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).

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. But 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.

Barbara McCullough's Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification is inspired by 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.

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."

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