Black cinema has always been relegated to the cultural margins, but how does an artist survive at the margin of the margins? A year and a half ago, UCLA Film & Television Archive presented a sweeping retrospective on artists of color who’ve come through the school’s filmmaking program since the 1970s. You may know about Charles Burnett, whose Killer of Sheep (1977) was named to the National Film Registry in 1990, or Julie Dash, whose Daughters of the Dust (1991) won the same honor in 2004. But “L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema” also showcased long-forgotten films by such adventurous talents as Ben Caldwell, Larry Clark, Zeinabu Irene Davis, Haile Gerima, Barbara McCullough, and Billy Woodberry. Needless to say, this explosion of underground, Afrocentric filmmaking at UCLA, mainly in the 70s and 80s, has gone completely unnoticed by the mainstream; even most histories of African-American cinema leapfrog it on their way from Shaft to Spike Lee.
One student who clearly internalized these ideas was Ben Caldwell, who appears at Film Center on Thursday to talk about his shorts Medea (1973) and I & I: An African Allegory (1977). Created on an animation stand and edited in-camera, the seven-minute Medea bluntly challenges viewers to recapture their culture: a darkly colorful sequence of moving cloud formations at sunset, eerily accompanied by a gong on the soundtrack, gives way to a manic montage of drawings and photographs that span the whole history of Africans in America, and a woman’s voice-over intoning Amiri Baraka’s poem “Part of the Doctrine,” a chant based on the word race and its homonyms. Provocatively, when Baraka observes, “Those who are without God, who have lost the spiritual principle of their lives, are not rays / And their race is to their natural deaths,” a burst of photos shows African-American entertainers who were embraced by white audiences (Duke Ellington, Odetta, B.B. King).
