film Q&As

83

At its best, the university can be a generative nexus where creative minds collaborate and facilitate each other’s expression, where diff erences are catalyzed into productive synergy. The Black fi lmmakers who came together at UCLA starting in the late 1960s, a group that Clyde Taylor retrospectively designated as the “L.A. Rebellion,” were from a variety of places, including southern towns and cities, New Mexico, Texas, New York City, various neighborhoods in Los Angeles, and even Haiti and Ethiopia.1 The shared experience of being fi lm students at UCLA, specifi cally fi lm students of color, fostered a bond between them in spite of their diverse backgrounds and life trajectories to that point. As much as the process of studying fi lm in a university consisted of learning the necessary skills, techniques, and history of fi lmmaking, working with a medium that had historically been mobilized in the persistent marginal- izing and dehumanizing of people of color necessitated approaching fi lmmaking with circumspection. It required a radical unlearning. In these students’ work, as Taylor observed, “Every code of classical cin- ema was rudely smashed—conventions of editing, framing, storytelling, time, and space.”2 They were likewise committed to questioning cultural assumptions about representation, as well as challenging institutional practices and many aspects of the fi lm school curriculum.

Of the many meanings of “rebellion” that Taylor’s appellation invokes, the act of unlearning is the most foundational to the collectivi- zation of these student fi lmmakers. This was initially practiced in the

2

Rebellious Unlearning UCLA Project One Films (1967–1978)

ALLYSON NADIA FIELD

C o p y r i g h t 2 0 1 5 . U n i v e r s i t y o f C a l i f o r n i a P r e s s .

A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d . M a y n o t b e r e p r o d u c e d i n a n y f o r m w i t h o u t p e r m i s s i o n f r o m t h e p u b l i s h e r , e x c e p t f a i r u s e s p e r m i t t e d u n d e r U . S . o r a p p l i c a b l e c o p y r i g h t l a w .

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 1/8/2020 4:02 PM via UCLA AN: 1093337 ; Stewart, Jacqueline Najuma, Horak, Jan-Christopher, Field, Allyson Nadia.; L.A. Rebellion : Creating a New Black Cinema Account: s6876347.main.ehost

84 | Allyson Nadia Field

Project One assignment, the fi rst fi lm made by each student after arriving at UCLA. The Project One process established a spirit of collectivity among the Black fi lmmakers and other student fi lmmakers of color, allowing open exploration of the medium of fi lm. From an initial dis- mantling of formal conventions, the student fi lmmakers experimented with diff erent strategies for articulating notions of Black “authenticity.” Such a totalizing goal was of necessity complicated, and the ambition of the fi lmmakers’ projects, coupled with the fact that these are student fi lms, means that we are dealing with a body of work that is at once uneven and diffi cult to categorize. Yet with the unruliness of the Project One fi lms comes incredible energy, vibrancy, and a rawness that refl ect the cultural environment in which they were made and its affi liated polit- ical movements, social concerns, and problematic gender expectations. The fi lms assert the claim, as Taylor put it, “Black cinema spoken here!”3

For something described as a group, the L.A. Rebellion is unusual in that it was not a collective of fi lmmakers with a shared background or a common political or aesthetic agenda. Rather, it was defi ned by a network of relationships woven through the experience of making fi lms as students at UCLA. The L.A. Rebellion fi lmmakers were shaped across decades by a shared collaborative process that impacted not only how they made fi lms but what was in them. Because of this, a straightfor- ward typology of the Project One fi lms would suggest a coherent and deliberate project incongruous with the more open association of the Black students, other fi lmmakers of color, and like-minded “fellow travelers.” Even so, there are a number of themes and formal aspects that characterize this body of work to the extent that certain tendencies emerge and common concerns can be traced across the fi lms. Taken as a whole, these fi lms refl ect a general and not necessarily linear trajectory from pessimism and near nihilism to an optimistic belief in the capacity of fi lm to catalyze social change. The Project One fi lms also laid the foundation for the subsequent works produced by these fi lmmakers at UCLA and beyond.

While the fi lm school at UCLA had a few notable Black alumni by 1968, such as Ike Jones and William Crain, it was the multiethnic stu- dent-led Media Urban Crisis Committee (MUCC, cheekily dubbed the “Mother Muccers”) that resulted in the establishment of the Ethno- Communications Program the following year, enabling more Black stu- dents to enroll in signifi cant numbers.4 While students came into the fi lm school through a variety of channels, the Ethno-Communications Program was the primary catalyst for collaboration among fi lmmakers

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Rebellious Unlearning | 85

of color. Students formed multiethnic crews on one another’s shoots, but they were especially encouraged to work within their minority groups and to produce fi lms that refl ected the communities from which they came. There was certainly a naïve assumption operating here about community, one that elides diff erences of gender, class, and geographic origin and segments students along the reductive category of ethnic identity. Thus, this emphasis created confl icts for some students, such as the women who often had to contend with male colleagues who were arguably enacting internalized patriarchal hierarchies through their work and their collaborative styles. Indeed, the gender dynamics that emerge from the fi lm school’s pedagogical model merit further explora- tion, especially the ways in which the “assertive nationalism,” as David James has characterized these early works, was manifested through gen- der.5 Nonetheless, the Ethno-Communications Program off ered stu- dents access to dedicated equipment and encouraged them to tell stories that refl ected their experiences (rather than those that conformed to industry expectations). The collaborative pedagogical model served the purpose of the students’ socially conscious goals.

This essay surveys a series of extant and nonextant Project One fi lms made by sixteen of the African American students in the fi lm school at UCLA between 1967 and 1978. This is the group retrospectively recog- nized by Taylor as the L.A. Rebellion and by Ntongela Masilela as the fi rst and second “waves” of the Los Angeles School of Black Filmmak- ers: Charles Burnett, Larry Clark, Thomas Penick, Haile Gerima, Billy Woodberry, Jamaa Fanaka, Ben Caldwell, Don Amis, O.Funmilayo Makarah, Alile Sharon Larkin, Bernard Nicolas, Jacqueline Frazier, Carroll Parrott Blue, Barbara McCullough, Julie Dash, and Melvonna Ballenger.6 In looking at the fi rst student fi lms of these fi lmmakers, I will trace several overarching themes and formal strategies that account for the changing dynamics, interests, and foci across the decade following the establishment of the Ethno-Communications Program.

The Project One assignment was a standard part of the MFA curricu- lum that was then applied to the undergraduate program in Ethno- Communications, so both the undergraduate and graduate students who would later be termed the “L.A. Rebellion” typically made a Project One fi lm. “Like an initiation” into fi lm school, it set technical parameters for student work while allowing aspiring fi lmmakers to explore a subject of their choosing.7 The minimal constraints were that fi lms had to be shot in 8mm nonsynchronous sound, with the option of a 16mm mag soundtrack mixed by the student. Added in the editing

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86 | Allyson Nadia Field

process, sound was a crucial element in L.A. Rebellion Project One fi lms: both sound and image were subjected to critical rethinking as the fi lmmakers experimented with creative combinations of fi lm elements. In particular, the sonic structure of the L.A. Rebellion Project One fi lms demonstrates an investment in representing the multilayered textures of the fi lmmakers’ experiences, not just complementing the fi lms’ visual elements but serving key narrative and formal functions.

Project One functioned like a laboratory for experimenting with the medium of fi lm as a means of expression, and the fi lms demonstrate this sense of formal experimentation that would be foundational for the fi lmmakers’ later work. Each student wrote, produced, directed, and edited his or her own Project One fi lm, which was then screened and critiqued by faculty and fellow students.8 The faculty stipulated that Project One fi lms should be around three minutes, but the fi lms made by the students of color tended to be signifi cantly longer. As Larry Clark recollects, “Well you’ve kept us quiet all these years, and you give us a chance to speak and you can’t tell us it’s got to be three minutes, it’s whatever you want it to be!”9 Giving the students ample leeway to design the projects on their own, the faculty emphasized the individual- ity of each student’s voice, stressing that they did not want all fi lms coming out of UCLA to look the same.10

In general, the Project One fi lms of Black students centered on issues of race, class, and community, though the fi lms covered a range of top- ics aff ecting African American people and their communities: rising political consciousness (Tamu [Dir. Larry Clark, 1970], Hour Glass [Dir. Haile Gerima, 1971], Rain/(Nyesha) [Dir. Melvonna Ballenger, 1978], Daydream Therapy [Dir. Bernard Nicolas, 1977]); notions of patriotism and cultural belonging (Apple Pie [Dir. O.Funmilayo Maka- rah, 1975]); drug abuse (Tamu, A Day in the Life of Willie Faust [Dir. Jamaa Fanaka, 1972]); domestic labor (The Kitchen [Dir. Alile Sharon Larkin, 1975], Daydream Therapy); social oppression and mental health (Charles Burnett’s untitled Project One [1968], The Kitchen); representational disenfranchisement (Medea [Dir. Ben Caldwell, 1973]); identity, self-determination, and cultural pride (Hour Glass, Ujamii Uhuru Schule [Dir. Don Amis, 1974], The Diary of an African Nun [Dir. Julie Dash, 1977]); family (Chephren-Khafra: Two Years of a Dynasty [Dir. Barbara McCullough, 1977], Hidden Memories [Dir. Jacqueline Frazier, 1977]); cross-generational dialogue (Two Women [Dir. Carroll Parrott Blue, 1977]); unplanned pregnancy and abortion (Hidden Memories); sexual assault (Billy Woodberry’s untitled Project

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Rebellious Unlearning | 87

One [1973], Willie Faust, 69 Pickup [Dir. Thomas Penick, 1969], Day- dream Therapy); and interracial sex (Charles Burnett’s untitled Project One, 69 Pickup). While sharing a commitment to social relevance, the fi lms employed a variety of formal strategies from narrative to the avant-garde, fi ction to documentary. Many of the fi lms are replete with references, allusions, slogans, and symbols of political commitment (Tamu, Hour Glass, Daydream Therapy). Others are more formally restrained but no less critically invested (Ujamii, The Diary of an Afri- can Nun). Through the Project One fi lms, the Black student fi lmmakers demonstrated an eagerness to rethink cinema as a medium of communi- cation, critique, persuasion, and activism.

