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L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinemais the first book dedicated to the films and filmmakers of the L.A. Rebellion, a group of African, Caribbean, and African American independent film and video artists that formed at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the 1970s and 1980s. The group-including Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, Haile Gerima, Billy Woodberry, Jamaa Fanaka, and Zeinabu irene Davis-shared a desire to create alternatives to the dominant modes of narrative, style, and practice in American cinema, works that reflected the full complexity of Black experiences. This landmark collection of essays and oral histories examines the creative output of the L.A. Rebellion, contextualizing the group's film practices and offering sustained analyses of the wide range of works, with particular attention to newly discovered films and lesser-known filmmakers. Based on extensive archival work and preservation, this collection includes a complete filmography of the movement, over 100 illustrations (most of which are previously unpublished), and a bibliography of primary and secondary materials. This is an indispensible sourcebook for scholars and enthusiasts, establishing the key role played by the L.A. Rebellion within the histories of cinema, Black visual culture, and postwar art in Los Angeles.

L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema is the first book dedicated to the films and filmmakers of the L.A. Rebellion, a group of African, Caribbean, and African American independent film and video artists that formed at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the 1970s and 1980s. The group--including Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, Haile Gerima, Billy Woodberry, Jamaa Fanaka, and Zeinabu irene Davis--shared a desire to create alternatives to the dominant modes of narrative, style, and practice in American cinema, works that reflected the full complexity of Black experiences. This landmark collection of essays and oral histories examines the creative output of the L.A. Rebellion, contextualizing the group's film practices and offering sustained analyses of the wide range of works, with particular attention to newly discovered films and lesser-known filmmakers. Based on extensive archival work and preservation, this collection includes a complete filmography of the movement, over 100 illustrations (most of which are previously unpublished), and a bibliography of primary and secondary materials. This is an indispensible sourcebook for scholars and enthusiasts, establishing the key role played by the L.A. Rebellion within the histories of cinema, Black visual culture, and postwar art in Los Angeles.

Horrifying whiteness is a lens by which to read the paradox of white supremacists rendering Blackness as monstrous even as they terrorize Black people by executing physical and institutional attacks against them. As its name suggests, horrifying whiteness evokes the complex relationship between white supremacy and the horror genre calling attention to the violent white supremacist performances that are enacted on and off the big screen. In this article, I introduce my concept of horrifying whiteness which draws from previous Black scholarship on the gaze such as Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and bell hooks's Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992) but distinguishes itself by rendering white supremacy and the gaze as horrific via the horror genre. As a case in point, Jordan Peele's Get Out (2017) epitomizes horrifying whiteness through its depiction of the Armitages and their clients who mask themselves as good innocent white people while they privately abduct and sell/purchase Black bodies and exploit them. By reading Peele's Get Out through the lens of horrifying whiteness, I consider how horror frameworks not only challenge white denial and white innocence, but provide a lens through which Black vulnerability can perhaps be most clearly seen.

This article focuses on Black male and Black female ways of seeing and being seen in Jordan Peele's Get Out and Us . Drawing on the theoretical ideas of cinema and Black representation introduced by Manthia Diawara and bell hooks nearly three decades ago, Get Out and Us stage Black male and female orientations challenging established scholarship on Black representation in contemporary movies. Diawara and hooks discuss how Black identity is formed by White Hollywood and Black American Auteurs. Their analysis focuses on who gets to look and who gets looked at from Black male (Chris in Get Out ) and Black female (Adelaide/Red in Us ) perspectives. The article concludes that Jordan Peele contributes to established discussion on Black identity in American film while providing important new critical insights into contemporary Black experiences and legacies of white supremacy in American culture.

New African Cinemaexamines the pressing social, cultural, economic, and historical issues explored by African filmmakers from the early post-colonial years into the new millennium. Offering an overview of the development of postcolonial African cinema since the 1960s, Valérie K. Orlando highlights the variations in content and themes that reflect the socio-cultural and political environments of filmmakers and the cultures they depict in their films.Orlando illuminates the diverse themes evident in the works of filmmakers such as Ousmane Sembène'sCeddo(Senegal, 1977), Sarah Maldoror'sSambizanga(Angola, 1972), Assia Djebar'sLa Nouba des femmes de Mont Chenoua(The Circle of women of Mount Chenoua, Algeria, 1978), Zézé Gamboa'sThe Hero(Angola, 2004) and Abderrahmane Sissako'sTimbuktu(Mauritania, 2014), among others. Orlando also considers the influence of major African film schools and their traditions, as well as European and American influences on the marketing and distribution of African film. For those familiar with the polemics of African film, or new to them, Orlando offers a cogent analytical approach that is engaging.

This article examines the recent (2012-2019) work of Black filmmakers, television show runners, and directors whose aim is to directly engage and bring attention to the #blacklivesmatter movement through film by staging protest scenes in their work. Melina Matsoukas and Lena Waithe's feature film Queen & Slim (2019), George Tillman Jr.'s The Hate U Give (2018), and Boots Riley's Sorry to Bother You (2018) will serve as the anchoring texts for this article. The films were marketed as \"a Black Lives Matter picture,\" \"protest art,\" and \"a Black Lives Matter odyssey\" because of their explicit tackling of police brutality, state-sanctioned violence, critique of racial capitalism, and ability to challenge notions of criminality and justice. Throughout this article I will argue that in seeking to stage protests, Black filmmakers have often produced \"protest art\" that is hollow, misguided, not movement-aligned, and fails to call for action or provide any substantive message for a nascent movement. Beyond examining the protest scenes themselves, this work also delves into how these films as a whole signify two leading and arguably intersecting schools of thought--Afro-Pessimism and Afrofuturism. I consider how salient narratives of nihilism and anti-Black violence animates the work of Afro-Pessimists. Conversely, I look at how these texts both include and at times lack narratives of what Fred Moten describes as \"Black optimism,\" escapism, and solidarity. Overall, this work considers the question, how can we create protest art that tends to the realities of anti-Blackness, while simultaneously challenging us to reimagine a new collective future, through Black resistance and protest, that is explicitly for us and by us?

The year 2016 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of her film Daughters of the Dust; the BFC/A [Black Film Center/Archive at IU] and IU Cinema thought it to be the perfect time to screen the newly released digital restoration of the film. Dash previously visited Indiana University and the BFC/A multiple times and returned to IU in December 2016 to present her groundbreaking film, along with a selection of short films from her time as part of the L.A. Rebellion, the UCLA-based Black cinema revolution of the late 1960s to late 1980s. While at City College in New York, a special program, the David Picker Film Institute, was set within the Lennard Davis Center for the Performing Arts. [...]it's important to recognize, on the one hand, a filmmaker who emerges out of her own kind of singular impulses-the motion and the power and the flash of roller derby-and then on the other hand, these kind of institutional, structural apparati that allow this creativity to flourish.