K. Austin Collins
A substantive series at Lincoln Center pairs films by the movement of Black auteurs with thematically linked contemporaneous and contemporary works.
Still from Ashes and Embers (1982), directed by Haile Gerima. Courtesy Film at Lincoln Center.
“LA Rebellion: Then and Now,” curated by Claire Diao and co-organized by Madeline Whittle, Film at Lincoln Center, New York City,
through May 4, 2025
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Looking at the listings for Film at Lincoln Center’s “LA Rebellion: Then and Now” series, one immediately recognizes the difficulty of the curators’ task. Anything short of a top-to-bottom survey of the LA Rebellion filmmakers’ output would be in danger of doubling down on the erasures that have long haunted this movement, a constellation of Black auteurs who studied at UCLA film school between the late 1960s through the early ’90s, prey as it is to history’s bad habit of nurturing lacunae where there ought to be canons. A series that focuses primarily on feature-length films, as this one understandably does, rather than on shorts risks ignoring the work of the majority of filmmakers affiliated with the movement, many of whom have yet to produce a feature to this day (not for lack of effort, in certain cases). To try to understand the LA Rebellion with an overemphasis on the Black American–Angeleno cross section of student work at its core, on the other hand, would be to betray and misunderstand what was, in its politics, an intentionally diasporic endeavor: a candid attempt, by those filmmakers, to project outward from post-Watts Los Angeles toward a broader Third World cinema. This is the cinema with which these young directors—who were seeing films like Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl (1966) for the first time and were being exposed to Latin American political cinema by influential pedagogues like Teshome Habte Gabriel—labored to place themselves in conversation.
Nathaniel Taylor as Eddie Warmack in Passing Through (1977), directed by Larry Clark. Courtesy Film at Lincoln Center.
You can sense a desire to overcome these various programming pitfalls in the eighteen-film Lincoln Center lineup, which is primarily broken down into themes—incarceration, Black love, jazz, political engagement, etc.—that couple one proper LA Rebellion film with a contemporaneous work, usually from overseas, or a more recent film (also usually from overseas) meant to imply some facet of the LA Rebellion’s long artistic afterlife and influence. This means that a classic LA Rebellion film like Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts (1984) gets paired with Barry Jenkins’s James Baldwin adaptation, If Beale Street Could Talk (2018), as two approaches to a Black love story; and Larry Clark’s seminal and rarely screened jazz film Passing Through (1977) is matched with French-Senegalese director Alain Gomis’s archival Thelonious Monk doc, Rewind & Play (2022).
Danny Glover as Harry and Julius Harris as Herman in To Sleep with Anger (1990), directed by Charles Burnett. Courtesy Film at Lincoln Center.
This series coincides with the bicoastal release of a long-awaited restoration of one of the best-known and most sought-after LA Rebellion titles: Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1977)—the second of his films, after The Annihilation of Fish (1999), to receive a repertory run in 2025. So the programmers have chosen Burnett’s To Sleep with Anger (1990), that extraordinary portrayal of Southern-urban Black folklore and metaphysics, starring Danny Glover as a condemned spiritual amalgam of Black history and the Devil. Zeinabu irene Davis’s Compensation (1999), also newly restored, received its first theatrical run only this year, so instead we get her 2016 documentary Spirits of Rebellion: Black Cinema at UCLA, which does much of the contextual heavy lifting for the series, featuring a generous use of clips and interviews with her former UCLA colleagues. Seminal features by Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust, 1991) and Haile Gerima (Ashes and Embers, 1982, and Bush Mama, 1979) are necessarily here, and so too are a set of films by Jamaa Fanaka, Welcome Home, Brother Charles (1975) and Penitentiary (1979), works whose commercially legible grit throws the avant-gardist, ideologically robust experiments of Gerima and the others into relief.
Still from Spirits of Rebellion: Black Cinema at UCLA (2016), directed by Zeinabu irene Davis. Courtesy Film at Lincoln Center.
