by

Ntongela Masilela

Every age creates the age it needs, and only the next
generation believes that its fathers' dreams were lies
which must be fought with its own new "truths".

-Gyorgy Lukacs, Soul and Form , 1911

It is only with the passage of time, temporal distantiation, that it is possible today in 1991 to historically and culturally re-construct the actual emergence and existence of a black independent film movement in the early 1970s in Los Angeles . The film movement was founded at the University of California in Los Angeles by African and African-American students, most of whom were in the process of completing their film studies in the Theater Arts Department of that highly esteemed institution. At that time UCLA's Theater Arts Department was one of the two or three best places in the United States to study film production, partly because it had visiting guest lectures of the caliber of King Vidor, Fritz Lang, Frank Capra, Roberto Rossellini and many others. It was in the context of this practical experience that this black independent film school, which went against the trend of its illustrious teachers in intellectual affinities and affiliations, gave expression to its historical brilliance. In the main, this cultural movement was constituted by two waves black film makers, whom Clyde Taylor, one of the leading African-American authorities on black film culture, has characterized as forming the essence of the UCLA film school.(1) Haile Gerima, Charles Burnett, Larry Clark, John Reir, Ben Caldwell, Pamela Jones, Abdosh Abdulhafiz, and Jama Fanaka were members of the first wave, and Bill Woodberry, Julie Dash, Alile Sharon Larkin, Bernard Nichols were members of the following wave. It is because of competence, that this sketch will concern itself solely with the first great wave, and then, only with its central features which define the structure of this cultural configuration.

The arrival of Charles Burnett at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1967, two years after the assassination of Malcom X and the Watts Rebellion, and the disembarking of Haile Gerima from Ethiopia via Chicao in 1968, the year of the assassination of Martin Luther King and the launching of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, were the beginning moments of the gestation of this black independent film movement. By 1978, when Teshome Gabriel, the distinguished scholar of African film and the Third World Cinema from Ethiopia, held a series of fascinating discussions and interviews with the great Brazilian film director, Glauber Rocha, the members of the UCLA film school had already disbanded and gone in different directions, though maintaining close contact with each other.

The political and social struggles and convulsions of the 1960s inseparable from the intellectual and cultural coordinates which forged the parameters of this black independent film school. The Civil Rights Movement, the Women's Movement in accompaniment with Feminism, the consequences within America of the national liberation struggles against neo-colonialism in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and the American Resistance to the Vietnam War, informed the political consciousness of these African-American and African film directors. Their imagination was inescapably wedded to political and cultural commitment . While this political fermentation was taking place in America, and Europe exhibited a particular variation on it with emphasis on the Student Movement, the Third World in the 1960s was in the cauldron of new Marxist ideologies: in Asia, Maoism held sway in that prodigious continent, in Latin America Guevarism was opening new historical pathways in an attempt to resurrect the uncompleted political project of Simon Bolivar, and in Africa Fanonism within the context of the Algerian Revolution was arguing for the position that only through revolutionary ideologies can this black continent move forward. Fredric Jameson, in his great essay "Periodizing the 1960s", has profoundly delineated the political contours and the intellectual currents of this decade.(2)

Specifically, the decade of the 1960s threw a series of historical questions to this generation of black film directors in the form of the revolutionary maxim of Fidel Castro: "the duty of a revolutionary is to make revolution". For Charles Burnett and other African-Americans this maxim translated itself into the concrete question of how do they establish an independent black film enterprise which is authentic to their unique cultural roots and contests the falsification of African-American history and culture by Hollywood . This question was partly governed by the fact that Melvin Van Peebles in 1971 with Bad Song Sweet Ass film had clearly shown that there was a huge market in America for black films. The phenomenal success of this film spurred Hollywood to glut the market in the 1970s with black exploitation films. The concrete task of Ben Caldwell and cohorts was then how to take inspiration from the example of Melvin Van Peebles, while criticising the ideological incorrectness of his film, in order to demolish Hollywood 's mis-representation of black culture. The oversight of Melvin Van Peebles was to have made his film, a very commendable achievement, as though the revolutionary project of the Blacks Arts Movement of the then Leroi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) and Larry Neal had not taken place. James Baldwin, learning from these young lions and from the then great cub Ishmael Reed, had refused to write a screenplay from Malcolm X's autobiography for Hollywood, in the correct fear that he would be participating, as he eloquently put, ".... in the second assassination of Malcolm X." Clearly then, for this school of black American film makers the central aim was to find a new film form unique to their historical situation and cultural experience, far beyond possible Hollywood appropriation and incorporation. It was in this historical search that they found Oscar Michieaux's family film dramas of the 1920s and 1930s. The revolutionary breakthrough of the UCLA film school was to have shifted the historical problematic central in Michieaux's family dramas from his middle-class milieux into the working-class environment, in which the fundamental struggle is between black Labour and white Capital. This shifting of gears was necessitated by the fact that the American social structure had been waging a class warfare against the African-American family. The terrible consequences of this unrelenting class assault were beginning to be apparent in the 1960s.

