L.A. Rebellion

Individual lives, viewed through the right lens, can reveal the essence of a time and place with startling clarity. In this innovative memoir, filmmaker Carroll Parrott Blue turns her lens on her mother's and her own lives as African American women in the segregated South before and during the Civil Rights era. This mother-daughter story foregrounds two strong women who fought institutionalized racism - one through community activism, the other through artistic creativity - even as the effects of racism and their differing responses to it frayed the very fabric of their relationship.

Charles Burnett (b. 1944) is a groundbreaking African American filmmaker and one of this country's finest directors, yet he remains largely unknown. His films, most notably Killer of Sheep (1977) and To Sleep with Anger (1990), are considered classics, yet few filmgoers have seen them or heard of Burnett. The interviews in this volume explore this paradox and collectively shed light on the work of a rare film master whose stories bring to the screen the texture and poetry of life in the black community.

In the first book devoted to Charles Burnett, a crucial figure in the history of American cinema often regarded as the most influential member of the L.A. Rebellion group of African American filmmakers, James Naremore provides a close critical study of all Burnett's major pictures for movies and television, including Killer of Sheep, To Sleep with Anger, The Glass Shield, Nightjohn, The Wedding, Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property, and Warming by the Devil's Fire. Having accessed new information and rarely seen material, Naremore shows that Burnett's career has developed against the odds and that his artistry, social criticism, humor, and commitment to what he calls "symbolic knowledge" have given his work enduring value for American culture.

Includes entry on Charles Burnett, p.60-69

Charles Burnett's 1977 film, Killer of Sheep is one of the towering classics of African American cinema. As a deliberate counterpoint to popular blaxploitation films of the period, it combines harsh images of the banality of everyday oppression with scenes of lyrical beauty, and depictions of stark realism with flights of comic fancy. From Street to Screen: Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep is the first book-length collection dedicated to the film and designed to introduce viewers to this still relatively unknown masterpiece. Beginning life as Burnett's master's thesis project in 1973, and shot on a budget of $10,000, Killer of Sheep immediately became a cornerstone of the burgeoning movement in African American film that came to be known variously as the LA School or LA Rebellion. By bringing together a wide variety of material, this volume covers both the politics and aesthetics of the film as well as its deeper social and contextual histories. This expansive and incisive critical companion will serve equally as the perfect starting point and standard reference for all viewers, whether they are already familiar with the film or coming to it for the first time.

Includes chapter, "‘You Be a Man If You Can, Stan’: Family Life and
Fatherhood in Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1977)." (p. 223-43).

Includes chapter, "“Grace Nichols’ I Is a Long Memoried Woman and Julie
Dash’s Daughters of the Dust: Reversing the Middle Passage.” (p. 221-32).
Black Women Writers Across Cultures-An Analysis of Their Contribution is an edited volume of value to women's studies courses, and to courses specifically addressing the work of black women writers.

Julie Dash wrote and directed Daughters of the Dust, the first nationally distributed African American feature film to come out of the U.S.

Contains essay "Black Film Theory, Black Feminisms: Daughters of the Dust."
This book brings together carefully selected essays on feminism and film with a view to tracing major developments in theory, criticism, and practices of women and cinema from 1973 to the present day. It illuminates the powerful, if controversial, role feminist research has played in theemergence of Film Studies as a discipline during these years; reprinting influential 1970s pioneering essays tracing the ensuing debates and challenges to key theories that shaped this field in the next two decades. Kaplan details the Euro-American contexts within which feminist film theories andpractices emerged and traces the changing influences of French, German, and American intellectual movements on feminist film research. As well as a wide-ranging introduction which sets the selection of essays in context, readers will find examples of social-role, psychoanalytic, structuralist,post-structuralist, gay and lesbian, postmodern and postcolonial feminist film criticism, prefaced by introductory notes and including further readings.

Includes chapter, "Tensioned and Interlocking Identities in Daughters of the Dust.” (p.82-90).

This text explores the history of representations of African-American women in American film and theatre. Using a semiotic critical race theory framework, the author examines three stereotypes of African-American women.

Frederick Aldama engages in theoretically sophisticated readings of Ana Castillo's So Far from God, Oscar "Zeta" Acosta's Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, and The Moor's Last Sigh, Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust, and Stephen Frears and Hanif Kureishi's Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. Coining the term "magicorealism" to characterize these works, Aldama not only creates a postethnic critical methodology for enlarging the contact zone between the genres of novel, film, and autobiography, but also shatters the interpretive lens that traditionally confuses the transcription of the real world, where truth and falsity apply, with narrative modes governed by other criteria.

