Despite its significant aesthetic and philosophical differences, the movement of Black student filmmakers at the University of California L.A. (UCLA) in the 70s-80s here referred to as "the L.A. rebellion" should in fact be considered an integral part of the militant anti-imperialist Third Cinema movement. Because of the unique positionality of black Americans, however, the L.A. Rebellion was only marginally able to achieve the kind of concrete political gains achieved in other parts of the world by Third Cinema. This discrepancy does not make these films any less important, however I hope aspiring leftist filmmakers can learn from this history.
Let’s dive in.
As defined by multiple theorists, but particularly Argentinian filmmakers and revolutionaries, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, Third Cinema is more of a prescriptive political program than an "art" movement. Closely related to Brazilian Cinema Novo (see Glauber Rocha's "The Aesthetics of Hunger"), Garcia Espinosa’s Imperfect Cinema (see Espinosa’s For an Imperfect Cinema), and other film movements, Third Cinema was initially theorized by Latin Americans but practiced world-wide. Marrying various socialist tendencies such as Left Peronism (see James’s “The Peronist Left”)with film production, distribution, and theory, Solanas and Getino outline a compelling manifesto for an already burgeoning filmic wave in their text "Toward a Third Cinema". In it, they emphasize the need for films that decolonize both the mind and material conditions by provoking not only thought, but real revolutionary action.
Side note: what is decolonization? The term is thrown around a lot in academic and liberal or “leftist” spaces, to the chagrin of some (see Tuck and Yang’s “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor”). It can refer to: literally throwing off the yoke of a colonial power i.e. the Haitian Revolution which won independence from France in 1804; opposing the European cultural and ideological dominance that comes with colonization by centering nonWestern histories and lifeways; shifting the balance of power so that formerly colonized peoples have more agency; basically just healing from the destruction of colonialism in whatever ways possible. This is integral to the mission of Third Cinema. And of course, one cannot mention decolonizing without a shoutout to Frantz Fanon, the OG of decolonial theory (See “The Wretched of the Earth”).
Whereas films churned out by the imperial core are at worst capitalist-colonialist pig propaganda and at best, "the 'progressive ' wing of Establishment cinema" (Solanas and Getino, 1), Third Cinema presents the exact opposite model of filmmaking. It calls for "transformation from mere entertainment into an active means of dealienation" (ibid, 1).
The first element of Third Cinema is its militant stance against the dominant cinema culture of the imperial nations, primarily that of Hollywood. Thus, Solanas and Getino encourage the breaking of Hollywood-style film language and conventions. Third Cinema differs in form not only because of conscious aesthetic rebellion (though this is an important aspect of "developing a culture by and for us" [ibid, 2]), but also due to the vastly different material conditions under which these films are made. It is shot on-location “guerilla-style”; decentralization is encouraged in production through distribution; all crew members should have a well-rounded knowledge of all the equipment rather than a hyper-specialized role to maintain adaptability; secrecy is needed; it must be made on a shoestring budget; etc (ibid, 8). Not only is the Third Cinema guerilla filmmaker invested in smashing the filmic and cultural norms imposed by the colonizer; they are also invested in building a new revolutionary Third Cinema as part of a new revolutionary culture:
However, one cannot simply change culture and call it revolution. What differentiates Third Cinema from its antecedents is that Third Cinema goes further by emphasizing revolutionary praxis. If this is Third Cinema, what are the "first '' and "second"? These are actual categorizations that Solanas and Getino make. First cinema is hegemony; it is bourgeois ideology incarnate: conformity, escapism, ahistoriscization, consumerism and commodity fetishism, etc. Second cinema is essentially any "auteurist" form of cinema (meaning movies which are viewed as being “authored” by one individual’s creative vision; emphasizes the director as lone artist and architect of the film), particularly the arthouse productions of Europe which rebel against traditional film formulae, something Solanas and Getino consider a "step forward" from First Cinema. "But such attempts," they write, "have already reached, or are about to reach, the outer limits of what the system permits. The second cinema film-maker has remained 'trapped inside the fortress' as Godard put it, or is on his way to becoming trapped" (ibid, 4). Often, Second Cinema is “apolitical” and tries to universalize art, culture, and the human experience, a naïve testament to "art for art's sake". However, I agree with Solanas and Getino when they say: "Ideas such as 'Beauty in itself is revolutionary' and 'All new cinema is revolutionary' are idealistic aspirations that do not touch the neocolonial condition, since they continue to conceive of cinema, art, and beauty as universal abstractions and not as an integral of the national processes of decolonization" (ibid, 3). Even if the second cinema film attempts to question capitalism or colonialism, it may be caught up in denouncing the effects and not the causes, trapped in a reformist merry-go-round (ibid, 7). Or perhaps it simply documents without any attempt to intervene--even symbolically. After all, "revolutionary cinema is not fundamentally one which illustrates, documents, or passively establishes a situation: rather, it attempts to intervene…" [emphasis original] (ibid, 6).
Solanas and Getino made a film in 1968 called La Hora de los Hornos or The Hour of the Furnaces (dir. Solanas and Getino, 1968) about the political climate in Argentina and the need for socialist revolution. When they hosted clandestine screenings of this film, it was an overtly revolutionary act to simply watch it because to be a spectator: you were literally risking your life. The counterrevolution could storm in and shoot up the place any minute. Moreover, it was never just a screening; the films served a multifold revolutionary agenda. They at the very least always held a debate afterwards, turning every viewer into an active participant. They also frequently supplemented the film showing with other revolutionary arts; sometimes they would stage a play or read a poem. The film screening served multiple utilitarian functions. First, it was "an effective pretext for gathering" people in a revolutionary meeting. Second, the strong educational and ideological message of the film engaged with current socio-political realities grounded in class analysis and encouraged viewers to do the same. And most importantly, the attendees are radically transformed from passive viewer to active revolutionary via the screening as an event (ibid, 5). To quote Ella Shohat and Robert Stam:
Rather than vibrating to the sensibility of an auteur, the spectators are encouraged to 'author' their own collective narrative. Rather than placing a hero on the screen, the film suggests that audience members are history's real protagonists. Rather than a place of regression, the cinema becomes a political stage on which to act (Shohat & Stam, 262).
In some cases, these screenings would even directly lead to revolutionary actions such as demonstrations (Solanas & Getino, 5). As you can see, Third Cinema is more than artistic rebellion; it is truly a cinema of action.
So back to the initial question; can we make Third Cinema here in the belly of the beast, in the most imperialist of imperialisms, the settler state of the USA? Solanas, Getino, Teshome Gabriel, and other Third Cinema theorists would say, yes. Directors in the first world can make third cinema, if it is aligned with global anti-imperialist/decolonial struggles (Field 2018, 278).
Side note: I will be using the terms “First” and “Third” World, not as any sign of hierarchy or condescension, but because this is the language used by these revolutionaries. It is a show of solidarity with the “Third Worldist” Marxist position that emphasizes decolonial struggles in the global south as the world’s path to liberation.
Where Does the LA Rebellion Come Into All This?
When third cinema was just freshly theorized and brand new, there were already American filmmakers who were hooked on its message. And they were exactly who you might expect to be invested in anti-imperialist cinema; one of the US's own internal colonies. This is a black film movement through and through.
In the '60s, new initiatives like Affirmative Action finally pushed American universities to recruit more students of color, a mission which became all the more urgent on the West Coast in the wake of the Watts insurrection of '65 (Field et. al, 5). Cut to (arguably) UCLA's first black faculty member (ibid, 6), Elyseo Taylor, who was the only black faculty in the School of Theatre, Film, and Television while he was there. In 1970, "Elyseo Taylor became founding director of a program called Media Urban Crisis (MUC)" which was the new "ethno-communications" program at the college (ibid, 8). This program was "designed to train Black, Chicano, Asian, and Native American students at UCLA to use mass communication technologies to document their own communities and thereby increase understanding of and a sense of cultural participation for marginalized groups" (ibid, 9).
So, with a new multiracial cohort of students, the MUC program began. However, this first cohort was not integrated into the rest of the school: they had their own funding (from a grant from the Ford foundation)and their own equipment. They almost operated outside the school itself, though these students certainly did raise their voices and made themselves heard in the institution (ibid, 11). Taylor made sure that students learned about film and not only film production, forging connections to African filmmakers and bringing them in for lectures. He also created a new course: "Film and Social Change". He was very much enthusiastic about using film in a black liberation context. However, to the students’ dismay and anger, Taylor was denied tenure and soon had to leave the school. UCLA brought in Teshome Gabriel, an acclaimed Third World film scholar, to "replace" Taylor and teach the course, which he did until his death in 2010 (ibid, 13).
The students worked very closely and collaboratively throughout the years, and this collaboration started right away. Students started off with their “Project One” films and were thrown right into the fray. They worked together across ethnicity but were “encouraged to work within their minority groups” in order to authentically make a film which reflects that community. “There was certainly a naïve assumption operating here about community, one that elides differences of gender, class, and geographic origin and segments students along the reductive category of ethnic identity” (Field 2015, 85). This led to some conflicts among students such as women being marginalized within their own groups (ibid). But, the films produced by women in this cohort are especially powerful even though they had to face many extra challenges. Regardless, this loose collective forged powerful connections that would last for decades, as, according to Clyde Taylor, “Black independents were remarkable for their positive, supportive style, across the board” (Taylor, xviii). Eventually, older students like Haile Gerima, Charles Burnett, and Larry Clark, would really take on a vital mentoring role to others. Burnett became the TA for the Project One class in the mid 70s and got nicknamed “the professor” (Field 2015, 87).
There were a lot of long-lasting bonds formed in those times, but also tensions, particularly with the white students. White students “met with skepticism” content about racism and police brutality which was obviously very frustrating (ibid, 88). Regardless, students (particularly students of color) crewed on one another’s shoots and spent many nights up late in the editing room (ibid, 87). Apparently, the Project Ones were really confrontational, and some were even violently problematic-- depicting sexual assault and violence in irresponsible and misogynistic ways (ibid, 89). Field writes that these “filmmakers also rehearse patriarchal and nationalist notions of gender roles in these early films and in this respect reflect contemporary debates about the role of women in revolutionary struggle. The machismo evident in some of these early films extended to the classroom, where professors reportedly felt intimidated by the perceived aggression of the male students of color” (ibid, 90). I can’t find a lot of info about the causes of this perceived aggression aside from one anecdote of Haile Gerima and another student carrying a white professor out of class for trying to screen Birth of a Nation without talking about race, which I think is somewhat justified honestly (Field 2015, 90). This leads me to believe that a lot of this perception on the part of white professors was simply due to their preconceived notions about Black and Latino men. However, that is not to say that the men of color in this group were not reproducing sexism. Especially in project one films, there is evidence of some very problematic sexist manifestations of Black Power. See The Red Papers, a collection of writings by female Black Panthers about combating sexism in Black nationalist liberation. See also the work of the Third World Women’s Alliance for a thoroughly intersectional feminist understanding of imperialist oppression. So, even though this group was very invested in liberation, they weren’t perfect and still reproduced different axes of oppression like misogyny and homophobia.
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| Triple Jeopardy zine cover 1971, from Women of Color Resource Center on Flickr |
The students created diverse works but shared a passion for “elaborating distinct elements of Black culture and exploring the lifeworlds of Black working class and poor people” (Field et. al, 4). They ranged from more narrative to more experimental, from short to long, from subtle to confrontational and were of differing aesthetics, pacing, and themes. Despite this diversity, there are certainly many common threads and broad strokes to outline the connections that make these pieces fit in as part of a unique African American Third Cinema movement. In “Tough Enough: Blaxploitation and the L.A. Rebellion”, Jan-Christopher Horak writes:
On the one side, a film like Haile Gerima’s Bush Mama (1975) consciously eschewed Hollywood genre narratives, relying instead on Third World cinema–style elliptical montages, mixing documentary and fiction as well as multiple levels of audio with extremely fragmented editing... At the other end of the spectrum, Jamaa Fanaka’s films like Emma Mae (1976) and Penitentiary (1979) employed the tactics of mainstream cinema to produce Black films as cheaply as possible, but they also critiqued Hollywood’s vision of African Americans through self-conscious irony (Horak, 124).
Despite their unique strategies and often more narrative and Euro-arthouse inspired modes than some other militant cinema, these films all operated on a level that critiqued and disrupted American racism, the incarceration and welfare state, control of women’s reproductive rights--particularly black women, American imperialism, etc. (Field et. al, 20-21).
What were they fighting against?
In the 1960s, Hollywood was facing a crisis of funding. After noticing the great commercial success of films like Melvin Van Peebles’s independent production, Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song (dir. Melvin Van Peebles, 1971), studios finally decided to pick up features with black casts and even black directors. Before this, “institutional racism on the part of producers, studios, and craft unions conspired for much of the 1960s to keep African Americans out of the director’s chair and away from positions of industry power in general” (Sieving, 204). The movies that they made brought in huge profits as evidenced by the excessive reproduction of the “Blaxploitation” formula in numerous sequels, spinoffs, and ripoffs.
What was this formula? Set in inner city neighborhoods, such movies would follow a black hero or heroine who used their street smarts, bravery, and sex appeal to stick it to the man (Wilson). Replete with drug pushers, pimps and prostitutes, and crooked white cops, these movies were widely criticized by civil rights groups, film critics, and others as flattened and sensationalized portraits of black life. Christopher Sieving asserts that the new sex and violence formula was more commercially viable than black cinema prior to the 70s which was too artsy, political, or confused about its audience (Sieving, 202-206). Movies like Shaft (dir. Gordon Parks, 1971) and SuperFly (dir. Gordon Parks jr, 1972) showed their badass super-stud protagonists kicking ass and seducing their way through life, getting the one-up on white mobsters, politicians, and cops-- all to a groovy as hell soundtrack. They are criticized for promoting a toxic interpretation of black masculinity, glamorizing drugs and ghetto life, and treating their female characters as sexy props, among other things (Wilson, Sieving, Horak, Mason, etc.). Though there were female equivalents in the genre in the form of franchises like Foxy Brown and Cleopatra Jones--both directed by men--wherein the strong and of course sexy black women protagonists get revenge on both oppressive white establishments and also local drug dealers whom they believe are preying on their own communities.
Though these movies were widely enjoyed, there was also lots of backlash. There was a big opposition effort headed by groups like People United to Serve Humanity (PUSH), Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the NAACP. “Junius Griffin, president of the Beverly Hills-Hollywood NAACP, describes Super Fly as ‘an insidious film which portrays the black community at its worst. It glorifies the use of cocaine and casts blacks in roles which glorify dope-pushers, pimps and grand theft'" (Mason, 62). Now, that statement is coming from an organization often criticized for its liberal reformism and politics of respectability. On the other hand, it seems the Panthers’ initial reaction to Sweetback was indeed a positive one. Huey P. Newton--Minister of Defense of the BBP--even wrote a whole article about it, saying that “it is the first truly revolutionary Black film” (Newton). So, Blaxploitation was more complex than the simple economic exploitation of black audiences and the proliferation of stereotypes. Increased inclusion and compensation of creative black filmmakers in the industry is a positive consequence of the Blaxploitation cycle, yet it is clear that whites were capitalizing on the sensational images and stereotypes that these movies were making. It seems likely that “Black directors, in particular, were considered by the studios to be insurance policies, or guarantees against accusations of stereotyping and exploiting” (Sieving, 206). Though in reality they were obviously not immune from criticism from the black community.
So, are the L.A. rebellion filmmakers really part of "Third Cinema"?