Film students were encouraged to work on one another’s shoots, ostensibly to gain valuable experience in production.11 Designed to model the collaborative aspect of industrial fi lmmaking, the group-project aspect of the Project One process also refl ected the collective nature of contemporary social movements with which most students closely identi- fi ed. The camaraderie that emerged in the Project One process, fostered through shared experience and “sweat,” united students from diff erent backgrounds and life experiences to create lasting respect among them.12 Filmmakers who would later be seen as diametrically opposite in style and purpose (such as Ben Caldwell and Jamaa Fanaka) collaborated on early fi lms.13 The students also bonded in the “bull pen,” the nickname for the Project One editing room. Often staying consecutive nights in the editing room where they were practically living, the sleep-deprived stu- dents edited and synched their fi lms by hand. As Julie Dash described the atmosphere in the editing room, “Everyone’s complaining, miserable—it was great.”14 It is this act of collaboration, perhaps even more than polit- ical commitments, resistance to Hollywood aesthetics, and shared experi- ence, that characterizes the L.A. Rebellion as a collective group, however informal or loosely defi ned.

In an educational environment, part of the students’ unlearning had to do with determining from whom to learn. With the faculty taking a hands-off approach to the Project One process, the mentorship of the older students, particularly Burnett, Gerima, and Clark, was especially signifi cant to the younger students of color. In the mid-1970s, Charles Burnett served as a TA for the Project One class and was an unoffi cial mentor to many more, to the extent that he earned the nickname “the Professor.” This kind of internal mentorship was necessary because the fi lmmakers of color felt they received little support from others. The atmosphere, as one fi lmmaker recalls, was like “the inmates running the

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88 | Allyson Nadia Field

asylum.”15 Yet the inmates did not always get along. While the atmos- phere was “creatively chaotic,” Burnett recalls the combination of per- sonalities that comprised the UCLA fi lm school as “explosive.”16 Along- side the fi lmmakers of color were many students from privileged backgrounds who had not been exposed to the kinds of issues explored in the fi lms of minority fi lmmakers. When the students would screen the fi lms for the faculty and fellow students, the fi lms made by the African and African American students were often met with stunned silence, what Alile Sharon Larkin characterizes as the recognition that “this is something new and diff erent.”17 At the same time, many narratives were met with skepticism from an audience so culturally removed from the subject. Critical comments often centered on the veracity of a story, dismissing troubling subject matter (such as police brutality) with, “Oh, that couldn’t happen.”18 Gerima became so frustrated with the disbelief of his fellow students over issues such as police brutality that he wrote a monologue called “The Bunch of Mr. Convince Me” to motivate him- self to continue doing the kind of work that he found signifi cant.19

The skepticism and general disconnect from inner-city realities prev- alent on the Westwood campus should certainly be considered contrib- uting factors to both the relentlessness of some of the works (the unfl inching camera of Bush Mama [Dir. Haile Gerima, 1975], the pro- longed church sequences in As Above, So Below [Dir. Larry Clark, 1973]) and the documentary impulse behind many of them (the use of photographs of a demonstration against Eula Love’s killing by the LAPD in Gidget Meets Hondo [Dir. Bernard Nicolas, 1980], the sys- tematic documentation of Medea and I & I [Dir. Ben Caldwell, 1979], the location shooting in Watts and use of non-professional actors from the community in Killer of Sheep [Dir. Charles Burnett, 1977]). This same skepticism and general disconnect also explain, in part, the asser- tive tendency of the early Project One fi lms; their shocking content can be read as a manifestation of aggression born out of frustration on the part of students who, at least in the early years, were seen by some white faculty, administrators, and students as out of place in the fi lm department. Frustrations with the curriculum, though, sometimes erupted in creative ways, such as in Haile Gerima’s “The Death of Tar- zan,” made for a design course and lauded by one of the Chicano stu- dents in the class for killing “that diaper-wearing imperialist,” and in the critical reimaginings of Gunsmoke (1955–75), a television series used so frequently for the basic editing course that the class was com- monly referred to just by the title of the show.20

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Rebellious Unlearning | 89

Charles Burnett entered UCLA in 1967, a year prior to the organiza- tion of MUCC. As UCLA did not have an enforced policy of archiving student fi lms, Burnett’s untitled fi rst fi lm is believed to be no longer extant.21 He shot it on a Bolex with a Switar lens, borrowed from his TA, using regular 8mm Kodak color fi lm.22 Burnett had gone to school with the artist Michael Cummings and featured him as a Black artist who chokes his white nude model after making love to her.23 Shortly after Burnett arrived, Thomas Penick came to UCLA and made his fi rst fi lm, with Burnett as director of photography. 69 Pickup is about two Black men who pick up a white woman and then rob, sexually assault, and beat her.24 Penick made the fi lm shortly after breaking up with a girlfriend and was admittedly angry. The woman, played by a UCLA theater student, stood on Western and Adams, an unusual spot for a white woman to be hitchhiking at the time, which led to numerous cars pulling over and interrupting the shoot.25

The Project One fi lms of Burnett and Penick, who perceived them- selves to be outsiders in the insular world of UCLA, demonstrate an assertive resistance to white middle-class sensibilities. Their presenta- tion of interracial taboos around sex evokes contemporary revolution- ary discourses. While neither of these fi lms is overtly political (in the sense of Eldridge Cleaver’s assertion that raping white women was “an insurrectionary act”),26 they inherently reference the disturbing sexual politics of certain aspects of the Black Power and Black Arts move- ments, such as that conveyed in sections of Cleaver’s 1968 Soul on Ice and the work of Amiri Baraka, where the idea of poetry as a weapon of action extends to imagined physical violence. While Burnett and Penick challenge white patriarchal norms, their acts of resistance actually serve to reinforce those same norms through a form of racialized misogyny. Thus, although Jamaa Fanaka is often singled out as embracing aspects of exploitation cinema that put him at odds with many of his class- mates, Burnett’s and Penick’s Project One fi lms show that he was not alone in portraying women as sexualized objects of male fantasy. (In fact, while Fanaka’s later work arguably draws from sexually exploita- tive elements of popular “Blaxploitation” cinema, his second feature fi lm made at UCLA, Emma Mae [1976], centers on an active and strong woman protagonist who is neither a victim nor subordinate to any man.) The otherwise progressive fi lms of some of the male fi lmmakers arguably perpetuate the fetishization of fi gures such as Angela Davis or fall back on stereotypes or voyeuristic fi lmmaking, something that sev- eral of the fi lmmakers themselves acknowledged was a concern.27 The

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90 | Allyson Nadia Field

fi lmmakers also rehearse patriarchal and nationalist notions of gender roles in these early fi lms and in this respect refl ect contemporary debates about the role of women in revolutionary struggle.

The machismo evident in some of these early fi lms extended to the classroom, where professors reportedly felt intimidated by the perceived aggression of the male students of color. Larry Clark recalls one instance of a run-in with the faculty:

They would show Birth of a Nation [Dir. D. W. Griffi th, 1915], and it was always prefaced, “Well, we’re not going to talk about the sociological parts, we will talk about the fi lm itself as cinema.” Now how can you not with Birth of a Nation? And so one year this professor was going to show Birth of a Nation and Haile Gerima and Francisco Martinez walk to the front of the room and one grabbed one arm and the other grabbed the other arm, they lifted him up and carried him out of Melnitz Hall and went back and taught the class.28

Incidents like this arguably prompted the faculty to admit more women in subsequent admissions cycles in an attempt to neutralize the aggres- sion of the male students of color.29

Other student fi lmmakers of color aimed to present positive images of their respective cultural experiences that would correct the misrepre- sentation prevalent in mainstream culture. As with Third Cinema prac- titioners, they were concerned with modeling resistance through narra- tive choices and cinematic language. Inspired by Glauber Rocha, Larry Clark recalled, “We were thinking more, really truly more of cinema as a gun.”30 Like many of his colleagues, Clark came to UCLA with a strong social mission that seemed well suited to the fi lm school’s col- laborative emphasis and multicultural orientation. Clark had been pres- ident of the Black Students Union in college in Ohio, and when he fi rst came to UCLA he fi rst went to the Afro-American Studies Program, which pointed him to Elyseo Taylor and the new Ethno-Communica- tions Program in the fi lm school. At the same time, Clark was deter- mined to get involved in the cultural community off campus: “I made myself a promise that I would have one foot in UCLA and another foot in the community.”31 To this end, he became involved with PASLA (Per- forming Arts Society of Los Angeles), an all-Black theater company founded by Vantile Whitfi eld in 1964 to train inner-city youth in the performing arts.32 Clark started a fi lm workshop with the support of Whitfi eld and met both Nathaniel Taylor and Ted Lange at PASLA, as well as most of his crew for As Above, So Below and Passing Through (1977).