Includes chapter, "‘My Story Begins Before I Was Born’: Myth, History, and
Power in Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust.” (p. 46-66).

An anthology of essays devoted to the examination of filmmaker Julie Dash's ground-breaking film, Daughters of the Dust, this book celebrates the importance and influence of this film and positions it within the discourses of Black Feminism, Womanism, the LA Rebellion, New Black Cinema, Great Migration, The Black Arts tradition, Oral History, African American/Black/African diasporan Studies, and Black film/cinema studies. Employing a transdisciplinary approach to examining the film, the anthology includes chapters which examine unique aspects/themes of the film. At the core of each chapter, however, is a recognition of the influence of Black feminist/Womanist theory and politics and African American history--from enslavement to freedom/Reconstruction, Black political identity and liberation movement(s)--and African/ African diasporan cosmology on Dash's work and how all work in concert in her masterful narrative of Black family, 20th Black women's identities, and the tension between modernity/tradition experienced by Gullah-Geechee people at the turn of the 20th century.

Contains Chapter 18 "Daughters of the Dust, the White Woman Viewer, and the Unborn Child."

With contributions from scholars in a variety of disciplines, the book examines the ways in which historical, cultural, and personal identities impact pedagogy and scholarship. Essays cover such topics as the outsider's gaze as it applies to the study of non-white literature; an able-bodied woman's reflections on teaching literature by disabled women; and the challenges of teaching the Western canon at an African American college.

Includes chapter, "Rhythm as Modality and Discourse in Daughters of the
Dust." (p.87-97).
These essays explore the meaning, motif and theme of rhythm in black cultures throughout the USA and Africa. They discuss music and dance, the visual arts, architecture, theatre, literature and film, and suggest that an African aesthetic, revolving around the motif of rhythm, does exist.

Contains section on Zeinabu Irene Davis short film "A Powerful Thang"
Film Fatales offers a fascinating glimpse into the lives and work of women filmmakers. Profiled here are over thirty pioneering directors, producers, and distributors who have changed the face of contemporary film by delivering new and distinctly female images and sensibilities for the screen.

Includes chapter by Davis, "Pushing beyond the Stereotypes and Fostering Collaboration: One Sistuh’s Approach to Teaching Media Production.” (201-18).
What is it like for women of color to teach in predominantly white college classrooms? This anthology is about the pedagogical implications of diversifying the faculty of higher education. It compiles narratives by women professors of color who interrogate their classroom experiences in predominantly white U.S. campuses to examine the impact of their social positions upon their classroom practices and their teaching-learning selves. The authors reflect upon their unique classroom challenges and talk about the teaching-learning strategies they use to find rewards in their interactions with students.

Black women filmmakers not only deserve an audience, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster asserts, but it is also imperative that their voices be heard as they struggle against Hollywood’s constructions of spectatorship, ownership, and the creative and distribution aspects of filmmaking. Foster provides a voice for Black and Asian women in the first detailed examination of the works of six contemporary Black and Asian women filmmakers. She also includes a detailed introduction and a chapter entitled "Other Voices," documenting the work of other Black and Asian filmmakers. Foster analyzes the key films of Zeinabu irene Davis, "one of a growing number of independent Black women filmmakers who are actively constructing [in the words of bell hooks] 'an oppositional gaze’"; British filmmaker Ngozi Onwurah and Julie Dash, two filmmakers working with time and space; Pratibha Parmar, a Kenyan/Indian-born British Black filmmaker concerned with issues of representation, identity; cultural displacement, lesbianism, and racial identity; Trinh T. Minh-ha, a Vietnamese-born artist who revolutionized documentary filmmaking by displacing the "voyeuristic gaze of the ethnographic documentary filmmaker"; and Mira Nair, a Black Indian woman who concentrates on interracial identity.

Illuminating an overlooked era in African American film history, Trying to Get Over is the first in-depth study of black directors working during the decade between 1977 and 1986. Keith Corson provides a fresh definition of blaxploitation, lays out a concrete reason for its end, and explains the major gap in African American representation during the years that followed. He focuses primarily on the work of eight directors--Michael Schultz, Sidney Poitier, Jamaa Fanaka, Fred Williamson, Gilbert Moses, Stan Lathan, Richard Pryor, and Prince--who were the only black directors making commercially distributed films in the decade following the blaxploitation cycle.