Although Haile Gerima also equally met the challenge of this historical logic within the American context, being an African he had to confront another set of historical issues, one of the most serious was desperately voiced by Frantz Fanon in Toward the African Revolution : namely that Africa tragically lacked an ideology. In other words, in order Africa to move forward she had to forge a unique ideology or be in possession of a progressive one. With different words, Amilcarr Cabral, in his voluminous writings, particularly in Unity and Struggle , had said the same thing, in arguing that since European history had superimposed itself on African history through imperialism and colonialism, it was necessary to wage a national liberation struggle and forge a revolutionary national culture in order to dislodge the political, ideological and cultural domination of Africa. In achieving this, Africa would in effect be leaving European history and re-entering African history. With his films, Haile Gerima, sought to be part of this progressive movement of Africa . But for this to be possible, film had to be articulated as an art form of ideas, an intellectual project, inserted into, and in dialogue with, history. The founding moment of the Los Angeles black independent film movement indicated that this was possible.

The artists and members of the UCLA film school near for a moment subscribed to a singular dominant and hegemonic ideology. Rather, different and diametrically opposed ideologies, were in contestation for hegemonic status among its exponents. This merely reflected the reality of the fact that in black America at large two ideologies were in virulent opposition to each other in the 1960s: the cultural nationalism of the US organisation and the revolutionary nationalism of the Black Panther Party. In many ways, the positions of Ben Caldwell and Larry Clark were mediated by this polar contrast. Before participating in the formation of the UCLA film school, Ben Caldwell had been one of the solid pillars of the Black Arts Movement, which so profoundly revolutionised black aesthetics in the late 1960s. Amiri Baraka, in his autobiography, The Autobiography of Leroi Jones , pays warm tribute to Caldwell for his contribution to this literary and artistic movement. This dialectical tension between cultural nationalism and revolutionary nationalism was one of the ideological strands central to the intellectual development of the Los Angeles black independent movement. An equally important tension within the ideological space of this particular emergence, was that among the African members of this school: namely, the African Marxism of Frantz Fanon and Amilcarr which replaced and displaced the Pan-Africanism of Kwame Nkrumah and George Padmore as the living philosophy of African history, following the 1960 Congo Crisis debacle. While Fanon's Marxism was predicated on the peasantry being a revolutionary class within colonized Africa , that of Amilcair Cabral celebrated the African working class: their theorized differing epistemologies of African history. Paradoxically, Ntongela Masilela, coming from South Africa , a highly industrialized country, leaned in the direction of Fanon, while Haile Gerima, from Ethiopia , a relatively feudal society, was more inspired by Amilcair Cabral. Teshome Gabriel, although coming from a Marxist provenance, and Charles Burnett, seemed to have been unaffected by these ideological positionings. As stated, these positions were never steadfast and dogmatic as to hinder ideological discussions and disagreements.

Prolonged and intense ideological discussions is what cemented our film movement together. Within the movement, ideological tendency was inseparable from artistic tendency and creativity, as Walter Benjamin has eloquently argued in his remarkable essay, "The Author as Producer".(3) Particular texts were paramount in enriching the developing political and artistic consciousness of Larry Clark, Charles Burnett, Teshome Gabriel and others. Invariably, for this generation, Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth , was the canonical text. Some among us emphasised the chapter on revolutionary violence so passionately articulated by Fanon; while others were enthralled by the chapter on the emergence of national cultures at the very moment of national liberation struggles; while still others were enamoured by the chapter which undoubtedly is one of the most devastating critiques of the African national bourgeoisie ever written. In other words, there could not possibly be any 'canonical' reading of such a great and complex book. The book clarified the historical moment in which these creators found themselves, Ngugi wa Thiongo's Homecoming applied African Marxism, particularly that of Fanon, to African cultural struggles, and thereby opening new breakthroughs on matters of language. Richard Wright's American Hunger , published after twenty years of suppression, taught us the indissolubility of Pan-Africanism and Marxism, as the historical experience of the late C.L.R. James has testified in the twentieth-century. It was Malcolm X's life as well as his autobiography that proclaimed to us that all is achievable or attainable, provided the will is there. In summary, all these works, as well as many others, spoke to us of the need of always incorporating an internationalist perspective in our work.

