Charles Burnett. James Naremore
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stopped by members of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) as he walked down the street; his pockets were searched, and had he been carrying as much as a seed of marijuana, he would have gone to jail (Martin and Julien 2009, 23). At UCLA in the late 1960s and 1970s, however, he moved freely and lived in an apartment where the hallways were filled with the smoke from burning joints. “I was terrified,” he recalled. “But the campus police would pretend like nothing was going on” (Martin and Julien 2009, 23). Some of his anxiety was well justified. In 1970 he was mistakenly arrested and held in jail for a weekend because he had been traveling in an automobile that was used in a robbery.
During those years antiwar protests were spreading, feminist and black-power rebellions were gaining media attention, and the impulse toward national liberation was taking root throughout the “Third World.” At the same time, the civil rights movement and affirmative action were helping make institutions like UCLA somewhat more multiracial. There were nevertheless potentially explosive relations between privileged white students and students of color. In 1968, a year after Burnett’s arrival, a small group of students and faculty formed the ad hoc Media Urban Crisis Committee (MUCC, also known as the “Mother Muccers’) and staged a series of protests that caused the university to establish a pilot program in “ethno-communications.” As David E. James has explained, this program, which began with thirteen students from a variety of ethnic and racial backgrounds and remained important not only for blacks but also for Asians and Chicanos, “was modelled on the film school’s main production training, which required a number of 8 and 16mm shorts, followed by a thesis film, and the production courses were supplemented by seminars on Third World aesthetics and community involvement. Elyseo Taylor, a former U.S. Army cinematographer and one of the first blacks hired in the film school, played a leading role, and Charles Burnett, one of the few blacks in the film school proper, was engaged as a teaching assistant” (2005, 304).
Elyseo Taylor was a key figure in the education of Burnett and other black students, among them Ben Caldwell, Larry Clark, Zeinabu Irene Davis, Julie Dash, Jamma Fanaka, Haile Gerima, Ali Sharon Larkin, Barbara McCullough, and Billy Woodberry. He was already training teenagers in Watts in amateur filmmaking, and at UCLA he taught a course called Film and Social Change that was especially important for Burnett because its objective was “to get people of color to tell stories about their community” (Kim 2003, 9). Taylor’s seminars in Third World aesthetics, and similar courses later taught by Teshome Gabriel, introduced students to the twin manifestos of Latin American “Third Cinema”: Glauber Rocha’s (1965) “Aesthetics of Hunger” and Julio Garcia Espinosa’s (1969) “ For an Imperfect Cinema,” both of which argued that revolutionary, socially liberating films made by and for oppressed people must willingly embrace the standards of low-budget production, avoiding slickness, spectacle, and the formulas of commercial entertainment. (As Rocha put it, “Wherever there is a filmmaker prepared to stand up against commercialism, exploitation, pornography and the tyranny of technique, there will be the living spirit of Cinema Novo.”) Taylor hosted a campus visit by Ousmane Sembene and a delegation of visiting African filmmakers and showed students examples of “imperfect cinema” by such committed Latin Americans and Africans as Rocha (Black God, White Devil [1964]), Sembene (Black Girl [1965]), Nelson Pereira dos Santos (Barren Lives [1963]), and Fernando Solinas (Hour of the Furnaces [1968]).
In 1971 Taylor directed Black Art/Black Artists, a fifteen-minute color documentary about black painters that suggests the kinds of ideological and aesthetic issues he was discussing with his students. Centering on a museum exhibit of black painting and fine art in Los Angeles, the documentary is backed by jazz and blues music and features offscreen commentary by Van Slater, a political activist, woodcut artist, and teacher at Compton Community College. Slater argues that the 1960s were the beginning of “black art that represents a black point of view.” In the nineteenth century, he points out, black painting in the United States was technically indistinguishable from white painting and was largely overlooked, and in the period of the Harlem Renaissance it was preoccupied with modernist depictions of nightclub highlife—the sort of thing that white patrons found more appealing than, say, paintings of black families and children. Middle-class blacks, Slater observes, tended to purchase black art that had been approved by white critics. True black art, he insists, would emerge only when it began to reflect the ideas and full experience of black people. Such art, whatever forms it might take, could embrace different ideas or attitudes: if two black artists looked at the same dying neighborhood, for example, one might see beauty in decay and the other might see evidence of a failing society.