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Rebellious Unlearning | 91

With Tamu, his Project One fi lm (shot on Super 8), Clark set out to counter Hollywood’s negative stereotyping. “I wanted to do something positive,” he explained. The desire to produce positive images proved to be more complex than he initially expected. He describes the process as an “Aha! Eureka!” moment:

I am editing the fi lm and I get a rough cut and I say “Jesus Christ!” and I saw this fi lm is just as negative and stereotypical as anything coming out of Hol- lywood. And that’s when I really realized how deep this stuff is—people say, “Oh, I’m not infl uenced by Hollywood,” even if you are a person of color you pick up on these same negative things. So then you realize “I have some work to do”; you can’t just say, “I’m going to do something that’s not nega- tive.” Those are good intentions, but how do you get there? You have to unlearn a lot of stuff .33

He ended up recutting the whole fi lm “to salvage it.”34 The Project One experience made Clark realize that fi lm could be a powerful medium for him to convey his message through writing and directing.35 In the fi nal edit, Tamu was twelve minutes long and imagines the thought processes of two fi gures, based on Eldridge Cleaver and Angela Davis, as they develop their consciousness against the realities of drug infi ltration and other systemic means of perpetuating a Black urban underclass. Con- currently, the fi lm imagines a relationship between the two fi gures who are represented as both specifi c Black leaders through references to Cleaver and Davis and relatable everymen through the generality of their portrayal.

Clark’s fi lms are generally notable for the way they mobilize politi- cally progressive contemporary jazz and spoken word artists to proff er a critique of Black disenfranchisement and political apathy. In Tamu, the soundtrack indicates political commitment and demonstrates the cultural fl uency with music that Clark and many of his colleagues had while they were learning the technical skills of fi lmmaking. The musical samples, in fact, express the thematic concerns of the fi lm in a more coherent critical perspective than the narrative diegesis, opening up a rich terrain to comprehend the fi lm’s loose narrative structure. The fi lm begins with Pharoah Sanders’s “Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah” from the 1969 album Jewels of Thought, as the Eldridge Cleaver fi gure sits in his car in the rain watching a junkie across the street, wondering in an internal monologue if the problems of the day are any diff erent than before. After a rapid montage of images representing historical oppressions of Black people, the man concludes that the issues are the same: “the only diff erence is that there are bigger and better forms of

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92 | Allyson Nadia Field

control and repression.” He then goes on to connect the struggles in the United States to international liberation movements as he drives through a neighborhood replete with wig shops and other visual markers of broad disenfranchisement of the Black urban underclass. Later, The Last Poets’ “Two Little Boys” is heard over a scene in which the man witnesses two boys stealing a purse from an elderly woman, followed by an excerpt from Malcolm X’s “Message to the Grass Roots” on the necessity of overcoming diff erences between Black people. This excerpt motivates the man to think about Black-on-Black violence, referencing Frantz Fanon’s characterization of the internalized violence of the oppressed. At the end of an impassioned internal monologue, he asserts that “what we need is a revolution,” motivating a cut to a wanted poster for “Eldridge Brown,” who is listed as “Interstate Flight Revolu- tionary” (a subversion and reimagining of the FBI’s poster for Cleaver that announced assault with the intent to commit murder).

The next section of the fi lm follows the Angela Davis character, introduced in her apartment making coff ee, a Patrice Lumumba poster hanging in her kitchen and Miles Davis’s “Sanctuary” from the 1970 album Bitches Brew playing extradiegetically. The Davis fi gure refl ects

FIGURE 2.1. Tamu (Dir. Larry Clark, 1970).

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Rebellious Unlearning | 93

on the image of the Soledad Brothers in chains and cites Fanon, “the oppressor always overreacts to the actions of the oppressed,” conclud- ing, like the Cleaver fi gure, that “what we need is a revolution.” The two characters then meet as he climbs the stairs to her apartment as the opening theme from Pharoah Sanders replays. Reaching her, he draws her close to him and tells her, “Hey baby, you’re the one. The true Black gold. The real Black gold. Ain’t going to ever miss the joy of calling you sister.” The two fi gures then go outside, where the man observes the junkie urinating against a wall with a PASLA tag. As if channeling the intersection of the junkie’s subjectivity and that of Cleaver, the sound- track samples The Last Poets’ “Jones Comin’ Down,” with Martin Luther King Jr. saying “suddenly a great revolution is going on in our world today, sweeping away an old order.” The Cleaver fi gure sees the junkie standing under a stop sign and shakes his head in disapproval, followed by Malcolm X proclaiming “revolution is in Asia, revolution is in Africa.” Here, the situation of the disaff ected urban poor is juxta- posed against global liberation movements.

The fi lm concludes with the junkie staggering off as Cleaver’s voice declares the organization of the Black Panther Party: “We’re going to develop a coalition all the way across this country and we’re going to organize. Black Panther Party all across this country.” In this sense, the organization of the Panthers is posited as an act of resistance to the dis- enfranchisement of the poor, yet the optimism of the call to organize is tempered by the sustained image of the junkie. Tamu portrays progres- sive Black political activism as emerging from the actual conditions of urban poverty and vying against counterforces detrimental to collective action for the consciousness of the community within a patriarchal framework. The fi lm then ends with a reimagined wanted poster for “Tamu Davis,” who, like “Eldridge Brown,” is listed as “Interstate Flight Revolutionary.” Although the fi lm is named Tamu and ends with the wanted poster for Davis—Tamu was Davis’s African name—the fi lm centers on the Cleaver fi gure. Davis’s revolutionary potential is circum- scribed by the implicit gender expectations of Black revolution: the Cleaver fi gure is portrayed as active as well as refl ective, while the Davis fi gure is passive and refl ective, associated with domestic space and delighting in the validation given to her by her male counterpart.

Like Tamu, Jamaa Fanaka’s 1972 Project One fi lm, A Day in the Life of Willie Faust, highlights the abuse of drugs in the Black urban envi- ronment. While Tamu grounds its social critique in the intellectual his- tory of anti-imperialist struggles, Willie Faust allegorizes systemic

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94 | Allyson Nadia Field

oppression through the fi gure of an interracial corporate board oversee- ing the “payment in full” of a junkie who has, in eff ect, sold his soul for drugs. Where Tamu’s central protagonist observes the junkie from a detached standpoint, Fanaka makes him the central fi gure, chronicling a day in his life—a day predetermined by the plotting devil fi gure as his last. Fanaka had read Goethe’s Faust while a student at Compton Com- munity College, and with Willie Faust he contemporizes the Faust leg- end by transposing the story to South Central Los Angeles. Like Clark, in Willie Faust Fanaka mobilizes popular, politically engaged, and socially conscious contemporary music to articulate the critique and provide commentary on the narrative action. The fi lm’s episodic struc- ture is punctuated by musical samples, as Fanaka draws from the recently released soundtracks of Shaft (Dir. Gordon Parks, 1971) and Super Fly (Dir. Gordon Parks Jr., 1972) as well as The Beatles’ “Come Together” and the music of Pharoah Sanders.

The fi lm opens with Isaac Hayes’s “Walk from Regio’s” from the soundtrack to Shaft, which serves as the entrance theme for the devil. The devil is imagined as the president of an interracial corporation, named Universal, whose board is meeting on the fi nal day of an execu- tive seminar. While acknowledging the eff orts of Universal’s “archrival Gabriel & Associates,” who endeavors to convince its clients to renege on their agreements, the president tells the board that they will observe one of the president’s own clients on the day in which his account is to be “paid in full.” The scene then cuts to Willie, played by Fanaka him- self, in bed with his wife, who sleeps as he tries to steal the cash she has tucked in her bosom. Unsuccessful, he leaves the house as his wife tries to quiet their crying baby. Willie breaks into a house, and after being caught in the act of robbery and attempted rape, he escapes, shoplifts from a supermarket, sells what he stole to a pool hall, and buys drugs on a street corner. Against Curtis Mayfi eld’s theme from Super Fly, the drug dealing scene is shot from across the street as if from a surveillance camera or the perspective of a removed observer, like the evil corporate board or even that of an audience titillated by the spectacle of an urban underworld in fi lms such as Shaft and Super Fly. As the fi lm is structured with a framing device so that the entire unfolding occurs through the lens of the board members, the audience shares their privileged perspec- tive and the spectator’s view is thereby complicit with Willie’s downfall.