In fact, two events which had a lasting influence on the Los Angeles school of black film-makers were international in their nature: the emergence of the Cuban National Cinema and the development of Third World Cinema. From the time of Guiterrez Alea's Memories of Underdevelopment (1967) and Humberto Solas' Lucia (1968) to Alea's Last Supper (1977), the Cuban cinema was the pre-eminent film movement in the THird World in re-appraising and interrogating its national history anew with the aim of assisting in the construction of socialism. What was exemplary about this national film movement was its ability to incorporate within its beingness the Soviet cinema of Dziga-Vertov, the Italian neo-realism of Roberto Rossellini, and the French New Wave film form of Jean-Luc Godard, and yet still able to develop a particular national film language which was in consonance with the dialectical needs of its history. The national language of the Cuban national cinema was one of the defining strands of the Third World Cinema. Undoubtedly, taking the cue from Fredric Jameson, the Cuban National Cinema was articulating the internationalism of national situations as one of the fundamental projects of Third World Cinema.)4) The importance of the socialist undertaking and historical project of the Cuban cinema was evident enough that Teshome Gabriel, Larry Clark, Charles Burnett, Ntongela Masilela, Haile Gerima, Ben Caldwell and others organized a Third World Film Club from 1974 to 1976 at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) in order to be able to show and see Cuban films and other Third World films. The Third World Film Club demanded from the University an enormous budget for the above mentioned task.(5) After some struggle, the University yielded. Simultaneously, the Los Angeles school of black film-makers through the Third World Film Club had to forge links with other progressive national organisations in order to pressure the United States government to rescind its order of banning all forms of cultural exchanges between Cuba and the United States . One of the high moments of the Los Angeles school of film-makers through the Third World Film Club was its modest political and cultural struggle in assisting to break the cultural boycott of Cuba on the part of reactionary forces in the United States . Upon winning this struggle, UCLA became one of the very few institutions which initially showed Cuban films and other progressive films.

The Third World Film Club did not limit itself to showing only Cuban films, but rather, availed to itself the whole spectrum of the Latin American Cinema: stretching from Miguel Littin in Chile to Sanjines in Bolivia . Specifically, the importance of the Latin American Cinema for the members of the Los Angeles film school lay in its uncompromising examination of the relationship between film and national culture. Sanjines' positioning of Bolivian Indians into a central place within Bolivian national culture was profoundly revealing to us. We derived from this the lesson that film must define or articulate Third World national cultures as dialectical totalities , in which the city or the urban space is not necessarily in a privileged position in relation to the country or the rural space: in other words, dialectical totalities are posited by the tension between class and culture. The Brazilian Cinema Novo , whose films the Third World Film Club showed extensively, revealed a set of historical problems: the dynamic relationship between regionalism, national culture, history and class struggle. Glauber Rocha's Barravento , Black God White Devil , and Antonio des Mortes , and the films of Nelson Pereira dos Santos, especially Vidas Secas , were concerned with these historical issues: Rochas through religion and mythology, and Pereira through the ascetism of the novelist Remos.(6) Naturally, the other film directors of the Cinema Novo school, for example, Ruy Guerra, also participated in this great national debate in Brazil. Clearly, the Brazilian National Cinema taught us that film can be or should be, in fact, must be, an intellectual enterprise.

