Charles Burnett. James Naremore
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did it because you had a passion for it. But now, God, I was over there and I was so disappointed. I felt raped. (Kapsis 2001, 84)
Out of the freewheeling, politically aware atmosphere at UCLA in the 1960s and 1970s, a wave of U.S. black independent filmmaking emerged. (At roughly the same moment, a smaller manifestation of black cinema was developing in New York, beginning with Bill Gunn’s Ganja and Hess [1973] and culminating in Kathleen Collins’s Losing Ground [1982]; see Klotman 1991.) Historians initially referred to the UCLA group as “the Los Angeles school,” but as a result of a 1984 retrospective organized by Clyde Taylor at the Whitney Museum, it came to be known as “the L.A. Rebellion.” Burnett was at its forefront, directing his own films and serving as a kind of mentor for Woodbury, Dash, and Larkin (Larkin dubbed him “the professor”). This is not to say, however, that he was the leader of a homogeneous collective or conscious movement. The UCLA group was composed of individual artists with their own interests and was no more stylistically cohesive than a group like the French New Wave had been (in retrospect, Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, and the others in this group are quite different from one another). Unlike most movements, it never promoted itself via a journal or a manifesto, and when its work was first shown outside the walls of UCLA, it didn’t give itself a name. The “Rebellion” might have had somewhat greater success if it had done these things.
Burnett and his cohort eventually achieved significant recognition at European film festivals, where motion pictures were recognized as art. His early work won prizes in Berlin and at a 1980 Paris retrospective of “black independent cinema,” where his films were shown alongside those of Ben Caldwell, Larry Clark, and William Greaves. A French interviewer asked Burnett if he belonged to a kind of new wave. He responded, “No. We’re not a single school of filmmakers sharing the same ideas. We are very independent. The only points we have in common is that we are Black and we feel close to the Third World” (Kapsis 2011, 3). In 1991 he told Berenice Reynaud much the same thing. He had stayed in touch with other filmmakers from UCLA, “But it wasn’t a rebellion. Clyde [Taylor] and I argue about his use of the term. When we went to UCLA, we tried to form groups at different times to facilitate filmmaking. But it wasn’t a ‘school’ of Black filmmakers, or a conscious effort. Things just happened” (Kapsis 2011, 57; for Clyde Taylor’s view, see “Once Upon a Time in the West . . . L.A. Rebellion,” in Field, Horak, and Stewart 2015, ix–xxiv. See also two other essays in that volume: Chuck Kleinhans’s retrospective commentary on the L.A. formation in light of subsequent changes in black cinema and its audiences [57–82] and Michael T. Martin’s essay on what he prefers to call “the Los Angeles Collective” or “L.A. School” [196–224]).
Like most other members of the UCLA group, Burnett had no wish to become a Hollywood director; indeed, he had no plans for a career. Much of his work was fashioned in a rough, “imperfect” style that paradoxically required great artistic judgment and considerable technical skill. He eschewed the “well-made” narratives of both commercial and certain types of social realist pictures. Too many films of the Left, he argued, “‘would present an abstract worker against management. . . . They had this sort of A-B-C-D quality—that if you do A and B, then C would follow’” (Kapsis 2011, 6). In contrast, he emphasized the domestic sphere and the relatively subtle things that happen between people in everyday life. Reacting against cause-effect plots, he avoided stories about growth, change, and the resolution of conflict. Instead he concentrated on the pressures that poverty exerts on families and friendships and the struggle of black families to exist with dignity; as he put it in an interview with Michael Sragow, using a language that has come to be identified with the “survivalist” branch of black sociology, he was trying to depict situations in which “you don’t necessarily win battles; you survive” (Kapsis 2011, 98).
Burnett and the other black filmmakers of the “L.A. Rebellion” were nevertheless recognizable as a distinct cultural formation, and like any cultural formation in modern society, they tended to define themselves in opposition to an established standard. The Italian neorealists had been against glossy studio films, the French New Wave against “the tradition of quality,” and the Latin American and Third Cinema movements against all forms of Western cultural imperialism. Burnett’s group had something in common with all these formations, but Burnett and most of his fellow students reacted more specifically against the blaxploitation pictures of the early 1970s and the films about black gangsters that appeared intermittently in US theaters over the next two decades. The short-lived blaxploitation cycle, prompted by the runaway success of three historically significant black-directed films—Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971), Shaft (1971), and Superfly (1972)—was exactly contemporary with Burnett’s years at UCLA and spawned several B-picture, action-genre vehicles for black actors (The Legend of Nigger Charley [1972], Black Caesar [1973], Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off [1973], Blacula [1973], The Mack [1973], The Black Godfather [1974], etc.). Popular with certain black audiences and promoted as if blacks had created them, some of these films were in fact produced, written, and directed by whites, and their gestures toward social rebellion tended to be confined chiefly to the image of the hero as outlaw and superstud. All of them had the sensational qualities of traditional exploitation cinema and resembled what could be called a hustler’s version of the cinema of poverty. They confirmed Burnett’s deepest distrust of Hollywood. As he later declared, “The studios are not interested in depicting life in a realistic way. Films create myths about black people. . . . I think that the studios project this image of being really what they’re not, sort of liberal institutions. . . . Most of the films they show are action-packed dramas about drugs and so forth. . . . The only perceptions these people have of us are basically drugs and mothers who prostitute themselves” (Kapsis 2011, 71).
The UCLA group’s characterization of its blaxploitation “other” was somewhat oversimplified, and the question of what constituted black cinema was debated for many years afterward (for a recent, postmodern example, see Gillespie 2016). Nevertheless, unlike a later generation of more commercially oriented black directors that includes Spike Lee, John Singleton, and Carl Franklin, Burnett and his cohort avoided making films about dope dealers and gangsters. (One exception to the rule was Jamma Fanaka, but his films can be viewed as critical of blaxploitation; see Horak 2015, 119–55.) Instead they made antigenre films about racism, police brutality, sexual stereotyping, and the quotidian experience of black people. Some of their early films were striking for the way they deliberately broke the formal rules of continuity editing and conventional screenwriting.
PROJECTS ONE, TWO, AND THREE
Like everyone in the production school at UCLA, the black students had to fulfill three filmmaking assignments. Project One, for which the individual student acted as writer/director/photographer/editor, was a short film in 16mm or Super 8, without synchronized sound but with the possibility of magnetic stripe. (Magnetic stripe, or “mag stripe,” is a strip of recording tape attached to one edge of a roll of film, allowing for music and post-synch sound, but requiring a special projector.) Project Two was a longer 16mm film with synch sound, made in collaboration with other students. Project Three was a short film with synch sound.
Unfortunately, Burnett’s untitled Project One (1968) has been lost. Allyson Field, who researched all the Project One films made by the black students, has found that it was shot with a Bolex camera, a Switar lens, and 8mm Kodak color. (See Field’s excellent essay on the Project One films by the students of color, who deliberately set out to “unlearn” the usual codes of narrative cinema, in Field, Horak, and Stewart 2015, 83–118.) Michael Cummings, a friend of Burnett, played a black painter who strangles his white model after making love to her. This plot sounds uncharacteristic of Burnett; it may have owed something to the combined influence of Richard Wright’s Native Son and Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, the latter of which, with its essay “White Woman, Black Man,” was published during Burnett’s first year at UCLA.
In chapter 1 I described the opening scenes of Burnett’s Project Two, the 16mm, black-and-white, twenty-nine-minute Several Friends (1969), which is a more ambitious and original film, signaling a major talent. It, too, deals with interracial sex, but it has a looser, less goal-directed narrative; episodic in structure, it was originally