Yet, if Fanaka denies the spectator the salaciousness of the drug deal, keeping his camera at a distance, he unfl inchingly presents the overdose in an extended shoot-up sequence. After buying drugs, Willie returns

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Rebellious Unlearning | 95

home to his baby crying, goes into the bathroom and shoots up to Isaac Hayes’s rendition of Charles Chalmers’s “One Big Unhappy Family.” Then, when the heroin is injected, Pharoah Sanders’s “Black Unity” comes on, musically expressing the eff ects of heroin on Willie; it obliter- ates the “unhappy family” with Sanders’s free jazz. Yet the Black unity imagined by the music is rendered ironic through Willie’s self-imposed isolation and self-destruction. In the absence of true Black unity, drug abuse is able to infest. As Sanders’s saxophone punctuates Willie’s deadly high, Fanaka intercuts close-up shots of the corporate board members laughing directly at the camera, watching Willie as we do. As Willie slowly overdoses, the laughter of the board members becomes increas- ingly grotesque, merging with the shrill saxophone. While at fi rst “Black Unity” signaled a release from the demands of his crying baby and plead- ing wife, as Willie dies the saxophone becomes like an alarm crying for help while the board members laugh in sadistic delight. When Willie col- lapses to the fl oor, the board members collectively rise in a standing ova- tion, celebrating the conquest of another soul.

The fi lm ends with Willie’s wife discovering his overdose as the board members look on in amusement. Following an intertitle “paid in full,”

FIGURE 2.2. A Day in the Life of Willie Faust, or Death on the Installment Plan (Dir. Jamaa Fanaka, 1972).

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96 | Allyson Nadia Field

Willie’s wife tries to revive him as their baby cries. The fi lm concludes with the fi rst verse of “The Creator Has a Master Plan (Peace),” sung by Leon Thomas and recorded in 1969 with Pharoah Sanders. The fi nal song is thematically circular in that it conjures a pre-Fall idyll “when peace was on the earth, and joy and happiness did reign, and each man knew his worth.” The nostalgic optimism of the lyrics is subverted by the cynicism of the board’s ruthless “cashing in” of Willie’s debt. As a social critique, Willie Faust draws from Super Fly’s and Shaft’s recogni- tion of economic and racialized inequities—captured through the street scenes that, like Bush Mama, reveal the commercial reinforcement of the disenfranchisement of the urban underclass (such as wig stores and pawn shops)—while complicating these two fi lms’ voyeuristic aesthetic.

In the initial course screening, Willie Faust was reportedly well received, which Fanaka found invigorating—“I loved it! That’s when the directing bug bit me.”36 Fanaka went on to make an unprecedented three feature fi lms while a student at UCLA. While these fi lms were cri- tiqued by some fellow fi lmmakers for their commercialism, with charges of replicating stereotypes rather than exploding them (especially the Penitentiary [1979, 1982, 1987] series), the message, execution, and narrative of Willie Faust are consistent with the formal and thematic concerns of the other Black fi lmmakers at UCLA at the time, and the work exhibits characteristics that would later be identifi ed as represent- ing a fi lm movement.

Fanaka’s use of allegory is also present in Haile Gerima’s Project One fi lm, Hour Glass, made in 1971. Where Fanaka imagines the devil made fl esh as a CEO, overseeing a corporate board of evil executives who plot to win souls through drug addiction, Gerima imagines college basketball culture as a contemporary iteration of the brutality of ancient Roman gladiator matches. Hour Glass serves as a kind of bridge between the more narrative projects of fi lmmakers such as Fanaka and the experi- mental works of fi lmmakers such as Ben Caldwell and Barbara McCul- lough, as it embeds formally experimental sequences within a larger nar- rative trajectory centered on a single protagonist. Hour Glass is a fourteen-minute fi lm shot by Gerima and Larry Clark, made with Clark’s leftover Super 8 fi lm that he gave to support Gerima (who had just entered the fi lm school from the Theater Department).37 Such sharing of unused fi lm was a common practice among the L.A. Rebellion fi lmmak- ers and supportive African American fi lmmakers working in Hollywood (such as Carlton Moss, who gave Clark a box of short ends that contrib- uted to Passing Through).38 Hour Glass was edited after Gerima dreamt

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Rebellious Unlearning | 97

the fi lm rolling through his mind, and he edited it the way he had dreamt it. Dreams became a signifi cant part of Gerima’s fi lmmaking process; his Project Two fi lm, Child of Resistance (1972), came out of a dream he had after seeing the image of Angela Davis in handcuff s.39

Like Gerima’s later features Bush Mama, Ashes & Embers, and Sankofa (1993), Hour Glass chronicles a protagonist’s coming into political consciousness, assuming a sense of identity and self-worth. In Hour Glass, a Black college athlete becomes politicized, rejects the role assigned to him on campus, and moves to a Black community. Even more directly than Child of Resistance, Hour Glass is a laboratory of ideas for Bush Mama. Most notably, it shares with the later feature an interest in capturing on fi lm the vibrancy of the Black community, con- trasted with the hostility of the university and the imagined fi ckle toler- ance of white students for the Black student athlete. Gerima’s critique of the way Black student athletes provide entertainment for white spec- tators certainly echoes the tensions he must have observed between the campus politics of that era and the championship years of UCLA’s men’s basketball team under celebrated coach John Wooden. Hour Glass captures the spirit of players such as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (Lew Alcindor), a Bruin who boycotted the 1968 Olympics in protest against America’s treatments of its Black citizens. Abdul-Jabbar was inspired by sociologist Harry Edwards, who encouraged the boycott, proclaim- ing, “It’s time for the black people to stand up as men and women and refuse to be utilized as performing animals for a little extra dog food.”40

Still, despite its resonance with actual events, the fi lm is highly sym- bolic and weaves narrative diegesis and dreamscape, color and black and white (a strategy Gerima will employ in his next fi lm, Child of Resistance). As with Gerima’s later work, the soundscape is key for understanding the fi lm. Just like the bureaucratic voices that occupy Dorothy’s mind in Bush Mama, the soundtrack of Hour Glass func- tions as the externalization of the mental subjectivity of the student athlete. The subjective soundscape also triggers the visual projection of the athlete’s fantasies. As Larry Clark did in Tamu, Gerima samples the socially conscious spoken word poetry of The Last Poets and the speeches of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Angela Davis.

Hour Glass opens in black and white with a striking extreme low- angle shot of a young Black man with a noose around his neck, the sound of a clock ticking. This leads to an extended basketball sequence in which the player imagines the white spectators as modern-day Roman emper- ors, deriving sadistic pleasure from the physical battles of combatting

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98 | Allyson Nadia Field

slaves. Later in his dorm room, the student athlete reads postcolonial theory and Black liberation literature, and he imagines a nightmarish scene of a naked Black boy trapped in a prison cell full of liquor bottles and a frightening elderly white woman who snatches the sheets away from him to reveal they are in fact portraits of civil rights leaders. She hangs the sheet portraits of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. on the wall, only to have them immediately crossed out by shadows and the sounds of bullets and screaming. As she tries to take the sheet bearing Angela Davis’s image, the boy resists and holds on to the portrait. This gendered fantasy scene of successful defi ance is followed by the student athlete intervening between the camera and Davis’s poster, packing his bags, leaving the dorm, and moving to a Black community as Elaine Brown’s “Seize the Time” plays on the soundtrack. In addition to com- menting on the political issues concerning Black student athletes, the story draws from Gerima’s own experiences as a student at UCLA. Hour Glass exhibits the frustration and alienation that Gerima felt at UCLA while also refl ecting the growing political consciousness of the Black stu- dent body in the wake of the 1969 Campbell Hall shootings, the fi ring of Angela Davis, and the founding of the ethnic studies centers. Most of the fi lmmakers strongly identifi ed with the Black Panthers and their critique of American imperialism at home and abroad. The male fantasy of pro-

FIGURE 2.3. Hour Glass (Dir. Haile Gerima, 1971).

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Rebellious Unlearning | 99

tecting Angela Davis that is evident in Tamu and Hour Glass refl ects the gendered politics of the Black Panthers but also springs from the general outrage against the pervasive mistreatment of Black women.

For his Project One fi lm, Billy Woodberry drew from an actual inci- dent that took place in Chicago yet represented widespread police mis- conduct toward African Americans and the historical sexual abuse of Black women by white men. The story centers on a young girl who was sexually assaulted by the police; initially ignored, when the incident was reported to the Panthers they pursued the offi cer and demanded justice. Woodberry took the story from the Black Panther Party newspaper and used it as voice-over narration for his fi lm.41 Another story Woodberry wove through the fi lm centers on the attractive girlfriend of a member of his Marxist study group. In retrospect, Woodberry realized he had shot the woman voyeuristically and that as a result the fi lm was unsuc- cessful and “a mess because of two confl icting impulses or ideas.”42 The instance where the girl is captured by the police in their car is shown abstractly—“the only thing you really see is shadow and light”—relying on narration to convey the full signifi cance of the incident. Woodberry recollects the response Gerima had to the use of the newspaper story as narration: “Haile told me, wonderfully, you don’t talk a fi lm, you show a fi lm.”43 (Gerima would show a similar atrocity in the climactic scene of Bush Mama.)

Woodberry praised the relative freedom of the Project One experi- ence, in which the fi lmmakers were free to explore images that intrigued them: “I do this thing at the end of the fi lm, just a car driving on a wet street. Why? Because I liked shooting a car driving on a wet street.”44 Like a number of other Project One fi lms, Woodberry featured traveling shots of people on the street to create a sense of urban ambiance, in this case fi lming skid row as a stand-in for Chicago. Though grappling with how to avoid a voyeuristic gaze, and how to best structure a narrative, Woodberry’s fi lm demonstrates a commitment to bringing to light rac- ist atrocities and to recentering cinematic language to focus on the neglected stories of the urban African American underclass. The narra- tive of the fi lm is an evident precedent for Woodberry’s later works, The Pocketbook (1980) and Bless Their Little Hearts (begun in 1978 and completed in 1984).

The critical focus of Project One fi lms was not simply on the present, as Black student fi lmmakers also evinced an interest in exploring the damaging historical trajectory of racist imagery that had gained such a stronghold in the visual representation of African Americans, particularly

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100 | Allyson Nadia Field

in Hollywood and popular culture. O.Funmilayo Makarah’s 1975 Project One, Apple Pie, is a refl ection on the bicentennial in which she asked diff erent people what they thought about America. Choosing an all-male multiracial group of more advanced students, she asked her sub- jects to sing “The Star Spangled Banner.” She refl ects, “No one could do it, and at the very end I had a group of people singing it and it was so out of tune and so wrong that it was a good comment on America about everybody.”45 With Apple Pie, Makarah off ered a critical perspective on the dissonance between the offi cial national discourse of the bicentennial celebrations and the “true reality” of inequality and racism.46

The work of Ben Caldwell similarly refl ects on questions of represen- tation and the role of visual culture in systemic racism. Engaging with a diff erent project than many of his classmates, who saw him as “off into the cultural part,” Caldwell privileged cultural questions over a specifi c political project conveyed through narrative storytelling.47 Still, Cald- well’s work exhibits fl uency with the same set of intellectual references as his classmates, drawing from contemporary Black Arts writings and a selectively curated visual arsenal. These diff erences and similarities sparked intense dialogues and led to decades-long conversations about the nature of fi lm and art, most notably in his collaborations with Charles Burnett. As Caldwell remembers, “It helped make really engag- ing discussions because we were all very diff erent and we were all from diff erent places. So all of that diff erence was really engaging, even though that same diff erence made it impossible for us to organize a name for the organization, but part of it had a lot to do with the reason we were together was to be diff erent. We were trying to make Western thinking concepts out of something that was very antithetical to it.”48 It was in such ways that the process of fi lmmaking could unify the students of color far more than a single style or voice. The questions that the minor- ity students brought to their work demonstrated a shared consciousness, however elastic, that informed their work and their collaboration.

The six-and-a-half-minute long Medea was submitted as Caldwell’s Project One, under the supervision of Haile Gerima, the TA for the course. Caldwell describes the collage fi lm as being about “all of the information that comes into a child before it’s born.”49 The title Medea for a fi lm concerned with the preexisting world into which a child is born references the immediate threat that will confront the child as well as the history of infanticide as a gesture of resistance. In Euripides’s version, Medea is a scorned barbarian woman who kills her children to exact vengeance for her husband’s betrayal. Caldwell has a diff erent account,

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Rebellious Unlearning | 101

one based on the view of Margaret Garner as a modern Medea, a posi- tion that took imaginative hold in antislavery discourse, most notably in Thomas Satterwhite Noble’s 1867 painting The Modern Medea. Subse- quent invocations of Medea in an African American context have carried a tone of gravitas, cognizant of the complexities and ambivalences of bringing children into a world of such totalizing inequity.50

Using an animation crane, Caldwell linked static images “kind of like the history of art in ten seconds,” conveying “the history of the birth of this young man in those few minutes.”51 Editing in the camera, that is, shooting sequentially and precisely so that there is minimal postproduc- tion editing necessary, Caldwell worked on the interplay between stasis and motion in a single image: “Within each picture is also an innate movement even though it is a static picture.”52 Accompanying these images, a woman’s voice recites Amiri Baraka’s poem “Part of the Doc- trine” from Black Magic: Collected Poetry, 1961–1967. The amalgama- tion of still images comprises a collected history of representations of culture, mainly African and African American, chronicling early cultural encounters through the history of segregation and civil rights struggles. Caldwell uses a myriad array of examples, ranging from white ethno- graphic images to contemporary photojournalistic representations to a

FIGURE 2.4. Medea (Dir. Ben Caldwell, 1973).

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102 | Allyson Nadia Field

history of Black self-representation. In the fi lm, these images function like fl ashes of memory, the collected mental subjectivity of a people’s history, the history that the unborn child will inherit.

Caldwell’s collected images counter the persistent dehumanizing images perpetuated in Western visual culture. But, as his initial invoca- tion suggests, they are also a kind of “comeback” whereby the ethno- graphic images give way to twentieth-century moments of empower- ment, resistance, and affi rmation. Caldwell, in fact, came to the idea for the fi lm as he was becoming interested in the ways in which fi lm could function as “ritual and spell”:

I’ve noticed that a lot of those subliminal images were threaded throughout fi lms in the history of fi lmmaking and all those things were to the demise of my culture. It was like jigaboos and funny things and subtle implications of who we are and that’s because we were conquered and the conqueror was the one that was showing these fi lms. You could see with Birth of a Nation, no subtleties there but they played like it was subtle and I had to fi ght for imagery. [. . .] I felt we had to work against that kind of symbology and we had to change the ritual.53

To change the ritual, he cites the tradition of “making the tools work towards our story”:

That’s why I ended up on that road of really seeing it as a way of emancipat- ing the image. So that’s the reason I got involved with the fi rst frame. With each frame I wonder, how does it look, how was it operated, and we as humans see each frame. It changes your view, and so how are they related to each other almost like poems? Each was created within the poem, there is no word stronger than the word before it or the word that it’s about to follow; it’s the same thing with pictures.54

By editing in the camera, Caldwell creates a kind of visual poetry akin to jazz or spoken word, where the impact is aff ected by the real-time experimentation with visual collage. The live-action sequences feature cloud patterns in the sky, a pregnant Black woman, and a young child holding a balloon that bursts at the end as Caldwell cites a passage from Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons: “A culture provides iden- tity, purpose and direction. If you know who you are, you’ll know who your enemy is. You’ll also know what to do, what is your purpose.” Caldwell uses an experimental form to articulate a gendered national- ism predicated on a practice of othering.

As in Medea, Don Amis’s nine-minute Project One fi lm, Ujamii Uhuru Schule Community Freedom School, uses documentary tech-

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Rebellious Unlearning | 103

niques to understand the process of transmitting knowledge to future generations. One of the few Project One fi lms entirely documentary in approach, Ujamii is a portrait of an Afrocentric elementary school a few blocks west of Crenshaw on West Adams in Los Angeles. Perhaps because of this documentary impulse, Ujamii moves away from the pes- simism of the previous Project One fi lms to present a more positive celebration of Black cultural practice and cross-generational affi rma- tion. Amis came to UCLA through the High Potential Program and saw himself as coming to the university from “a community perspective”; he made his Project One to take back to the community, ultimately giving the school the original negative. He described his decision to fi lm at the school: “I visited the school and checked it out. And I thought it was a good visual. It was a lot of activity, a lot of kids, adults, a lot of cultural history going on, a lot of self-awareness, a lot of self-respect, a lot of teaching about things that weren’t being taught any place else at the time.”55 He fi lmed on three occasions, and by the end of his fi lming the students were used to the camera and he was able to get a number of cutaway shots. Amis recalls, “Being part of the community, being in that environment, knowing what was going on, looking and dressing like everyone else, it made the actual fi lming of that project easy.”56

Ujamii is shot in an observational mode, showing a day in the life that captures the artwork, slogans, images, and sounds that comprise the Community Freedom School. Against these images and the sound of drums and students repeating slogans, a teacher explains in voice-over the educational philosophy of the school and the commitment to cor- recting the misperception of Black inferiority perpetuated by the public school system. With an emphasis on pride and heritage, the school exemplifi es the educational mission of the Black Power movement. (It is the kind of school that the fi ctional Tovi attends in Alile Sharon Lar- kin’s Your Children Come Back to You [1979].) When Ujamii was screened for the UCLA faculty and students, Amis recalls that they were shocked and surprised because the majority of fi lms made by Black stu- dents were fi ction narratives. Apart from Chicano and Asian American students who were making community-based documentaries, the fi lm school was largely sequestered from the diverse ethnic communities of greater Los Angeles. Amis recalls, “Nobody was bringing what was going on in the community or outside of UCLA—what was going on in the real world into the campus or onto the screen. [. . .] Nobody was doing what was going on around them. And there was everything— there was so much going on at that time.”57 With Ujamii, Amis presents

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104 | Allyson Nadia Field

a celebratory portrait of the transformative power of early education, an optimism markedly resilient in the context of repeated attacks on Black Power, civil rights, and progressive politics that were coming to dominate the tenor of the era. By focusing on the positive message of self-respect and self-determination, Amis provides a stark contrast to the Project One fi lms that turned a lens on the damage of such extreme social inequity, to both the individual psyche and the collective con- sciousness.