Perhaps, the premier Third World film which presented itself as a total intellectual enterprise, was Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanos' La Hora do los Hornos ( The Hour of the Furnaces , 1968) from Argentina . Quoting extensively from Fanon's masterpiece, The Wretched of the Earth , this film attempted to theorize the living experience of Third Worldism within the historical coordinates of the Cuban Revolution. Situated within the specificity of Argentina , the film examined the legacy of Peronism, and clearly stated why Guevarism was the fundamental Latin American ideology of the 1960s. The Hour of the Furnaces is, beyond question, the classic of Third World Cinema. To many of us within the Third World Film Club, this film represented the unsurpassable exemplary instance of the interaction of film form and revolutionary ideology. In its passion, in its political commitment, in its intellectual brilliance, the film was on the same par or level as Regis Debray's Revolution in the Revolution . Both were passionate calls for the liberation of Latin America , drawing inspiration from Simon Bolivar, but primarily from Jose Marti. Both these Martian texts wee occupying the same position as Roberto Fernandez Retamar's great essay, 'Caliban', which formulated the cultural unity of Latin American societies. In defining the cultural and historical structure of Latin American film or Third World Cinema, the films of Sergio Giral and Pastor Vega, compelled the exponents of the Los Angeles School of Black Film-Makers to ask themselves the truly challenging questions: what is an African-American film or what is an authentic African-American Cinema?: what is an African film or what is an authentic African Cinema? This posing of questions should be understood within the international context of the 1960s when Jean Luc-Godard from La Chinoise (1967) to Tout Va Bien (1972), had questioned the historical viability of cinema as such.(7) In fact, Godard in Wind from the East (1969), probably the only Marxist western which was first shown in North America at UCLA, had asked Glauber Rocha to define Third World Cinema. Acting in the film as an exponent of this new emergent cinema, Glauber Rocha had many fascinating things to say.(8) Glauber's African film, The Lion Has Seven Heads (1974), an attack on European imperialism in Africa , was part of this attempted definition of Third World Cinema. In the aesthetics of his films, Rocha was attempting to realize what he had theorized as the 'Cinema of Hunger'; and together with Julio Garcia Espinosa's aesthetics, 'An Imperfect Cinema', they represented the most ambitious efforts to theorize the aesthetics of Third World Cinema.(9).

But the Latin American Cinema was not the only school in which some of the members of the Los Angeles School of Black Film-Makers schooled themselves, there was also the prodigious emergence of the African Cinema. The first figurations of this black cinema was Sembene Ousmame's Black Girl (1963), which was a study of the impact or effects of French imperialism on Africans in France itself. The subsequent development of his cinema has earned him the right to be considered the 'father' of the African Cinema. We had occasion to see the prodigious splay of this cinema, when the African Studies Center at UCLA organized in the Fall of 1970 the first African film festival in North America, in which seven leading African film makers participated oncoming from as diverse countries as Senegal and Madagascar. Among the participants were Sembene Ousmane himself, Stephane Allisante from Niger , and Oumarou Ganda from Cameroun . As can be imagined, the main theme of discussion at the Festival was the problematics of the African Cinema: the then ideological directionless of the African cinema, lack of processing laboratories in Africa, the strong presence of European cultural imperialism, and the hardship in finding financing for our cinema. The main benefit of this encounter was the opportunity it afforded the then up and coming directors of the Los Angeles School to interact and exchange views with the leading lights of the African Cinema: this author still remembers a long and animated discussion between Teshome Gabriel and Oumarou Ganda.

The two outstanding figures of the Los Angeles School of black film-makers are undoubtedly Haile Gerima and Charles Burnett. In their films which reflect or were part of the ideological preoccupations of the Los Angeles period history is the central theme: a re-definition or re-conceptualization of the forms and parameters of history within the structures of the family. History and Family constitute the crucial strands of Haile Gerima's Bush Mama (1974), Billy Woodbury's Bless Their Little Hearts (1984), and Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep (1977) and My Brother's Wedding (1983). Charles Burnett stood at the intersecting point of this film movement in that he photographed both Bush Mama Bless Their Little Hearts , as well as writing the screenplay for the latter film. The poetic realism of these early films of the Los Angeles School is inseparable from the imagination of Burnett. This poetic realism is reminiscent of the poetic dramatism of the British documentary film school of the 1930s rather than the poetic experimentalism of the French experimental film school also of the 1930s. This similarity is definitely not accidental in that Basil wright (one of the leading lights of the British documentary school) was Charles Burnett's teacher in the late 1960s at U.C.L.A. In fact, it was Wright who persuaded Burnett to pursue film studies. Perhaps another determinant of this similarity was the politics of context, mainly, colonialism: although Wright's Song of Ceylon (1938) was politically unconscious of the classical colonialism within which it was situated, these School films of the Los Angeles were very much concerned with the question of internal colonialism in America. The influence of Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth is more than apparent. The prologue in Gerima's Bush Mama of the Earth is an implicit announcement that Watts (the black ghetto in which all these films are situated) is an occupied territory. While Haile Gerima is much more concerned with the politics of history within which the family is situated or to which it must respond, Charles Burnett is fascinated by the complex intricacies and mechanism of the family structure. However, both of them were preoccupied with one particular theme: the politics of resistance within the family which emerged after the Watts Rebellion of 1965.