This anthology on otherness and the media, first published in 1993, was prompted by the proliferation of writings centring on issues of 'difference', 'diversity', 'multiculturalism', 'representation' and 'postcolonial' discourses. Such issues and discourses question existing canons of criticism, theory and cultural practice but also because they suggest a new sense of direction in theorisation of difference and representation.

Featuring interviews with key personalities from 12 nations, Questioning African Cinema provides the most extensive, comprehensive account of the origins, practice, and implications of filmmaking in Africa.

Includes chapter by Teshome Gabriel, "Towards a Critical theory of Third World Films."

See chapter 12 "Haile Gerima: Sacred Shield of Culture" by Mark Reid

Featuring interviews with key personalities from 12 nations, Questioning African Cinema provides the most extensive, comprehensive account of the origins, practice, and implications of filmmaking in Africa.

The essays in this collection have been written by feminist film-makers and theorists on both sides of the Atlantic. Together, they provide a picture of feminist film criticism in the1980s, perspective readings of individual films and TV programs, and insights from women in the filmmaking business.

Collects original and previously published essays, interviews, and manifestos from some of the most defining and groundbreaking independent female filmmakers of the last 40 years. Featuring material from the seminal magazine The Independent Film and Video Monthly--a leading publication for independent filmmakers for several decades--as well as new interviews conducted with the filmmakers, this book, edited by Michele Meek, presents a unique perspective into the ethnically and culturally diverse voices of women filmmakers whose films span narrative, documentary, and experimental genres and whose work remains integral to independent film history from the 1970s to the present. Independent Female Filmmakers also includes a biographical profile of each filmmaker, as well as an online resource with links to additonal interviews and a sample course syllabus.

Six independent African American filmmakers, including Charles Burnett, director of the film To Sleep with Anger, are represented in this collection by screenplays produced from 1973 to 1989. They speak in their own voice, a black voice which has resisted the cultural dominance of Hollywood. Phyllis Rauch Klotman introduces each screenplay provides a biographical sketch of the filmmaker, and lists the casts and production credits for each film: Ganja and Hess, Killer of Sheep, Losing Ground, Illusions, A Different Image, and Sidewalk Stories.

This monograph revises our understanding of this important era in American film by examining the contributions that women made not only as directors, but also as screenwriters, editors, actors, producers, and critics. Including essays on film history, film texts, and the decade's film theory and criticism, this collection showcases the rich and varied cinematic products of women's creative labor, as well as the considerable barriers they faced.

Includes chapter by Makarah, "Fired-Up!" (p. 125-38).

This monograph revises our understanding of this important era in American film by examining the contributions that women made not only as directors, but also as screenwriters, editors, actors, producers, and critics. Including essays on film history, film texts, and the decade's film theory and criticism, this collection showcases the rich and varied cinematic products of women's creative labor, as well as the considerable barriers they faced.

A landmark exhibition on display at the Brooklyn Museum from April 21 through September 17, 2017, We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85 examined the political, social, cultural, and aesthetic priorities of women of color during the emergence of second-wave feminism. This expanded exhibition catalog showcases the work of many significant Black women artists, reorienting conversations around race, feminism, political action, art production, and art history in this significant historical period.

Contains the piece "Realist Melodrama and the African-American Family: Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts."
African-American Screenwriters Now brings together recent interviews with both up-and-coming and established screenwriters, some of whom also work as directors and producers, and paint a vivid picture of the opportunities and obstacles that face today's black filmmakers in Hollywood. These writers discuss their influences, their goals, the birth of stories, the writing process, getting work, and getting films made, alongside their comments on racial barriers and the portrayal of blacks in film.

Includes chapter, “Realist Melodrama and the African-American Family: Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts.” (p.157-67)

Contains Chapter 5 "Negotiation of Ideology, Manhood, and Family in Bill Woodberry's Bless Their Little Hearts"
The essays collected in this volume make room for the disciplinary activism dismissed by left- and right-wing traditionalists. The contributors, covering a diverse range of topics, foster the repressed dialogue of institutional critics committed to a professional politics and public scholars committed to progressive social values.