Made the following year, Alile Sharon Larkin’s fi rst fi lm demon- strates the power of the message of “Black Is Beautiful” championed by the Community Freedom School and how harmful the absence of posi- tive images could be. Made in 1975 as her Project One and shot in Pasadena, The Kitchen is a six-minute narrative fi lm about the psycho- logical damage caused by a beauty culture that values straight hair over “natural” African American hair. The fi lm lays bare the psychological damage caused by Eurocentric beauty culture, a theme taken up by other Black student fi lmmakers who critiqued the proliferation of wigs and wig shops in urban Black communities (e.g., in Tamu, Willie Faust, and Bush Mama, among others). The surviving copy does not

FIGURE 2.5. Ujamii Uhuru Schule Community Freedom School (Dir. Don Amis, 1974).

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Rebellious Unlearning | 105

have synch sound, though the original soundtrack consisted of a wom- an’s stream of consciousness narration that expressed her wish to look like her white employer, with long, straight hair.58 Like several other Project One fi lms, The Kitchen has a nonlinear structure and the plot unfolds through the protagonist’s fl ashbacks.

The Kitchen begins with a straitjacketed young woman in a near- catatonic state being led down an institutional hallway into a cell. She repeatedly strokes a wig she wears and does not allow the nurse to remove it. The cause of her breakdown is made evident through a series of fl ashbacks intercut with her institutionalization. These fl ashbacks show her working as a domestic in the home of a white woman, roughly brushing her daughter’s coarse hair, and then primping her daughter’s hair as they wait for a bus. The concerns of the fl ashbacks—her place of employment and her relationship with her daughter—become linked as the fi lm unfolds, as she turns out to be obsessed with the quest for straight hair. While ironing in the background, she watches mesmerized as her employer brushes her own daughter’s long, straight hair. Dis- tracted, she burns the ironing and the smell of burning interrupts the employer: in the foreground of the frame, she and her daughter rapidly turn around to face the burning ironing and whip their long, straight hair, as if to punctuate the cause of distraction. The employer rushes to the maid and angrily points to the ruined ironing, trying to shake her out of the reverie, but the maid just reaches for the employer’s straight hair, running it through her fi ngers.

The most haunting sequence is the subsequent fl ashback, where we see the maid’s daughter running toward her, smiling and excited. The reverse shot shows the mother smiling at her daughter, but when the shot returns to the daughter we see that the mother does not see her daughter as she is but as she wishes her to be: in a dress with perfectly coiff ed hair, twirling around and enacting a classical type of prettiness. The idealized daughter is intercut with the real daughter wearing a T-shirt, pants, and sweater tied around her waist and less styled hair. Her mother’s hand enters the frame and yanks the daughter by the hair, and the fi lm cuts to the two of them in the kitchen as the mother roughly combs the daughter’s hair with a straightening comb, causing the young girl pain. The mother heats up the comb on the stove so that it is smoking and holds it on her daughter’s head. The daughter strug- gles, but the mother keeps her grip. Larkin allows the camera to linger on the torture of the young girl to register the horror of the dam- age, physical and psychological, caused by an impossible ideal. After

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106 | Allyson Nadia Field

the mother’s psychosis has resulted in the maiming of her daughter, the scene cuts back to the mother in the institution, shaken from her coma- tose state by the memory and subdued by the nurses in a straitjacket.

The Kitchen is a thematic corollary to Haile Gerima’s Bush Mama, made the same year. Like the young mother in The Kitchen, through much of Bush Mama Dorothy has a glazed, detached stare. Gerima chronicles her awakening political consciousness and her assumption of her own self-worth, culminating when she declares that “the wig is off ,” both a literal statement—she removes her wig—and a fi gurative marker of resistance to hegemonic disenfranchisement. But where Dorothy is motivated to action to protect her daughter, whom she discovers being raped by a policeman, the mother in The Kitchen is awakened from her comatose state only after she realizes the horror that she has infl icted on her daughter due to her own internalization of her distorted self-image. Both fi lms depict the political and social disenfranchisement of poor African Americans as violently played out on the bodies of the young daughters.

While The Kitchen depicts the displaced frustrations of a working- class mother, Jacqueline Frazier’s Project One fi lm, Hidden Memories,

FIGURE 2.6. The Kitchen (Dir. Alile Sharon Larkin, 1975).

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Rebellious Unlearning | 107

focuses on a middle-class notion of family in tension with the profes- sional ambitions of a Black woman. Made in 1977 and set in Los Ange- les, Hidden Memories is a ten-minute narrative fi lm featuring Mary Porterfi eld as a college student who gets pregnant and chooses an abor- tion in order to attend graduate school. Frazier was invested in narra- tive storytelling, “When I came to UCLA and was seeing all these other peoples’ fi lms . . . it was all this abstract stuff , and I’m like, ‘What the hell is that? I want a story. I want to tell a story. That’s what I’m here to do.’ So that’s what I did.”59

With The Supremes’ “Refl ections” as the main theme, Hidden Mem- ories presents its action through a fl ashback within a presumably con- temporary frame. The fi lm opens in color with an elated couple holding a newborn baby. The camera tracks in on the baby, motivating a fl ash- back shot in black and white that depicts the mother as a student. She approaches her boyfriend, who is fl irting with another woman, and despite misgivings she goes home with him. After he leaves, she realizes she has missed her period and goes to the clinic for a test. At the clinic, the nurse tells her that her pregnancy test is positive and the word “pos- itive” echoes repeatedly. She is distraught but, watching kids play, saves a young boy from running in the street and being hit by a car, as if to suggest that her maternal instincts are in place despite the pregnancy being a surprise. She fi nds her boyfriend, who is again fl irting with other women, and her confession “I am pregnant” again echoes. At home, she opens a letter announcing her acceptance to the Stanford School of Journalism for fall quarter 1967, indicating that the fl ashback likely takes place a decade earlier. Embracing her mother, she hears on the radio an announcement for an abortion clinic.

The abortion sequence is the most striking part of the short fi lm, as the doctor and nurse are shot through a distorted lens and their reassur- ing banter seems grotesque against the woman’s screams and moans. (The scene recalls Dorothy’s abortion nightmare in Bush Mama.) The fi lm then returns to the present day, in color, and the woman looks out as if refl ecting on the past. She walks past her husband picking fl owers, and as he off ers her one she smiles and embraces him. She is then shown inside, cooking, an activity intercut with shots of her holding the new- born with her husband—the same shot that opened the fi lm—and shots of her next to her sleeping husband, holding his head adoringly. These juxtapositions reframe the initial shots with the newborn as if to situate the birth of their baby as a corrective to the fl ashback of the past, itself represented in black and white. The hidden memories of the abortion

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108 | Allyson Nadia Field

are thereby supplanted by the joyful memories of marriage and mother- hood. Despite the use of such contrasts, Hidden Memories does not judge the protagonist’s actions but rather presents her choices as legiti- mate, her “proper” marriage functioning as a redemptive ending to the traumatic experience of choosing abortion a decade earlier. Yet, with this narrative resolution, the fi lm curiously validates a middle-class ideal of family as compatible with the woman’s professional ambition. Marriage and education may not be presented as in confl ict, but the fi lm’s social vision is dependent on the woman’s choosing an appropri- ate partner and her pregnancy’s occurring within the stability of a mid- dle-class marriage.

The Project One fi lms of Carroll Parrott Blue and Barbara McCul- lough, both made in 1977, also center on issues of the family and deal with cross-generational dialogue.60 Two Women centers around Blue’s aunt, who was in her eighties, and a teenage girl. Blue explains, “I was making comparisons about what it meant to be an older Black woman and young Black woman and how their philosophies about life were dif- ferent.”61 McCullough’s Chephren-Khafra: Two Years of a Dynasty fea- tures the fi lmmaker’s two-year-old son and weaves together moving

FIGURE 2.7. Hidden Memories (Dir. Jacqueline Frazier, 1977).

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Rebellious Unlearning | 109

images and still photography in a personal portrait. As the title suggests, the interest in Egyptian and other African histories, as well as the rela- tionship between the Black diaspora and Africa, was an important theme in the fi lm. Chephren-Khafra also prefi gures fi lms such as I & I, Your Children Come Back to You, Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purifi - cation (Dir. Barbara McCullough, 1979), Cycles (Dir. Zeinabu irene Davis, 1989), Daughters of the Dust (Dir. Julie Dash, 1991), and Sankofa.