Killer of Sheep , which is the true classic of the Los Angeles School, is a paean to childhood. The epilogue of the film is a hectoring initiation of a teenage-boy to family responsibilities. The film is structured around all forms of rituals: of the family, of childhood, of oppression, of resistance to oppression. Stan, the protagonist of Killer of Sheep , is involved in a series of complex rituals which sustain and hold his family together. Stan is the triumph of the will amidst adverse and demoralizing conditions: bad working conditions in the slaughter-house of sheep, desperate living conditions in the ghetto, the conditions of occupation by the police. Yet his family exudes warmth and tenderness, especially coming from Stan's wife. This film is undoubtedly one of the best American films on the living conditions of the living experience of the American working class. There is no sentimentalization of this lived experience, but a portrayal of the adverse conditions in the process of being overcome. The film has many biblical allusions of damnation and redemption. But what makes the film truly memorable are its poetic images, amongst the most remarkable within the history of the African-American cinema.

My Brother's Wedding does not possess the poetic range and the allusive depth of Killer of Sheep . While Killer of Sheep recalls the poetics of the Italian neo-realism, My Brother's Wedding has no apparent interconnectedness within the history of the cinema. Perhaps the poetic visuals of its middle-class choice and politics obviates its sense of history. The focal point of the film is Pierce Mundy, caught in the uncertainties of young adulthood, and cannot make the decision of whether to enter the middle-class world of his brother who is a layer, or identify with the working-class world of his boyhood best friend who is now a former criminal. It is the bitterness attendant upon this indecision that propels the dynamic of My Brother's Wedding . This film is a fallow moment before the storm of a major work of art, which is what To Sleep With Anger (1990) is.

To Sleep With Anger is a penetrative gaze on the relationship between History (the past) and the Family (the present). The film is metaphorical meditation on African-American history in the twentieth century: the black migration from the South to the North. It has been greeted with critical acclaim in practically all major American newspapers: Los Angeles Times , New York Times , Village Voice and Los Angeles Weekly .(10) This high estimation of the stature of Charles Burnett by American film critics has been confirmed recently by the 1990 National Society of Film Critics in giving the award for the best screenplay of the year to To Sleep With Anger (written by Burnett).(11) Though the film has won critical acclaim, it has had difficulty in finding its proper audience; it has largely attracted white audiences.(12)

The fundamental theme of To Sleep With Anger is the dialectical relationship or tension or confrontation between the Old History of the South and the New History of the North: the unresolved tension between the two histories as it impacted on a particular lower middle-class family in Los Angeles (Watts). This relationship concerns the transformation of the rural sharecropper experience (agricultural workers) into urban proletarian experience (industrial workers). The tension between the Old and the New has been a central construct of African-American cultural history in the twentieth-century: the Harlem Renaissance was a product of this historical migration as Houston A. Baker's Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance tendentially makes clear; the mutation of primitive blues into classical blues through the great genius of Robert Johnson was part of this transformation as Amiri Baraka's Blues People alludes; and Richard Wrights' Native Son was a cultural expression of this historical experience. Also the Chicago blues of Muddy Waters is a response to it. To Sleep With Anger follows on this great heritage. Harry Mention, coming from the tradition, superstition, and mythology of the South (old history) sows discord and mistrust in the family of Gideon and Suzie, who are immersed in the new history of the North. The new history is not necessarily predicated on the rejection of the old history; it is just that Harry symbolizes the return of the repressed. This film would seem to indicate that the central theme of Charles Burnett's work is the impact of the discords of the past (of history) on the present.

Burnett's latest film, America Becoming (1991), is a documentary film on the discordant voices or historical experiences of the new immigrants (mainly from Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean) in the making of a possibly new America: or, the Americanization and taming of new experiences into an old and conservative America. Again, the dynamic tension between the old and the new structures this new film. The title of the film comes from the title of Langston Hughes famous poem: constantly, Burnett situates himself lin a line of continuity within African-American cultural history. The making of America Becoming was contentious and conflict ridden, for the producers of the film, the Ford Foundation, wanted and imposed a harmonious interpretation of this new historical experience, whereas Burnett saw this experience as conflictual and crisis-ridden.(13) The result is that that film is the least auterish or 'vernacularish' of Charles Burnett's films.(14)

The strong vision of Charles Burnett interfused with those of Billy Woodberry and haile Gerima, respectively in Bless Their Little Hearts and Bush Mama .(15) These two films, together with Killer of Sheep , constitute and define the historical poetics of the Los Angeles School.(14) While Killer of Sheep and Bless Their Little Hearts are similar in certain ways, Bush Mama opened a new historical dimension: that of internationalism and political consciousness (political awareness). What fundamentally distinguishes this film from the others, is that it also portrays a woman's perspective (Third World feminism), in contradistinction to the male perspectives embodied in the other two films. Since the film is principally about the development of political consciousness on the part of Bush Mama about her oppressive condition and situation, in her struggle to hold the family together, it is very combative and 'noisy'. The sound track of the film is simply extraordinary: the urban acoustic space has rarely been conveyed to greater effect than in this film. The sound track of Bush Mama gives intense pleasure like that of a very different film, Robert Altman's Nashville .