Well, many film scholars point out that they are at least "aligned" with Third Cinema. According to Allyson Nadia Field, the L.A. Rebellion took a great deal of direct inspiration from this movement. In her essay, "Third Cinema in the First World", Field states what I have heard throughout multiple texts about the movement: that the "L.A. Rebellion filmmakers sought to align their work with global anti-imperialist fights'' and were in many cases trying to emulate what they’d learned about Third Cinema (Field 2018, 277). It is interesting, though unsurprising, that the filmmakers espoused such global solidarity with anti-imperial struggles given the often hyper-localized nature of these works. In the words of Alessandra Raengo, “The L.A. Rebellion produced a cinema profoundly engaged with its local community, in other words, a cinema that finds elsewhere the artistic tools to articulate something very specific and tragically neglected about the over here” [emphasis original] (Raengo, 298). Even though there were students in that program from all over the country and even abroad, a lot of them were L.A. natives, and much of the work produced is very grounded in the spacio-temporality of L.A. in the late 60s through the 80s. There is something about the texture of these films, their rhythm and language, which is deeply culturally specific: from lingering shots of urban landscapes to carefully curated soundtracks to simple, quiet moments in the character's daily lives.
Field points out that students sought to “inform an approach to domestic concerns, with local issues presented as part of a larger international struggle against systemic oppression” (Field 2018, 277). As the students learned about film from a global perspective, gaining access to African, Latin American, and Asian cinema, they made connections between those movements introduced by Professor Gabriel and their own circumstances as minorities in the states. Field writes that the L.A. rebellion was very invested in “decolonizing the mind,” an endeavor which she claims is “in the case of the ‘internal colony’ inhabited by a nonwhite underclass, perhaps the most radical gesture” (ibid, 280). This “internal colony” describes Third Worldist/Black Maoist perspectives popularized by the Panthers which views black people as an internal colony of the United States, drawing parallels between the settler colonialism in the US, including the kidnapping and enslavement of black people, and the ways that that the West has subjugated, economically exploited, and underdeveloped the global South (Martin & Bloom, 66). It was in this context that the filmmakers operated, shining a light with a sensitive “insider’s” touch on issues of the urban Black underclass.
[DASH INTERVIEW 01:46-02:43]
As Dash says here, this movement was really about making films about the stories that were being neglected. Similarly, in L.A. Rebellion filmmaker Zeinabu Davis’s words, “Generally speaking, the hope of the group is to realize a cinema of informed, relevant, and unfettered Black expression and the means to bypass the restrictive apparatus of distribution and exhibition to create a viable, alternative delivery system that will sustain the ongoing work of Black cinema artists” (Davis, 157). I believe that the goals regarding creating a new expressive black cultural medium have been exceeded, but it seems to me that the distribution part has been a bit neglected, something which I will discuss in greater detail later on.
The term “L.A. rebellion” is itself somewhat controversial. It was coined by Clyde Taylor to describe the first retrospective exhibition of the movement which he helped to present at the Whitney Museum in 1986: “The L.A. Rebellion: A Turning Point in Black Cinema” (Horak 2011). Apparently, Taylor simply coined it for the sake of coming up with a catchy name for the retrospective (ibid), and many scholars choose to use other terms like “the L.A. Collective” or the “L.A. School” to describe the movement instead (Martin, 198-199). However, I think that it is an appropriate label since the rebellion against filmic convention and rebellion in political content was and is a defining feature of the movement—if it can be called a movement at all. According to Alessandra Raengo, if nothing else, thinking of these films as a movement-- as the L.A. Rebellion--can:
…emphasize the productivity of a specific set of circumstances: the first generation(s) of filmmakers of color to have a formal education in filmmaking; the first generation(s) of filmmakers of color to develop a specifically domestic focus/aesthetics at the same time as they were articulating a transnational film language… (Raengo, 297).
This simultaneous alignment with global alternative and political cinema movements and tender care given to local people and situations can be seen in works such as Bush Mama (dir. Haile Gerima, 1979) which depicts a black woman, a mother in South Central L.A., coming into her own political consciousness after the incarceration of her partner T.C.
Bush Mama
Truly cemented in the rebellion’s canon, Haile Gerima’s Bush Mama (1979) is a strong example of the revolutionary tenets of third Cinema at work in both form and theme. Formally speaking, Bush Mama is a unique interjection with its cacophonous non-diegetic soundscapes, disjointed dreamlike sequences, and non-linear storytelling. Haile Gerima uses such rebellious filmic techniques to tell a vivid story about the interactions of systems of oppression and paths toward resistance, using the political radicalization of Dorothy as a conduit for the viewer. While focusing on big picture themes and the machinations of massive social forces, Gerima also also develops characters and their motives, fleshing out these elements to keep the viewer invested on a personal level.
The non-linear storytelling in Bush Mama is one obvious example of defying convention. This aspect of the film serves multiple purposes: 1. The nonlinear time opposes conventional Western fiction narratives, instead placing power in the African diaspora’s traditions. 2. It calls attention to the filmmaking process, introducing a metanarrative aspect. 3. It emphasizes the arbitrary, strange, disruptive inevitability of oppression.
Gerima loves to oppose Western hegemony in his films. Speaking on mainstream film industries, Gerima has said that such industry “monopolistically imposes itself on people as a kind of complete reality and can sometimes replace a person's original and intuitive knowledge and temperament. It displaces those sensibilities. It makes its own standard the official standard” (Jackson & Gerima, 27). So, Gerima is invested in creating films which employ the traditions and sensibilities of the colonized instead, a principle which is very much in line with Third Cinema. “We all don't come out of the Aristotelian paradigm and the Greek and Roman and Spanish aesthetics,” says Gerima, “We have our own narrative sensibilities, especially those of us who come from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. We have our own aesthetics, narrative temperaments that should be appreciated by all human beings” (ibid, 28). With that in mind, it makes sense to me that he would place less emphasis on a “cohesive” linear story as defined by Western literary tradition and more on the emotions and truths within.