An interest in Africa is likewise present in Julie Dash’s The Diary of an African Nun, a fi lm that refl ects on the tenuous and often damaging relationships that result from cultural dissonance. Made in 1977, Dash’s Project One is an adaptation of an Alice Walker short story, featuring the magnetic Barbara O. Jones as a nun in Uganda questioning her faith and cultural belonging.62 Dash matriculated at UCLA after attending the American Film Institute, where she had already written Four Women (1975) and Illusions (1982) (she would direct Four Women for her Project Two and Illusions for her thesis fi lm). As Dash had more experi- ence than most of her classmates, The Diary of an African Nun demon- strates a polish and professionalism rarely found in their fi rst (or even second) fi lms. Dash was inspired to adapt Walker’s story because of the striking image of the nun’s habit and a photograph that she encoun- tered, which appears in the fi lm and was used for its publicity, of several white nuns surrounded by a group of Black children. The contrast of the habit with the environment, along with the inner turmoil expressed by Walker’s protagonist, led Dash to want to see that woman come to life and to visualize her confl ict.63 She also saw the story as relevant to contemporary Black life, to issues of assimilation, class mobility, cul- tural authenticity, and individual aspirations. Moreover, she was struck by Walker’s way of describing the nun’s confl ict, the nun’s knowing that she was bringing “death to an imaginative people” yet at the same time believing that she was ultimately working in their best interest.64 Though set in Uganda, Diary thematically resonates with the Project One fi lms set in Los Angeles through its concern with women’s choices and with telling stories about women’s lives that are “personal and dif- ferent” from what is typically shown on screen.65

One of the strongest feminist fi lms made as a Project One is Bernard Nicolas’s Daydream Therapy. In it, Nicolas subverts the Hollywood rep- resentation of the fi gure of the Black maid, who labors in the margins of the narrative and the frame, by centering both on the daily chores of such a worker and on her interior and intellectual space. While Bush Mama would later imagine a voice for the systemically silenced, Daydream

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110 | Allyson Nadia Field

FIGURE 2.8. Production photograph, The Diary of an African Nun (Dir. Julie Dash, 1977). Collection of Julie Dash.

Therapy already treats that voice as resistant, militant, and self-possessed, envisioning the fantasy life of a hotel worker whose daydreams provide an escape from workplace indignities. Made in 1977 under the supervi- sion of Robert Nakamura, who was teaching the Project One course at the time, Daydream Therapy is set to Nina Simone’s haunting rendition of “Pirate Jenny” (from Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera) and concludes with Archie Shepp’s “Things Have Got to Change.” As in Bush Mama, which opens with documentary footage of the LAPD harassing Gerima and his crew, the shoot of Daydream Ther-

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Rebellious Unlearning | 111

apy was interrupted by the local sheriff who was alarmed at the sight of, in Nicolas’s words, a “bizarre assemblage” of a dozen Black people with strange costumes surrounding a white man apparently bleeding on the ground in Burton Chace Park in Marina del Rey.66 Of course Nicolas was shooting guerilla-style, without the necessary permits, but the white actor who played the hotel manager had gone to school with the sheriff and was able to explain that it was a student fi lm and thus diff used the situa- tion. The fi lm was well received and Nicolas subsequently entered it in a number of festivals, winning several awards—including fi rst place in its category at the Philadelphia International Film Festival.

Like Gerima’s Hour Glass, Nicolas alternates between black-and- white and color images to express the increasing indignation and

FIGURE 2.9. Handwritten insert, The Diary of an African Nun (Dir. Julie Dash, 1977). Collection of Julie Dash.

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112 | Allyson Nadia Field

political consciousness of the protagonist as she resists sexual exploita- tion by her boss. As Jacqueline Stewart has pointed out, Nicolas draws from Third Cinema and avant-garde precursors—such as Ousmane Sem- bène’s La Noire de . . . (1966) and Maya Deren and Alexander Ham- mid’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)—but reimagines their endings to replace impasse with resilience.67 With precision, Nicolas frames his pro- tagonist with the sharp diagonals of the furniture and architecture that make up her work environment, from the wooden table she lifts as she vacuums to the railings of the steps in front of an offi ce building where she sits to have her lunch. Spatially confi ned, she fi nds liberation through her imagination. Looking out beyond the immediate concrete surround- ings, she fantasizes about an insurrection of which she is the leader. With creative geography that connects downtown Los Angeles’s banking center to the shore at Marina del Rey, the fi lm depicts Black pirates who abduct the hotel manager and look to the domestic worker for instruc- tion for whether to kill the captive “now or later.” Dressed in her regular clothes (rather than her maid’s uniform) and holding a child, she opens her eyes wide as Nina Simone whispers “right now,” silently conveying the death sentence. A sword is raised over the victimizer turned victim, and the fi lm cuts back to the woman distractedly eating chips while star- ing out to the distance, daydreaming as the music shifts to Archie Shepp’s “Things Have Got to Change.” The woman gets up and leaves. No longer statically framed, she now moves through the urbanscape, the camera barely keeping pace as it fi lms her rapidly moving legs and body, intercut with matching shots in color of her briskly walking in red pants as she caries a copy of Kwame Nkrumah’s Class Struggle in Africa (1970).

As the fi lm toggles between the maid in black and white and her polit- ically conscious self in color, we see her carrying a sign announcing “don’t just dream, fight for what you want.” The color image of her marching with the sign cuts to a black-and-white shot of her holding a camera, leading to a color image of her marching with the camera and fi nally a shot of her marching with a rifl e. The trajectory from thought to action—book to camera to gun—is literalized through montage. When she returns to work, walking through the sliding-glass doors of the hotel, she is armed with the militant consciousness that serves as her “therapy.” The fi lm ends with the optimistic intertitle “the beginning . . . ” and iden- tifi es Nicolas not as director but as “Answerable,” just as Gerima identi- fi es himself in the opening titles of Bush Mama.

A self-styled revolutionary, Nicolas was foremost an activist who turned to fi lmmaking as a tool of activism. It is fi tting, then, that he

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Rebellious Unlearning | 113

portrayed a young revolutionary in Melvonna Ballenger’s Project One fi lm, Rain/(Nyesha), made in 1978. Like Daydream Therapy, the six- teen-minute narrative of Rain is concerned with political consciousness, in this case of a young typist played by Evlynne Braithwaite. Ballenger chronicles the woman’s increasing political awareness at the encourage- ment of an activist, played by Nicolas, whom she meets as he is handing out fl yers on the street. The soundtrack of the fi lm poetically brings together voice-over refl ections of the two protagonists with John Col- trane’s “After the Rain,” celebrating the will to personal transforma- tion and demonstrating how personal changes are refl ections of broader political transformations. Rain is fi gured as a metaphor for revolu- tion—cleansing “the atmosphere of elements detrimental to the human mind and to all of nature”—and the fi lm concludes with the optimistic refrain, “Storm winds are blowing.”

Though concerned with political consciousness, the fi lm is equally invested in depicting the quotidian routine of its protagonist. As Zein- abu irene Davis, in Cycles, would later explore the personal space of a young African American woman living alone, Ballenger here gives atten- tion to the small gestures that comprise her protagonist’s daily routine, including showering and dressing.68 This attention is lovingly presented even while Ballenger’s subject speaks of her “dreary routine.” By start- ing the fi lm with the character in her own home, Ballenger simply yet radically positions the Black female body within its own context, not as defi ned in relation to others—whether men, white people, strangers, or employers. Ballenger thus radically defi nes the locus of identity and self- respect as something innate rather than externally catalyzed. The typist may have been encouraged by the radical’s outreach eff orts, but, as the character explains in voice-over, change comes from within, and by changing yourself you change those around you. Unusually for Project One fi lms, as the protagonist becomes increasingly politically aware, the gender roles correspondingly change: she shifts the typing to the activist, making him type up his manifesto in a feminist gesture that belies the machismo of much contemporary revolutionary rhetoric.69 The fi lm thus refl ects the mission of its fi ctional activist, who types the manifesto for a fi lmmaking collective: “The fi lm co-op is a progressive group of fi lmmakers dedicated to developing strong and positive images of the minority peoples in their respective communities.”

This fi ctional collective is likely an echo of the collaborative emphasis of Ethno-Communications, as well as the work of other groups coming out of UCLA (such as Visual Communications). The collective also

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114 | Allyson Nadia Field

presents an ideal image of what organized collaboration would look like had the Black fi lmmakers of the L.A. Rebellion formalized their collectiv- ity. With “the fi lm co-op,” Ballenger echoes the commitment of Ethno- Communications to presenting positive images of people of color that would serve as a corrective to the myriad misrepresentations prevalent in mainstream culture. Like Hour Glass, Ujamii, and Daydream Therapy, Rain is optimistic about the possibility of personal and political change.

What the vast and varied Project One fi lms show is that, as much as the fi lmmakers were rooted in their communities, UCLA was a tremen- dous infl uence on their work, fostering an environment where creative experimentation through rebellious unlearning was possible. UCLA not only gave access to equipment and facilities; it also provided exposure to world cinema (thanks to Elyseo Taylor and Teshome Gabriel) and off ered camaraderie and collaboration among the students of color and their “fellow travelers,” other progressive and politically engaged stu- dent fi lmmakers from a broad range of backgrounds. Through the Project One fi lms, we can see the nascent coming together of ideas, styles, themes, and goals that would become emblematic of this Los Angeles–based Black independent fi lm movement.