At the center of Bush Mama is the intersection of three forms of oppression: class, gender and racial. It is this multi-layered texture which constitutes the complexity and richness of the film. Haile Gerima's film was perhaps the only one which defined the situation of black Americans as a form of internal colonialism and therefore comparable to Third World dilemmas. This was indeed a great lesson taught to Gerima by Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth . Bush Mama's developing historical consciousness informs her that in order to overcome her oppression in America her actions must assist the emancipation of Africa from European colonial and imperial domination. It is this consciousness of the interconnectedness of Struggles that makes logically understandable the huge presence of Africa as a historical experience in Bush Mama . From this film to Harvest: 3,000 Years (1976) was only a logical progression. Harvest was shot in Ethiopia a year after the Ethiopian Revolution of 1974. Consequently the film was made within the context of this revolution in its critical appraisal of Ethiopian history. At one time Ethiopian history was in effect African history, because of its longevity and the lineages of continuity to which the sub-title refers. W.E.B. DuBois in The World and Africa situates Ethiopian history at the center of African history, in his critique of European imperial domination of Africa. Also Cheikh Anta Diop in The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality shows the ways in which Ethiopian history at various historical moments 'subsumed' African history: in other words, not only were they inseparable, often they were exchangeable. The Pan-African Movement and the Marcus Garvey Movement took the ideological consciousness of this interpenetration as self-evident. Harvest , then, follows on a certain cultural heritage.

Whereas this cultural heritage has been preoccupied with the continuity of Ethiopian history and its place within the imagination of the black world, Haile Gerima in Harvest dissected its moment of discontinuity or break from a particular class position, that of the peasantry. Gerima examines the class struggle within Ethiopian history, rather than only the position of Ethiopian history in the struggle between African history and European history. It is because the Ethiopian Revolution dealt with internal class contradictions, rather than only the external forces of colonial and imperial domination, as has been the case with Algerian, Angolan and Mozambiqueacan revolutions, that defines this revolution as perhaps the most thorough in the twentieth-century African history. Harvest shows the historical imperatives of overthrowing the Ethiopian landed-aristocracy by the peasant and working classes. The film defines the structure of these historical imperatives, and not moralizing about them. The impact of the change is seen from the perspective of a family; and within it, the consciousness of a very young woman is central. The film articulates a female perspective on African history. In this Harvest is similar to Sembene Ousmane's Ceddo (1977), in that both situate female consciousness in a central position within African history.

Undoubtedly, Harvest is one of the best films to come out of Africa. It defines what a Third World film should encompass from an African perspectives. The film is definitely anti-Hollywood in its narration, visual poetics and theorizing of history. In this, it occupies an important position with the works of Glauber Rocha, Humberto Solas, Sanjines, Guiterrez Alea and others. Unquestionably, Harvest is part of the Third World Cinema. With this film, the Los Angeles School showed its international perspective or, perhaps, its internationalism.