Gerima is also drawing attention to the intentional construction of this film, breaking the illusion that Hollywood cinema so often preserves. Gerima wants you to think for yourself when watching his film, not to blindly accept the activities on a screen as truth. Far from the false objectivity and apolitical-ness of first cinema, Gerima wants to openly show you where he stands. Further, the incongruous cuts in the movie insert the viewer into the film in a deeper way by making them think about the filmmaking process and the significance of that choice. In this way, the viewer is forced to also become a “political” actor. It confronts you with confusion and forces you to take a side. You think deeply about both the behind the scenes and the content/images themselves as you try to piece it together as an active part of the film’s creation. You’re drawn in to make your own connections between the shots and thus reminded of your own revolutionary agency.
Moreover, certain cuts and montages serve to jar the viewer and evoke the metaphor of a violent and illogical oppression. Perhaps the most jarring cut comes at 00:19:30 when the scene goes from T.C. leaving for a job interview to being escorted into a prison cell. This cut works on a few levels. Firstly, it’s a popping of the bubble that was starting to form of hope and faith in the neoliberal American Dream when we thought T.C. might get a job and make things better. It is also a radical denial of the white narrative of incarceration being a deserved consequence of some action. Why is he there? What did he do? It doesn’t matter. It’s unfortunately just the way this system works, funneling black folks into jail; there doesn’t need to be a reason. On this unconventional cut, Gerima said:
...one of the experiences of being black in America is not going where you want to go, being stopped. . . . It is a truthful representation to cut from him leaving for the job interview to a prison scene without justifying how he got in jail. . . . That one cut in Bush Mama satisfies a truthfulness to a black experience. (Field 2018, 284)
There’s also the oft told anecdote of the opening scene in Bush Mama, the one of two black men being stopped and frisked by white cops next to their car. Now, I would not have known, if not for reading about this movement extensively, that this was in fact director Haile Gerima and a crew member on the shoot being stopped, presumably for being black and having film equipment. I don’t know if everyone who saw this film was privy to this information when it was released back in the day, nor does it really matter, however, this scene is a deeply ironic and perfect encapsulation of the absurd and evil policing of black people in L.A. that they were talking about in this film (Cason, 122).
In terms of its exact politics, the film has been read differently by various film scholars. For instance, Casey Shoop contests Mike Murashige’s reading of the film with regard to T.C. and Dorothy’s relationship, arguing that T.C. is not, as Murashige claims, acting chauvinistically in his letters. In his essay “Haile Gerima and the Political Economy of Cinematic Resistance,” Murashige asserts that Dorothy’s political awakening is indeed catalyzed by her partner and is caused in part by her partner’s letters to her from prison, however, her own experiences are also foregrounded as essential in the formation of her worldview. To him, Gerima presents many different narratives for Dorothy to draw from when constructing herself and her unique relationship to power and resistance (Murashige, 188). Dorothy’s friend Molly represents the ignorant mindset of victim-blaming and misdirected anger as she rants about black people “goin’ crazy”. The drunken man at the bar expresses something similar with his own insistence that the white man never “messed with” him, though his stance stems from a masculine ego wherein he clings to his false sense of agency as he claims--despite listing off ways that white society has screwed him over--that he would “whoop [their] ass” if they ever did mess with him. On the other hand, T.C. provides a useful critique of capitalism and its relationship with racism and colonialism; the young Angie provides a fresh and enthusiastic revolutionary spark; and Simmi provides connection to community with her experienced black feminst view of organizing built on bonds of kinship. Murashige asserts that T.C. becomes more depersonal, even condescending, with his increasingly preachy and abstract letters. Dorothy cannot see her own experiences reflected in T.C.’s critique which is narrow and even chauvinistic (ibid, 196). In the end, it takes hearing Simmi, a black woman organizer, discussing community for Dorothy to really connect this analysis of oppression with her own experiences and begin to take up resistance.
However, Shoop attributes T.C.’s less tender and personal letters to the process of incarceration and not to any un-feminist failings. Shoop writes that “the chauvinism that Murashige reads into T.C.'s monologues should be attributed more directly to the process of penalization itself. ‘Tenderness’ is precisely what incarceration threatens to kill” (Shoop, 25). Shoop also disagrees with Murashige’s interpretation of the framing as indicating T.C. feeling threatened by a black woman’s agency, instead claiming that it simply serves to reinforce the atmosphere of state control over T.C. (ibid). What Murashige fails to mention when pointing out the distance between Dorothy and T.C. is the obvious: the role of state violence. It seems like, because he doesn’t mention this, Murashige is implying that T.C. is pushing Dorothy away because of some kind of male chauvinism or some personal choice. In so doing, he unintentionally imbues T.C. with far too much agency here and also, in my opinion, misinterprets Dorothy’s reactions.
Despite or perhaps because of the multiple simultaneous narratives and complexities in Bush Mama, it is still a Third Cinema film. For one, Gerima clearly constructs his works with Third Cinema in mind (Gerima). Gerima discusses the influences he had which were overwhelmingly from Third World cinema. As his investment in countering racism and imperialism in culture and his explicit alignment with decolonial global South film proves, Gerima is a Third Cinema practitioner according to most definitions.
