L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema

At the end of "Los Angeles Plays Itself", Thom Andersen's monumental essay film about the cinematic representation of his hometown, the voiceover commentary turns away from the Hollywood films that largely formed the focus of the preceding minutes: "Another city, another cinema: a city of walkers, a cinema of walking." This is followed by excerpts from Haile Gerima's BUSH MAMA (1975) and Charles Burnett's KILLER OF SHEEP (1978) – examples of "a Neorealist movement in Los Angeles spearheaded by a group of young Black filmmakers from the South". Historically, this movement which Andersen's entire cinematic city history feeds into was known as "L.A. Rebellion". Its starting point can be traced back to the mid-60s onwards at the UCLA Film School, where a group of black students had come together to look for aesthetic and political alternatives not just to Hollywood but also to the standard forms of independent and auteur cinema of the time. The cinema of the L.A. Rebellion emerged on the one hand in direct tandem with the social struggles of those years – the civil rights movement, the Watts riots of 1965 – and on the other based on (critical) engagement with the currents of the national and international avant-gardes.