The LA Rebellion, as an idea, has for many people come to stand in for Black American independent cinema broadly speaking, with many subsequent attempts to make sense of a particular “moment” in Black filmmaking inescapably eyeing the LA Rebellion in the rearview, perhaps in part to make the routine and usually brief upticks in Hollywood’s desire to cater to Black audiences feel more enduring and committed than they really are. You could never tell the story of the LA Rebellion entirely through cinema, to begin with, when the setting and circumstances of this specific but multifaceted movement are so rooted in distinct institutions (chiefly, UCLA), social histories (for example, the legacy of the Watts riots), and policies (such as affirmative-action funding and the attendant bureaucratic foot-shuffling). The sum effect of the series is that the movement emerges as both singular and expansive. Harp too much on the folkloric realism of Burnett, merging, as he does, post–Great Migration urban discontent with a hardwired inheritance of Southern superstition and ritual, and you risk downplaying the many alternatives to this approach that the LA Rebellion afforded us, be it history and memory-infused experiments in Black mysticism or Blaxploitation-adjacent political entertainment.
Thomas M. Pollard as Eugene T. Lawson (left) in Penitentiary (1979), directed by Jamaa Fanaka. Courtesy Film at Lincoln Center.
Burnett has never seemed comfortable with his status as an LA Rebellion figurehead and would likely agree that our understanding of the movement would be richer if we did more to remember films like Fanaka’s Penitentiary, which fascinates, among other reasons, for being a moneymaker in its day. There’s a version of the LA Rebellion story in which all was lost: the great films that sat unrestored for decades, minimally released in their own time. Penitentiary, said to be the highest-grossing independent film of 1979, is a counterpoint to that narrative. It is an exploitation film hiding out in an art movement—a bridge between South Central and the barely-made-it outskirts of Hollywood proper, too tough to be heartbreaking, yet too strenuously, knowingly masculinist in its depiction of prison violence and the Black macho to be anything but a tragedy. When Davis’s documentary shows us multiple clips of Snoop Dogg talking about Penitentiary as if it were a sacred text, the effect is extraordinary, a harbinger of the unacknowledged, Black cult figures and deep cuts lingering just beneath the surface of global pop culture.
Still from Hyenas (1992), directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty. Courtesy Film at Lincoln Center.
Some of the series’ pairings are no-brainers. We could all afford to remember that directors like Djibril Diop Mambéty (Hyenas, 1992) and Sembène (Camp de Thiaroye, 1988), with their fierce wrenching of anti-colonial ideology into trenchant film aesthetics, are—for many people, the LA Rebellion filmmakers especially—the bedrock of an international cinema canon decentered from the usual parade of Europeans. The series’ contemporary selections are similarly insistent in their rerouting of the LA Rebellion back through the trade routes of diaspora and international cinema—raising an interesting question about how, and to what extent, the LA Rebellion has shaped Black American filmmakers, or if its legacy really does reside far outside not only Hollywood but the US entirely.
Alva Rogers as Eula Peazant, Barbara O as Yellow Mary, and Trula Hoosier as Trula in Daughters of the Dust (1991), directed by Julie Dash. Courtesy Kino Lorber.
Obviously, Burnett, Dash, and their peers have had a persistent impact on the style and concerns of Black filmmakers working outside the studio system. But it’s notable that nothing has made their movies more visible, in recent years, than the pop-signifying, shamelessly borrowed glimpses of these works seen in content as far-flung from post-Watts LA as Beyoncé videos and the Frankenstein’s-monster Pan-Africanism of the Black Panther movies—sincere-enough celebrations of Gullah and other cultures that nevertheless mass-commodified them so rapidly, so thoroughly, my head is still spinning. The LA Rebellion, as an idea, has been memed to death—which has no bearing on the movement itself, of course, but only makes a series like this all the more vital. Films such as Daughters of the Dust have now been mined for trinkets to such a degree that we’ve nearly allowed them to be reduced to aesthetic husks, an uncanny parallel to the rise in Black revolutionary cosplay and the mythological flattening of figures like James Baldwin. Everything, now, is reference. Everything, brand-aware curation. The Lincoln Center series does its subject particular justice by making the LA Rebellion’s cinematic legacy harder to take for granted. What we allow to happen from there is up to us.
K. Austin Collins is a film critic whose work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and the Atlantic. He is the author of forthcoming books on Frederick Wiseman and Black police officers.