Not only does Bush Mama point out the negative conditions inherent in colonial-capitalist ghetto-ization of black Americans; it also attempts to intervene. Dorothy is not only a surrogate for the viewer’s own challenged reality. Dorothy is more than a symbol; she is neither a “passive victim,” nor a two-dimensional “agential muse of revolutionary masculinism” which black women so often are made into (Shoop, 22). However, this deeply human character does inspire the viewer’s own parallel journey to political consciousness. The film asks--demands that the viewer reckon with what’s on screen just as Dorothy took things into her own hands when she killed the policeman who was raping her daughter. The final shot of Bush Mama is a realization of Dorothy’s character growth as well as the most explicit call to action in the film. After rack focusing between the poster of the Angolan freedom fighter with her baby in one arm and a gun in the other and Dorothy, drawing obvious parallels between Dorothy’s revolutionary act to defend her daughter and decolonial struggles abroad, it turns to a freeze frame. Then, we hear a monologue, a letter written from Dorothy to T.C. in which she stresses the importance of self-education [play “I have to get to know myself, to read and to study. We all have to, so we can change it” 1:35:52] but also communication and tender, loving bonds of kinship within the revolutionary struggle. Dorothy finally answers T.C.’s “preaching” with her own voice and calls on him to consider other people’s experiences when talking politics [play “most of the time I don’t understand your letters… talk the same talk, but talk easy to me” 1:36:10]. Especially with the final shot, Bush Mama goes beyond simple critique, offering paths of resistance via community organizing, political education, defending one another against oppressors, and revolutionary love.
Bush Mama is pretty different from a film like La Hora de los Hornos though, so it’s worth discussing variations within Third Cinema. I think that Michael Martin’s concept of “cine-memory,” the constant rewriting of history and present, works well to classify the different sub-strains of Third Cinema and to prove that the L.A. Rebellion was truly Third (and not second) cinema. However, it is worth noting that many writings complicate and dispute the category of Third Cinema. Maybe I am mis-categorizing according to some theorists. Critical of Teshome Gabriel’s definitions and “overdetermination” of Third Cinema, Anthony Guneratne writes that “the slippage between Second and Third Cinema in those original statements enables Gabriel to cite as examples of Third Cinema many films that more comfortably fit into García Espinosa’s category of Imperfect cinema than into Solanas’s and Getino’s Third Cinema” (Guneratne, 14). And yet, according to Paul Willemen, Third Cinema’s diversity should be emphasized. The theorists of Third Cinema apparently spoke of “the historical variability of the necessary aesthetic strategies to be adopted;” different strategies to accomplish similar political goals (ibid, 14). Thus, it could be argued that the minute differences that determine what is and is not Third Cinema may come down to the circumstances of a film’s reception rather than its creation: "a dialogical relation exists between modes of authorial address and modes of reception” (ibid, 26). Perhaps then, it is the context of screenings and distribution that determines whether these movies are indeed Third Cinema. If they are siloed within the academy, presented as an artistic diversion for the intelligentsia to critique in the parlors of the global north, these films are not serving their purpose as catalysts for change.
In my opinion, despite the focus on culture and narrative as opposed to explicit political purposes in many of the L.A. Rebellion films, they still broadly meet the objectives of Third Cinema and do in fact, in their own way, accomplish one of the most important defining features of Third Cinema: intervention. According to Martin, “Class 2 cine-memory works to recuperate the past and in the service of renewal, identity, culture, and nation and infers comparisons between historical struggles” (Martin, 204). Films like Bush Mama do this, but it’s even more accurate to the films which had less of an overt call to concrete political action such as Cycles (dir. Zeinabu irene Davis, 1989) or The Diary of an African Nun (dir. Julie Dash, 1977).
So let’s discuss Julie Dash’s The Diary of an African Nun (1977) and how it too is Third Cinema. Diary is adapted from an Alice Walker story of the same name. Set in Uganda, it follows a nun who is experiencing conflicting emotions about her cultural role and allegiance, incurring a crisis of faith. This film stars the same actress who portrayed Dorothy so beautifully in Bush Mama, Barabara O. Jones. In this short film, the titular nun character is shown walking around the wide open landscapes of Uganda near the convent grounds, writing her diary, and praying in her room. Virtually every shot of the nun contains only her in the frame, creating a clear isolating effect, particularly when she is cloistered in her chambers. The use of extreme wide shots and closeups both serve to underscore the nun’s feelings of disconnection and entrapment.
In one shot, a girl frolics over to join her family and they walk with their arms around each other away from the camera. Then, the nun enters the frame, blocking them from view, and the camera pans right to follow her as she walks into the distance, her lone white figure populating the next few shots. The nun is literally moving away from the potential family she could have had and the culture to which she belonged in favor of a lonely existence where her figure in the frame looks almost like an affront to the environment. Her sense of belonging is now transferred to this colonial establishment, the Catholic church, which she must navigate as a black woman alone. She has chosen this life because it’s something she has wanted from a young age, to adopt this “regal” tradition, to be “shrouded in whiteness like the mountains I see from my window”.