It would be wrong to think that there was unanimity about the nature of the historical project of the Los Angeles School. Among the fundamental ethos of this school in its inception, gestation and development was its anti-Hollywood attitude. On this issue all the members of the School were in agreement except for Jamaa Fanaka. He was an iconoclast. This iconoclasism is imprinted on his films: his films lack a critical perspective on the black experience in America. Jamaa Fanaka was very much fascinated by Hollywood, at the time the tenor of the other members was anti-Hollywood. This may be the explanation for the fact that he was averse to the ideological and artistic discussions, which were always very contentious, fundamental in the formation of the Los Angeles School. However problematical, Jamaa Fanaka's Emma Mae (1976), Penitentiary (1979), and Street Wars (1991) are an irreplaceable legacy of the School.(16) His work as a whole stands at a tangent within the historical project of the Los Angeles School. The historical project, which was never intentionally and ideologically defined as such (in the sense that every member should or must subscribe to), but informed the critical perspective of our discussions and endeavours, was to develop a historically informed authentic representation of black and Third World voices. Within the context of this project, the work of Jamaa Fanaka presents some problems. For instance, Penitentiary , which displays a solid grasp of film language, has no handle whatsoever on its own political and cultural context, let alone on American history. Any film on American prisons from an African-American or Third World perspective must in one way or another confront this question: the disproportionate representation of black and other minorities in the prison population. From this angle, one confronts the question of racism and oppression in America. Penitentiary was made in the late 1970s as if the whole Soledad Brother experience of the early 1970s had not occurred: specifically, the book, Soledad Brother by George Jackson, which C.L.R. James held in high esteem. After all, Angela Davis had taught some of us at U.C.L.A. in 1970 before she was falsely imprisoned for her associations with George Jackson. Further, the prison experience of the 1960s had produced two classics of African-American literature: The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver (however problematical he turned out to be). Similarly the film Emma Mae was oblivious when it was made in 1976 to two historic events of the early 1970s: the great prefiguiations of the African-American female writers (Maya Angelou, Ntozake Shange, Toni Morrison and others), a literature which has been great and dominant for the last two decades (it is not accidental that a decade ago C.L.R. James paid tribute to Alice Walker); the emergence of African-American feminism. Despite these contentious issues, Jamaa Fanaka occupies a central position within the Los Angeles School.

Concerning the other members of the School, John Reir, Ben Caldwell and Larry Clark, not much can be said at this particular moment because many of their projects are in a state of incompletion. In the near future their visions should become apparent. The earlier work of Ben Caldwell, I and I: An African Alligory (1977) is a mystical exploration of black nationalism, African history and black spiritualism. This work argues that spiritualism is an essential component of the cultural profile of African-American people. The film aligns itself with African cosmology, not only on the continent itself, but also as it has evolved in the diaspora, especially in Haiti, Cuba and Brazil. For Ben Caldwell, African emancipation is not possible without spiritual liberation. This theme of spiritualism places Ben Caldwell in a unique position within the constellation of the Los Angeles School. The uniqueness becomes all the more apparent when we consider his later film, Babylon is Falling: A Visual Ritual for Peace (1983), which is postmodernist exploration of popular cultural elements. A deep sense of religiosity seems to inform practically all of Caldwell's work. A work he is presently completing at the California Institute of Arts for the Watts Tower Art Center elaborates further on this theme of spiritualism. Larry Clark's Passing Through (1977) looks at the relationship between a young musician and an older one through music. The film in a way celebrates the greatness of African-American music. Probably this is as good a moment as any to mention that Killer of Sheep is a stunning and haunting film in its usage of music: the music of Scott Joplin, Louis Armstrong, Dinah Washington, Rachmaninoff, Cecil Grant and that of others.

Since this essay is not a total inventory of the filmic works realized by the Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers, but rather, a recapitulation of the intellectual and cultural conditions of its founding, not all the films brought to concretion by this brilliant generation have been mentioned. Such a total mentioning should be reserved for a future historical appraisal by more competent authorities. Nevertheless, the other films are worth mentioning for the historical record. Absent from this roster is Charles Burnett's The Horse (1977). From Haile Gerima we have omitted Child of Resistance (1972). It was this film which was the founding voice of the Los Angeles School. One still remembers that on its first showing in Melnitz Theater at UCLA, it created a tremendous stir and constituted a challenge to all those students who were later to be designated as belonging to the Los Angeles School. Many of us thought he was insane, and few of us still think so. It was a staggering opening shot, a tremendous challenge, to which Charles Burnett has responded fully. It is not a mere coincidence that Burnett in To Sleep With Anger pays tribute to Haile Gerima. It was an acknowledgement of a particular historical moment. However original Child of Resistance was, it nevertheless was a prefiguration of Bush Mama; the former is largely expressionistic, while the latter is densely textured. Three other films by Gerima have not been mentioned: Ashes and Embers (1982), Welmington Ten - U.S.A., 10,000 (1978), and After Winter: Sterling Brown (1985). All these await a full historical appraisal. Perhaps one or two words are necessary to characterize their nature. Ashes and Embers is remarkable for its transposition of African oral narrative devices onto a different artistic medium: the telling of particular story of the Vietnam War experience as though it were an old African folk-tale. Welmington Ten graphically documents the oppression of black people in America. After Winter is a tribute to a great poet; a tribute which makes clear that the Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers of the 1970s had learned much from the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.

NOTES

1) Clyde Taylor, "The Birth of Black Cinema: Overview", in Black International Cinema Berlin: 1-5 February 1989, Arsenal Cinema, West Berlin, 1989, pp. 115-117. See also: a special issue of TheBlack Scholar on Black Cinema: particularly, St. Clair Bourne, "The African-American Image in American Cinema", vol. 21 no. 2 (March-April-May) 1990, pp. 12-19.

