This week, we're turning to UCLA's Film and Television Archive's Youtube page, where you can find several selections from and related to the L.A. Rebellion, including early student shorts. (Additional resources regarding the L.A. Rebellion can be found at the Archive's website.) Aaron E. Hunt's Notebook Primer on the filmmakers and films of the L.A. Rebellion states that the the term, coined by Clyde Taylor, refers to the Black cinema movement led by Black filmmakers from UCLA between the 1960s and 80s. The grouping, however, remains contentious for some of the filmmakers for its conflations:
"'Rebellion' suggests a collective response to the status quo, rather than a series of independent expressions with diverse influences and motivations. But the slogan stuck, and, for better or worse, remains the most common calling card for a vital Black cinema movement that hasn’t been replicated since. Many L.A. Rebellion filmmakers resist such groupings. But the sense of community between film students and faculty, which bred fruitful collaboration, collective self-sufficiency, and a range of politically charged styles, is generally embraced among them as a critical element of their success."
At the forefront of the group or collective were filmmakers like Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, and Haile Gerima, whose early student film Hour Glass (1971) depicts a young Black basketball player's encounter with the words of Black thinkers like Franz Fanon and W. E. B. DuBois radicalizes and emboldens him (above) to physically step away from the court, away from the jeers and taunts of white spectators. In her Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen, scholar Samantha Sheppard writes that through this gesture, Gerima "takes a standard film school assignment and relocates Hour Glass within the protocols of Third Cinema and Third World Liberation struggles and philosophies." This motif of an awakened consciousness, which Gerima would later return to for his UCLA thesis film Bush Mama (1979), links together a number of titles from the L.A Rebellion.
Also included in UCLA's L.A. Rebellion playlist are news clips from the university's Hearst Metrotone News and KTLA News Film Collection, which display the backdrop of history that influenced the filmmakers of the L.A. Rebellion. The Archive's website states:
"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)."
Students in the program were regularly involved in and surrounded by resistance efforts from within Los Angeles and the state of California: In 1970, California protestors are seen standing against the wrongful imprisonment of Angela Davis. In another clip from 1978, students and teachers hold a sit-in to protest white student Allan Bakke's lawsuit against Affirmative Action at the University of California (above). From 1979, we see scenes of public outcry after the killing of Eulia Love, a middle-aged African American woman, by the LAPD.
A noteworthy "rite of passage" at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, Project One films required students to "write, direct and edit a motion picture with sound during their first academic quarter." The Project One film encouraged the creativity of the student to extend into uncharted territory ahead of any technical training.
Alile Sharon Larkin's Project One film, The Kitchen (1975), confronts the internalization of anti-Blackness as self-hatred. The film begins as a young Black woman is led by white nurses across a psych ward, and then cross-cuts between scenes where the woman expresses a fixation on her hair and the hair of others—including the vicious white family for whom she works as a maid, and her daughter—and scenes within the ward, where she grips the wig secured on her head and refuses to take it off. In her essay on The Kitchen for cléo journal, Ayanna Dozier states that the film's non-linear style communicates a disrupted state of mind as its protagonist grapples with her self-hatred:
"Larkin’s film begins to chip away at the alienation of the Black body through film’s ability to convey embodied senses and forms of affect, like shame. In its seven minutes, The Kitchen makes no attempt to solve, or resolve, the problem of its protagonist, but instead successfully draws attention to Eurocentric beauty standards and the value placed on them in society."
After fighting in the Vietnam War in his early 20s and attending Arizona State University for one year, Ben Caldwell entered UCLA's graduate film program. Edited entirely in-camera, Caldwell's Project One film Medea (1973) invokes Amiri Baraka's poem "Part of the Doctrine," and juxtaposes shots of a pregnant Black woman with images of the Black Diaspora. A voice asks the unborn child: "What is your purpose?" The baby, unseen, inherits this collage of memories, which together fortify who the child might become in the future.