However, this choice is not an easy one, as it sends the nun into turmoil. She describes feeling ambivalent about the role in colonization which she is playing as a representative of European cultural domination. From the very beginning, she writes, “As I am unalterably rooted in native ground, they consider me a work of primitive art housed in a magical color, the incarnation of civilization, anti-hedonism, and the fruit of a triumphant idea”. The nun’s relationship to the white travelers whom she encounters is indicative of the ambivalence he feels toward her vows. Each European confronts her with their own perceptions, perceptions which are undeniably colonial, condescending, and objectifying. The shots during this narration also work to complicate ideas of European cultural superiority. When she says “primitive art,” we are shown a side table with a plain white porcelain wash basin and pitcher, creating a Kulishovian association which urges us to think about the hypocrisy of calling African things “primitive,” while West European objects of that time period frequently reflect a boring artistic rigidity and capitalist/colonial modes of production. Who’s “primitive” now? Then when she says “the incarnation of civilization,” she shows us two other objects which represent the Western concept of civilization: a gregorian wall calendar inscribed with the image of Mary and baby Jesus and a table with a globe, glassware, and some books. These material objects show the technological and commodity fetishism shrouded in intellectualism present in Western culture, and the antique globe which displays the African continent invokes the European scramble for Africa. Who is really primitive here? Seems to me like that would be the group which barbarically conquered, pillaged, kidnapped, enslaved, sold, destroyed, and subordinated other societies.
Later, when the nun’s crisis reaches a high point, she is wearing less clothing, showing more of her brown skin and less of the white that shrouds her. She is trying in vain to connect with her uncaring white god through prayer, all the while thinking about the life of sensuality and vibrancy which she relinquished with her vows. The nun cries out to Jesus, but she receives no response, no engagement from her supposed “husband,” only the pounding of African drums in her mind. She then describes a courtship ritual of dance which becomes a passionate affair, the desperation in her voice reflected by the closeup of her face as she holds a rosary to her mouth, attempting to bite back the lust inside her. Afterwards, we see a barrage of quick close shots of her arms/hands clasping together in prayer interspersed with closeups of her face in which her eyes conspicuously move upward to the heavens. All the while, the frenzied drumming grows louder. To me, this sequence symbolizes the fragmentation of self and spirituality caused by the nun’s identity crisis. Who is she? A celibate devotee to the Catholic church and “wife” to God Himself, a pious, pure and noble woman? Or is she an agent of Western hegemony, representative of the Christianization and cultural erasure of colonialism which supports white power? Or is she a Ugandan woman who knows deep down that she longs to reconnect to her roots and her people? As the nun desperately tries to invoke her god, the film invokes ritual through repetition, except that instead of connecting her to community and providing solace, this ritual is hollow and strained.
This film depicts with a firm aesthetic cohesion the downfalls of imperialism, showing clearly how this African nun is “conflicted about serving white interests and how they lock the women into white-defined historical roles of servitude and invisibility” (Martin, 212). Through its formal aesthetic choices like soundscape, mise en scene, framing, editing, and recurring visual motifs like the white marble figure of Jesus and confining horizontal lines, Diary calls on the viewer to consider cultural politics. How is culture erased and replaced, used violently in the context of colonialism? If this is the case in Africa, it is not difficult to draw connections to black and indigenous people in the states. Since the main character herself is both the oppressed and the oppressor due to her participation and assimilation in the colonial institution, the film also asks the viewer to consider their own role in perpetuating colonialism. This story is so different from anything in mainstream film and full of revolutionary potential even just in the centering of an African woman’s perspective and its candid discussion of colonialism. It is not hard to see how Dash’s film acts within the 2nd class of cine-memory to “refute held beliefs; substantiate and redress historical claims… and invite audiences, in the tradition of Third Cinema, to conjure and narrate their own outcomes for historical struggles” (ibid, 218).
Distributional Critique
I’m not gonna sit back here from my ivory tower and tell you that these revolutionary filmmakers didn’t do enough to get their films out there or that they failed in any way. That isn’t true. These movies changed history, and there definitely was community engagement going on during the making of these films. Charles Burnett’s highly acclaimed and much discussed Killer of Sheep starred local non-actors, and other productions used non-actors as extras too. Elyseo Taylor “visited Watts frequently, taking his still camera and his Bolex film camera to teach neighborhood youth how to document their own communities” (Field et. al, 6). And student Larry Clark started a workshop through Performing Arts Society of Los Angeles where he helped to train “inner city youth” in film; at a 2011 Q&A he said “I made myself a promise that I would have one foot in UCLA and another foot in the community” (Field 2015, 90). However, it has been very difficult for me to figure out the exact political activities of all these filmmakers and how/if they really used their films in a context which made them useful to the revolutionary project. That is really the factor that determines whether or not this should be identified as “Third Cinema”. It was really hard to actually get these films out to the public, particularly to larger black audiences. According to the preliminary research done by the organizers of UCLA’s big 2011 retrospective on the Rebellion, “less than 39 percent of our initial list of L.A. Rebellion titles received distribution of any kind, other than when venues directly approached the filmmakers with invitations to screen their work or borrow prints” (Field et. al, 35). For one, these films were obviously not the entertainment that folks had come to expect from film; they are confrontational and, honestly, inaccessible at times due to their avante-garde-ness. Field, Horak, and Stewart write:
But it is not surprising that their work could not reach mass Black audiences, given that so few titles received theatrical distribution and so little of the work fit the generic and stylistic parameters that were familiar to viewers, or marketable to them via the attention of major media outlets. Indeed, it is not clear that all of the filmmakers wanted to reach Black audiences on the same scale as “Blaxploitation” films. Instead, because these artists also crafted individual voices in auteurist terms, their films received the most initial critical attention outside the orbit of the Los Angeles–based film industry, from academics and the film community at large in Europe and other places far from L.A. (Field et. al, 29).
So what does this mean?