FIGURE 2.10. Rain / (Nyesha) (Dir. Melvonna Ballenger, 1978).

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Rebellious Unlearning | 115

The Project One fi lms are the least known of each fi lmmaker’s creative oeuvre, as many have not been seen since their initial showing in UCLA’s Melnitz Hall screening room and a few subsequent festival appearances. However, thanks to the eff orts of the UCLA Film & Television Archive and the tenacity of the fi lmmakers who saved their work in whatever format possible, we are now able to revisit these early works. Doing so gives us a fuller appreciation of the creative trajectories of the Black fi lm- makers at UCLA during this period and an understanding of the genesis of the only Black independent fi lm movement to come out of a univer- sity.70 Even if the Black fi lmmakers “graduated into a desert” rather than a welcoming industry, as Gerima lamented, their Project One fi lms ena- bled experimentation with fi lm form and a free exploration of thematic concerns, providing the opportunity for student fi lmmakers to collabo- rate and lay the foundation for their subsequent creative work.71 Through this process of unlearning, the L.A. Rebellion fi lmmakers discovered that “revolution” through fi lm is not so simple, and their later work is marked by the rebellion born of these early experimentations with fi lm form.

NOTES

Many thanks to Chon Noriega for his insightful comments on an earlier draft of this essay and to Daniel Morgan for his astute eye. Thanks also to Artel Great and Samantha Sheppard for their research assistance.

1. Clyde Taylor, “The L.A. Rebellion: A Turning Point in Black Cinema,” in Whitney Museum of American Art: The New American Filmmakers Series 26, 1–2 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1986).

2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. See the introduction to this volume for a more thorough discussion of

MUCC and Ethno-Communications. 5. David E. James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography

of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 305.

6. Taylor, “Turning Point”; Ntongela Masilela, “The Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers,” in Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara (New York: Routledge, 1993), 107. While I focus on the key fi gures, there were other Black fi lm students at UCLA at the time. The sixteen fi lmmakers I discuss here refl ect the materials collected and oral histories conducted as part of the L.A. Rebellion Preservation Project. Hopefully, more materials will continue to become available to encourage wider consideration of even more student fi lm- makers of color.

7. Bernard Nicolas, oral history interview by Allyson Nadia Field, Jan-Chris- topher Horak, and Jacqueline Stewart, January 23, 2010, LAROH.

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116 | Allyson Nadia Field

8. Several fi lms had a more prolonged screening life outside of UCLA as they circulated in festivals, though these were primarily in Europe where the fi lms’ political engagement and anti-Hollywood aesthetic were met with critical approval.

9. Larry Clark, oral history interview by Jan-Christopher Horak and Jacque- line Stewart, June 2, 2010, LAROH.

10. Don Amis, oral history interview by Jacqueline Stewart, November 2, 2010, LAROH.

11. The connections between fi lmmakers can be traced in this volume’s comprehensive fi lmography detailing their collaborations.

12. O.Funmilayo Makarah, e-mail correspondence with the author, April 6, 2012.

13. For example, Jamaa Fanaka performed in I & I (Dir. Ben Caldwell, 1979) and Ben Caldwell’s still photography appears in Welcome Home, Brother Charles (Dir. Jamaa Fanaka, 1975).

14. Julie Dash, oral history interview by Allyson Field, Jan-Christopher Horak, and Jacqueline Stewart, June 8, 2010, LAROH.

15. Monona Wali, “Roundtable: L.A. Rebellion: Then and Now,” at the symposium “L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema,” UCLA Film & Television Archive, Billy Wilder Theater, Los Angeles, November 12, 2011.

16. Charles Burnett, oral history interview by Allyson Field and Jacqueline Stewart, June 7, 2010, LAROH; Clark, oral history.

17. Alile Sharon Larkin, oral history interview by Allyson Field, Jan-Chris- topher Horak and Shannon Kelley, June 13, 2011, LAROH.

18. Ibid. 19. Haile Gerima, oral history interview by Jacqueline Stewart, Allyson

Field, Jan-Christopher Horak, and Zeinabu irene Davis, September 13, 2010, LAROH.

20. Ibid. 21. Charles Burnett, conversation with author, March 11, 2012. 22. Burnett, oral history. 23. Michael Cummings, e-mail correspondence with the author, January 19,

2012. Cummings went on to become a renowned painter and quilter. 24. In his oral history, Penick recounts that 69 Pickup’s original ending had a

surrealist twist, with the three fi gures throwing balled-up newspapers around the room, having fun. Penick states that in a fi t of anger he removed the ending because the response from students and professors was that the ending was inconsistent. Thomas Penick, oral history interview by Allyson Nadia Field, LAROH.

25. Ibid. The soundtrack of the fi lm does not survive. 26. Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York: Dell, 1968), 33. 27. See Billy Woodberry, oral history interview by Jacqueline Stewart, June

24, 2010, LAROH. 28. Clark, oral history. Notably, Clyde Taylor has written the most convinc-

ing argument against this type of pedagogy concerning Birth of a Nation. Clyde Taylor, “The Re-Birth of the Aesthetic in Cinema,” Wide Angle 13, nos. 3/4 (July–October 1991): 12–30.

29. Several fi lmmakers have agreed with Teshome Gabriel’s assessment that more women were admitted because the faculty “didn’t want to deal with the

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Rebellious Unlearning | 117

men anymore.” Teshome Gabriel, conversation with the author, October 21, 2009. See also Larkin, oral history.

30. Clark, oral history. 31. Q&A at screening of Passing Through (Dir. Larry Clark, 1977), Billy

Wilder Theater, Los Angeles, December 10, 2011. 32. Whitfi eld also appeared in Haile Gerima’s Ashes & Embers (1982). 33. Clark, oral history. 34. A perfectionist, Larry Clark would not permit Tamu to be shown in the

UCLA Film & Television Archive’s series “Creating a New Black Cinema.” However, the fi lm can be viewed at UCLA’s Archive Research Study Center in Powell Library, along with the other surviving fi lms of the L.A. Rebellion that have been deposited at UCLA.

35. Clark, oral history. 36. Jamaa Fanaka, oral history interview by Allyson Field, Jan-Christopher

Horak, and Jacqueline Stewart, June 16, 2010, LAROH. 37. Gerima, oral history. 38. Clark, oral history. 39. Gerima, oral history. 40. Scott Moore, “Negroes to Boycott Olympics,” San Jose Mercury News,

November 24, 1967, 1. 41. Black Panther Newspaper 10, no. 7 (1973): 6 and 13. 42. Woodberry, oral history. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. O.Funmilayo Makarah, oral history interview by Jacqueline Stewart,

May 29, 2011, LAROH. 46. O.Funmilayo Makarah, e-mail correspondence with the author, April 6,

2012. 47. Ben Caldwell, oral history interview by Allyson Field and Jacqueline

Stewart, June 14, 2010, LAROH. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid. 50. Tyler Perry’s signature character Madea may seem to reference the clas-

sical myth, yet the character’s name more closely references the truncation of “Ma’Dear,” a common appellation for African American matriarchs, derived from southern Black culture.

51. Caldwell, oral history. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. Amis, oral history. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid. 58. Larkin, oral history. 59. Jacqueline Frazier, oral history interview by Jacqueline Stewart and Jan-

Christopher Horak, August 29, 2011, LAROH. 60. Neither of these fi lms is known to be extant.

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118 | Allyson Nadia Field

61. Carroll Parrot Blue, oral history interview by Allyson Field and Jacque- line Stewart, June 23, 2010, LA Rebellion Oral History Project, UCLA Film & Television Archive.

62. Walker’s short story was fi rst published in Freedomways: A Quarterly Review of the Freedom Movement 8, no. 3 (Summer 1968), and subsequently anthologized in Alice Walker, In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (Orlando, FL: Mariner Books, 1973), 113–18.

63. Julie Dash, interviewed by Barbara McCullough on Convergence, c. 1978–79, UCLA Film & Television Archive, inventory no. VA8025 M.

64. Ibid. 65. Ibid. 66. Nicolas, oral history. 67. Jacqueline Stewart, “Defending Black Imagination: The ‘L.A. Rebellion’

School of Black Filmmakers,” in Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960–1980, ed. Kellie Jones (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, University of California; New York: DelMonico Books/Prestel, 2011), 47.

68. For a thorough discussion of Cycles, see Kathleen Anne McHugh, “Experimental Domesticities: Patricia Gruben’s The Central Character and Zeinabu Davis’s Cycles,” in American Domesticity: From How-To Manual to Hollywood Melodrama (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 179–94.

69. While it is not clear if Ballenger saw the fi lm, her interest in the intersec- tion of political and domestic revolution echoes the great blacklisted fi lm of the 1950s, Salt of the Earth (Dir. Herbert Biberman, 1954).

70. Many of the Project One fi lms are now available for streaming on the UCLA Film & Television Archive’s L.A. Rebellion website, www.cinema.ucla. edu/la-rebellion.

71. Gerima, oral history.

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