Coinciding with Black History Month, the Museum of the Moving Image in NYC presents "LA Rebellion: Creating A New Black Cinema". The series is organized by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and will revisit various films and shorts from what is often referred to as the Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers or the 'UCLA Rebellion'.
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. Now referred to as L.A. Rebellion, these mostly unheralded artists, including Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, Larry Clark, Haile Gerima, Billy Woodberry, and many others, 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.
They came from Watts. They came from New York City. They came from throughout America or crossed an ocean from Africa. Together, they made movies and produced a rich, innovative, sustained, and intellectually rigorous body of work. The filmmakers of L.A. Rebellion achieved this while realizing a new possibility for “Black” cinema, one that explored and related to the real lives of Black communities in the U.S. and worldwide.
The series will feature works from Larry Clarke, Zeinabu Irene Davis, Julie Dash, Funmilayo Marakah in tandem with filmmakers that studied at UCLA from the late 1960s through the late 1980s and created alternative cinematic narratives. Check out the website for all the details.
(Daughters of the Dust 1991)
(Medea, 1973)