A primary criticism of Third Cinema is that it supposes a very particular reception on the part of its audience, constructing films for an imagined spectator who they consider paradoxical in nature. At the same time this imagined spectator is assumed to be depoliticized, in need of lessons about class consciousness, and simultaneously appreciative of and receptive to the strange and “oppositional” aesthetics in which the film operates. How could this spectator be both ignorant of politics and sophisticated enough to appreciate the film? I think this is somewhat of a contradiction, however, we must also avoid condescension here; I am sure there are people who have not yet made the formalized connections between their own condition and these larger systems of oppression or have simply been too timid to act but are primed to do so if only given the vocabulary or that extra push. Surely, we mustn’t assume that poor people are incapable of appreciating “high art”. And yet, it is true that audiences who are so conditioned to have certain expectations of film could be alienated by such an extreme breakage of those conventions. According to Guneratne and Dissanayake: “Not unexpectedly, the audiences who responded to the aesthetics of Third Cinema were already familiar with its political motivations. Thus, Third Cinema’s critical reception and reception at film festivals could seldom be mapped onto the same experiential terrain as those of audiences at popular venues” (Guneratne & Dissanayake, 181). Confining Third Cinema to festivals, academia, and artsy cinephilic annals can hardly be a good thing since the whole point of Third Cinema is to be a tool of concrete decolonization and radicalization, a weapon of the revolution.
“Ultimately, the L.A. Rebellion artists did not form lasting collective mechanisms for funding and showing their work; though they worked as crew on each others’ films, they largely shepherded the financing and distribution of their own projects individually. Bernard Nicolas and Haile Gerima spearheaded distribution initiatives” (Field et. al, 50) and the nonprofit Black Filmmaker Foundation and other similar projects did get these films some circulation (ibid, 35). They played at venues and festivals both domestically and internationally, but the films of the Rebellion never even approached the kind of recognition achieved by the “Blaxploitation” movies they were trying to oppose. If the “goal” of these filmmakers wasn’t necessarily to reach mainstream black audiences according to the editors of LA Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema, can it really be said to be serving a utilitarian purpose in raising revolutionary consciousness? Chuck Kleinhans argues that the momentum that was building towards a new independent black cinema was hindered due to the misconceptions and utopian errors of the Rebellion’s practitioners (Kleinhans, 58). He contends that filmmakers and critics--and presumably others who supported the movement-- “did not deal realistically with the nature of film viewing in the African American community” (ibid, 59). They were, understandably, very opposed to replicating the tropes and conventions perpetuated by the Hollywood machine and therefore avoided sports, music, comedy, and mainstream entertainment strategies which may have made their work more marketable (ibid, 60). He also argues that divisions among black communities in the wake of the civil rights era and disunities within the group caused by differing stances on things like feminism and gay liberation likely contributed to the eventual dissolution of the Rebellion. People’s personal circumstances were also constantly in flux, especially since these filmmakers started out as students, so turnover rate was high (ibid, 64). Ultimately, there are many reasons why the L.A. Rebellion folks did not necessarily widely disseminate their films or create a lasting platform for indie black cinema. Though, of course, there are always thriving black artists creating wonderful indie films like multimedia artist Cauleen Smith who exhibits her work in galleries across the country.
However, decades later, after these films have had a chance to permeate film studies and even get a tiny taste of mainstream recognition (Dash’s Daughters of the Dust; Burnett’s Killer of Sheep), I do think that there are long resonating successes. I would like to acknowledge the countless hours of hard work done by the academics and alums of this movement to preserve the films and get them out there into the world. In 2011 for this massive L.A. Rebellion retrospective, a group of passionate folks put together a book (the primary reference text for this essay), a website, a series of interviews, restored films, and toured the films around the country. Though the revolutionary messages seem to have been dulled by the grindstone of academia, I think that perhaps this second life is the closest thing these films ever got to Third Cinema distribution. Alessandra Raengo discusses the methodology of touring these films, particularly in the South, emphasizing the context of their viewing. She says that because the “L.A. Rebellion demands a collectivity at the point of reception,” the group tried their best to not only deliver the films but to provide context for them and make sure that audiences were able to engage and process them (Raengo, 295). Speaking on the Atlanta leg of the tour, Raengo writes:
We mapped out environments that we believed should be exposed to this type of cinema and created teach-ins to educate various Atlanta communities, bringing the filmmakers to places as diverse as the fine art gallery and the feminist bookstore, the community arts center and the corporate world. We facilitated postscreening conversations to foster contacts between filmmakers and audiences and to let the works reverberate as we discussed them informally (Raengo, 294).
This recent archival effort has been instrumental in bringing some of this work a little further into the light. This kind of thing is what we need to do more of. With Third Cinema films, we need to really make that effort to implement Third Cinema viewing and distro practices!
Some things that might be helpful in realizing the revolutionary goals of these movies:
Creating a real formal collective rooted in decolonial socialist politics to facilitate production and distribution of such films. Unlike the informal “collective” of the Rebellion, this would be a political group structured with mass-line vanguardist strategies in mind.
Making these movies more readily available! I think they should be FREE online with an optional donation that goes to both the filmmaker and the collective who is hosting the streaming site.
Promoting these as revolutionary literature akin to pamphlets, speeches, and other radicalizing methods. Distributing them to specific organizations: political orgs, mutual aid groups, community centers, arts nonprofits, etc.
That’s just my two cents. I love these movies; I want them to be seen! And I hope that I have inspired you to give them a try.