2) Fredric Jameson, "Periodizing 60s", in Ideologies of Theory 1971-1986: vol. 2: Syntax of History , University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1988.

3) Walter Benjamin, "The Author as Producer", in Understanding Brecht , New Left Books, London, 1976.

4) Fredric Jameson, "The State of the Subject (III)", in Critical Quarterly , vol. 29 no. 4, 1987, pp. 15-25.

5) It should be mentioned here that the Third World Film Club at U.C.L.A. also included other Third World students, particularly from Iran and Brazil.

6) See the interview conducted Teshome Gabriel and his students Nelson Pereira dos Santos, the former historically appraising the Cinema Novo: "Cinema Novo and Beyond . . . A Discussion with Nelson Pereira dos Santos", Emergence 2 , Spring 1990, pp. 49-82.

7) Prophetically in 1965, in a review of La Pierre Fou , Louis Aragon had titled that review: "What is Cinema Jean-Luc Godard", in Jean-Luc Godard , Jean Collet (ed), New York, Crown Publishers, 1970.

8) James Roy MacBean, "Godard and Rocha at the crossroads of Vent d'Est ", in Film and Revolution , Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1975, pp. 116-138.

9) Fredric Jameson has recently examined Espinosa's aesthetics of "An Imperfect Cinema" within the context of postmodernism: Signatures of the Visible , Routledge, New York, 1990, pp. 218-219.

10) For instance, Georgia Brown, "The Trouble with Harry (and Henry)", in the Village Voice , October 16, 1990, p. 59: "Charles Burnett is our other world-class African-American filmmaker. The quiet one." The other filmmaker presumably is Spike Lee.

11) David J. Fox, "National Critics land Scorsese, 'GoodFellas'", Los Angeles Times , January 7, 1991, F Section. To Sleep With Anger also won a best screenplay award from the Independent Spirit Awards: David J. Fox, "Prelude to the Oscars", Los Angeles Times , March 25, 1991, p. F1, F6.

12) Larry Rohter, "An All-Black Film (Except for the Audience)", New York Times , November 19, 1990; Anne Thompson, "Anger Strikes Back: The Non-Marketing of Charles Burnett", Los Angeles Weekly , November 16-November 22, 1990, p. 37.

13) Charles Burnett mentioned this to the author in several private conversations in early 1990 while shooting America Becoming : it was a constant refrain in our reminiscences on our experiences together with the other members of the Los Angeles School at U.C.L.A. in the early 1970s. See the interesting article on the making of the film: Henry Chu, "Film on Monterey Park Conflict Reviewed", Los Angeles Times , October 25, 1990, pp. J1, J10.

14) After the showing of the film, on April 13, 1991, at the 1991 American Film Instituite Los Angeles Film Festival, Charles Burnett was questioned on certain omissions, particularly the absence of the Native-American (American Indian) perspective in relation to the new wave of immigration from non-European countries. Burnett mentioned the limited options available to him during the making of the film. He expressed a wish of making a film in the near future on Native-American cultures.

15) On the occasion of the 25th Anniversary of the Watts Rebellion of 1965, the Fanon Research and Development Center of Charles R. Dres University of Medicine and Science, and the Los Angeles Library of Social Research, organized a tribute to the Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers. The films of Haile Gerima, Billy Woodberry and Charles Burnett were shown at Drew University in the month of August, 1990. In April 1989 U.C.L.A. held a Haile Gerima retrospective organized by a young Ethiopian filmmaker, Yemane Demissie. Among those attending were Charles Burnett, Ntongela Masilela, Teshome Gabriel and Ben Caldwell.

16) The tribute to Jamaa Fanaka organized by the 1991 American Film Institute Los Angeles Film Festival is in many ways a tribute to the Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers. In this tribute, Jamaa Fanaka's new film, Street Wars , was given a world premier on April 13, 1991. On the following day the Film Festival organized a symposium on "The African-American Filmmakers of Los Angeles: Is This a New Movement in American Cinema?", in which the following were participants: Charles Burnett, Bill Duke, Ruby Oliver, Jamma Fanaka, Ben Caldwell, Naema Barnette, Billy Woodberry, Roland Jefferson, Stephen P. Edwards, Hawthorne James, and George Hill. In other words, the Los Angeles School is in the process of institutionalized as having represented an important historical period in American cultural history.