Partly as a result of exposure to these ideas, Taylor’s students began to assume an activist, adversarial role in the film program. Willie F. Bell, a black student from the South, curated a series of films by Oscar Micheaux, a director Burnett had never heard of and was excited to discover. When a white teacher wanted to avoid talking about “sociological” aspects of Birth of a Nation and concentrate on formal matters, Haile Gerima and Francisco Martinez carried him bodily out of the classroom and took over the discussion. But at least one white teacher was a positive influence: Basil Wright, a pioneer of the British documentary movement, taught a course that Burnett took early in his student years and greatly admired. Wright had been chiefly responsible for Nightmail (1936), the most famous of the British General Post Office films, which has a poetic-realist quality enhanced by W. H. Auden’s verse narration. Wright’s somewhat earlier Song of Ceylon (1935) especially impressed Burnett; neocolonial in politics, it nevertheless has a quietly subversive attitude toward the alienated labor of colonial subjects, a sensitive feeling for daily life among poor Sri Lankan families, and a lyric imagery of children at play. Wright was a fine writer about film (he succeeded Graham Greene as the film critic for the London Spectator and wrote two film books, The Use of Film [1948] and The Long View [1974]), but most important, Burnett has said, he gave the students in his classes a conviction that “‘one had to approach filmmaking from a humanistic point of view’” (quoted in Klotman 1991, 95). Burnett also recalls being introduced by Wright to Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens, whose globe-hopping career began with semiabstract, avant-garde experiments in montage and led to politically radicalized films that mixed newsreels, reenactments, and on-the-spot footage. Like Wright, Ivens was a social activist (he was blacklisted in the United States in the early 1950s) who was possessed of a lyrical temperament. Whether he was exploring the condition of Belgian coal miners (Borinage [1934]), the daily life of U.S. rural families in the Great Depression (Power and the Land [1940]), or Vietnam’s revolution (the collaborative Far from Vietnam [1967]), his work had an aesthetic sensitivity to movement, light, and photographic texture.
At UCLA Burnett studied languages (French, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish), read Georg Lukács and Frantz Fanon, and immersed himself in production. In those days the film school was relatively open to experiment and less geared toward Hollywood than its equivalent at the University of Southern California, which saw itself as a feeder for the industry. The year after Burnett arrived, and when “ethno-communications” was born, Francis Ford Coppola received an MFA from UCLA for You’re a Big Boy Now, which served as a calling card for his subsequent Hollywood career. But students in Westwood, especially the black students, weren’t expected to follow Coppola’s path. The school didn’t court the studios by creating specializations in producing, directing, writing, or cinematography, and students weren’t taught how to get agents or pitch projects; instead they learned the entire movie technology and often shot films on the streets, recruiting amateurs for their casts and crews. In a 1994 interview with Aida A. Hozic, Burnett looked back on the important education he had received in those years and lamented how much things had changed:
If you go [today] to UCLA where everyone is nineteen years old, has seen the same movies, and has the same background, you cannot learn anything from each other. It is no wonder that the kids can only think of selling movies. . . . People are not interested in talking about issues. I have been lecturing at colleges and find it very frustrating. The kids just want to earn a certain number of credit units. It is maddening. At UCLA, the students are not interested in experimenting; they want to learn how to write these very slick movies. When I was going to school . . . one of the great things was that you better not come back with a film that was a cliché or ordinary or something that someone had seen before. . . . It was very competitive in this sense: