McCullough produced what is believed to be her first film Chephren-Khafra: Two Years of a Dynasty.

McCullough was fascinated by dance, but she felt that she had to look outside it for a way to express her creativity within the constraints of her role as a college student enrolled at UCLA and as the mother of two children.

She was also interested in history, psychology and literature, particularly the work of Zora Neale Hurston.

It was her love for photography drew her to experimental film and video, where she wanted to become the "Hurston of video" and to “tap the spirit and richness of [her] community by exposing its magic, touching its textures and trampling old stereotypes while revealing the untold stories reflective of African American life.” McCullough would go on to earn her B.A. in Communications Studies and her M.F.A. in Theater Arts, Film and Television Production at UCLA, and her work secured her position as an influential representative of the Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers.

The women filmmakers of the Los Angeles School shared the movement's desire to communicate their ideas about black people's history and experience in film or video, but they also often sought to emphasize women's experiences, and McCullough's work in particular was preoccupied with the themes of creativity and ritual.

She would later recall about her time at UCLA that "it was unwritten philosophy that you weren't just a student but an independent filmmaker existing in a community of independent filmmakers who supported each other's work as best they could. Most of the time, no one had any real financial support, and it took some of us years to complete our projects. But the film school was our factory and production facility. Each one of us was a mini film company producing our very special works. We basically learned from each other and struggled through a system that wasn't particularly nurturing. I don't think that the faculty really thought that there was a life for our work beyond film school", and that, "it was a highly politically charged environment."

Independent Career

McCullough's first film Chephren-Khafra: Two Years of a Dynasty was produced as her Project One film at UCLA.

The film features McCullough's then two-year-old son and weaves together moving images and still photography in a personal portrait.

The themes in the film include Egyptian and other African histories as well as the relationship between the Black Diaspora and Africa.

It also expresses Afrofemcentrism, examines the location of family, destabilizes the boundary between home and work, and visualizes cinematically unfamiliar ideas of the black female imagination.

McCullough's Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification is inspired by an experience with a friend who suffered a nervous breakdown and African spiritualism as it portrays a woman ritually stirring a mixture of soil and other substances in a calabash, then cups the mixture in her hands, and then blows it away.

The film has been controversial because it then depicts the woman going back into the crumbling structure of the building behind her and urinating on the ground.

McCullough explained that the woman was intended to symbolize all displaced people from developing countries who are forced to live according to the values of other cultures.

Her act of defiance in a strange land asserts her freedom over her own body.

The film was shot in 16mm black and white, the film was made in an area in Watts, L.A. that had been cleared to make way for the I-105 Freeway.

Shopping Bag Spirits and Freeway Fetishes: Reflections on Ritual Space consists of separate episodes documenting Los Angeles artists as they create works of improvisational art.

McCullough interviews the artists and asks them about their ritual and creative processes, and her subjects include painter and sculptor Kinshasha Conwill; poet Kamau Daa'ood; sculptor David Hammons; sculptor N'senga Negundi; musician Raspoeter Ojenke; and painter and sculptor Bettye Saar.

In an interview about her film, McCullough stated that "ritual is a symbolic action" capable of releasing the subject from

herself to allow her to "move from one space and time into another."

She uses this as a means of self-determination and self-representation.

As many of the other L.A. Rebellion filmmakers express in their works; it is crucial for a community to define itself on its own terms.

McCullough chooses to represent the rituals and creative processes of these artists to allow them to speak for themselves.

Despite allowing the interviewees the space within the film, McCullough occupies the lens and space outside of and surround each subject.

She uses this space to speak for herself, to allow herself to become a subject.

Under this lens, her work takes on a new meaning that allows the viewer to uncover each layer of the film.

The filmmaker no longer exists as a viewer, they become as much a part of the experience for the audience as the actors.

Her short film Fragments (1980) is a continuation into the exploration of ritual from Shopping Bag Spirits.

Her 1980 short film World Saxophone Quartet is about a short conversation with the World Saxophone Quartet whose members comment on their work and motivation.

Unlike her more formalist work, World Saxophone Quartet would go on to be picked up by PBS and shown at international film festivals, particularly during black history month.

McCullough has completed substantial work toward a documentary about Black jazz pianist and composer Horace Tapscott (Horace Tapscott: Musical Griot), who stayed in Los Angeles even after attaining a national reputation so that he could continue to help the Watts community where he grew up.

The film highlights Tapscott's musical education and career within the Watts Central Avenue Jazz tradition.