LA Rebellion

By: Malik

I was originally just going to translate the entire website here, but I started to realize like 85% of the people involved aren’t in the database. Please help if you can at adding the rest of the movies into the database! This is such a significant missing part of American film making history!

Here is UCLA’s site that has all the information that I’m going to be translating over Click on “film exhibition” to see a handful of the shorts that they have up!

In the late 1960s, in the aftermath of the Watts Uprising and against the backdrop of the continuing Civil Rights Movement and the escalating Vietnam War, a group of African and African American students entered the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, as part of an “Ethno-Communications” initiative designed to be responsive to communities of color (also including Asian, Chicano and Native American communities). Now referred to as the L.A. Rebellion, these mostly unheralded artists created a unique cinematic landscape, as—over the course of two decades—students arrived, mentored one another and passed the torch to the next group.

Some aspects of the story have been told before, in articles and in panel discussions, and at retrospective screenings of key films. Now, the UCLA Film & Television Archive has undertaken its L.A. Rebellion initiative to help illuminate previously unknown aspects of the story, the artists and the work, and facilitate a greater understanding of the whole.

The Archive’s initiative began with a desire to participate in the Getty Foundation funded “Pacific Standard Time” exhibition of post World War II Art in Los Angeles. Three years later, dozens of filmmakers have been identified as part of the L.A. Rebellion movement and the initiative has grown into a massive effort by all departments of the Archive to bring to light the contributions of these first generations of Black UCLA film students.

LA Rebellion filmmakers not in Mubi database

Gay Abel-Bey
Don Amis
Melvonna Ballenger
Carroll Parrott Blue
Ben Caldwell

LA Rebellions filmmakers on Mubi

S. Torriano Berry
Charles Burnett
Larry Clark
Julie Dash