#larebellion

[theallianceblog]

Grateful to check off Tijuana on my bucket lists of cities I've watched wrestling. Tonight I'm here to check out #LaRebellion, reigning @nwa tag team champions @thecrashluchalibre. www.alliance-wrestling.com #thecrash #tiajuana #LuchaLibre #wrestlegram #wrestleblog #wrestlingblogger #wrestlevlog #wrestlingphotographer #prowrestling #wrestletravel #wrestlingjournalist (at Auditorio Municipal "Fausto Gutierrez Moreno") https://www.instagram.com/p/CTtLsqgl5fB/?utm_medium=tumblr

[scribesandvibes]

#diasporaculturalcurators #Repost @diasporaculturalcurators ・・・ #DCC #BLACKHISTORYMONTH PROGRAM: #LARebellion: Cinematic Pioneers and Social Troublemakers Talk and Conversation with #JheanelleBrown and #BenCaldwell Saturday February 20th 4pm PST / 7pm EST In the aftermath of the 1965 #WattsUprising, a group of Black diasporic students entered the #UCLASchoolofTheater, Film and Television as part of the University’s Ethno-Communications Initiative. These students collectively became known as the #LosAngelesSchoolofFilmmakers or the L.A. Rebellion. From the late-1960s to the early-1980s, they produced experimental, #documentary, and narrative film and video work. Curator/film programmer and educator Jheanelle Brown will give an introductory talk and afterwards she will be in conversation with Ben Caldwell, LA Rebellion filmmaker, multidisciplinary artist, and community leader. Links to several short films will be sent in advance of the program. Please be sure to follow #Diaspora #Cultural #Curators on Instagram and Facebook (facebook.com/diasporaculturalcurators) to receive updates. IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A black square graphic with green and red highlights at the top and bottom. The title of the program is in bold red text, with the streaming information in white text. https://www.instagram.com/p/CLacrrLh54o/?igshid=1xj6fnuxl52ee

[gavinhalm]

Traditional Versus Avant-Garde Aesthetics in Charles Burnett's "Nightjohn"

The biggest difference between Burnett's 1996 film Nightjohn and his earlier masterpiece Killer of Sheep is certainly within the camera work utilized, and though Burnett's concerns for social inequality (along with a deep-seeded desire to dismantle such inequity) had not changed over the years between these films, their formalistic differences could not be more pronounced.

--

In Nightjohn, what we have is a much more expected Hollywood approach to blocking the actors/figures, typical center and asymmetrical framing, camera and crane moves, and a traditional approach to sound.

Whereas in Killer of Sheep we find the use of Godard-like editorial and framing experimentation (especially in regards to how he photographs the children), Nightjohn seems to dispense with any significant formal experimentation. This new approach for Burnett opens up an aesthetic Pandora's box of sorts: is the goal of informing the viewer of social concern detracted by this new, more traditional "Hollywood" approach? Is the formalistic experimentation in his earlier movie a necessity for the telling of that story? What is the base difference, in regards to Burnett's filmmaking, between avant-garde filmmaking and traditional ways of telling a story?

Though the short discussion here is not an extended comparison between the early and later Burnett, this viewer feels that the director missed a chance to tackle the most sorrowful chapter in American history (slavery), and in a way that might have been better served through the use of his earlier, brilliant avant-gardist filming techniques--Much like Trinh T. Minh-Ha utilized an array of experimental approaches to present the "now" in/of her ethnographic films, Burnett accomplished something similar in his earlier film, and did so in a way that traditional Hollywood picture making simply can’t live up to.

[gavinhalm]

You're Breaking Up: Audio Dislocation as Identity in Julie Dash's “Illusions”

What is so striking to the viewer in Illusions is that, right away, Dash hits us with an array of sound dislocations that make one question if they were intentional (which I will argue), or if they were all simply a set of "mistakes" in production and/or the editing room--From the very first scene, there are what seem to be miscues in dubbing, poor quality inserts, questionable mic work in general, and music that overpowers dialogue. 

Most of the shots where this is happening are of the female Producer discussing with the Studio Head "bringing the reality of war" to the screen, while her dialogue is overridden by some of the previously mentioned "effects”. This approach is arguably utilized by the director in order to produce a critical/metaphorical reflection of the black female Producer’s status as a citizen and human being within the Hollywood/US cultural environment of 1942--That is to say, as the Producer character states later on, "(t)hey see me, but they can't recognize me". She is there, but her identity as a human being is fractured, shifted, dislocated across the scrim of cultural interfacing to the point that, like the unnamed character in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, she is not truly seen.

One of the most cunning usages of these auditory dislocations is that, after setting the identifying tone of the female Producer (named Minion Dupree; her first name being a clever ironic touch), they disappear when the scene moves to the sound stage where we see a black singer overdubbing the song of a white actress on screen (a common practice in the film industry of the time). Here, most of the audio dislocations are then transferred to the visual plane, where the faces of the white sound engineer and Studio Head are refracted and displaced in the window separating the mixing booth and sound stage.

Soon after this scene, we find Dash exquisitely bringing back and utilizing the audio “distortions” to signify another identity that is fractured: that of the singer. While it is obvious that the black girl is singing the part of the white actress on screen, what is so brilliant about Dash's work in this scene is that the viewer gradually realizes that even this signer is being over-dubbed (!)

By using these formal cues to bring attention to the filmic medium itself (a la Jean-Luc Godard), Dash enables the fractured, overwritten, and abused voices of black women to become fully heard and out in the open.

[gavinhalm]

Hermetically, Lovingly Sealed: A Meditation on the Watts of Charles Burnett’s "Killer of Sheep"

Los Angeles film, or, more precisely, films in and about Los Angeles, often contain a subtextual reflection that communicates an architecture or larger urban space which is constrained, or even circular, by design, and is thus very different than, if not diametrically opposed to, what we superficially perceive to be the reality of LA’s sun drenched architecture or “wide open” urban sprawl.

From early Noir such as Double Indemnity and Kiss Me Deadly, to more recent renderings in such racially charged (purposefully or otherwise) works as Chinatown, Falling Down, or Menace II Society, or the current LA Pulp/Noir, Drive, urban and even domestic spaces are often presented as performatively encased: circulating their characters into dead-end, labyrinthine cul-de-sacs; dark foreboding rooms from which there is no escape (physically or psychologically); streets that flow to nowhere or turn back upon themselves, or, in the cases of Kiss Me Deadly, Falling Down, and perhaps Refn’s aforementioned Drive, they are terminated by that ultimate (meta)physical "wall", the Pacific Ocean.†

--

Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep is solidly within this historical, filmic architecture of constraint, restraint, and enclosed space, as he also formally and metaphorically “entraps” his characters. But, unlike the other films mentioned, there is a singular difference in that Burnett shows his quasi-fictional spaces to be ones of psychological openness reflecting aspects of love and comfort.

The area of Watts in Los Angeles, especially circa 1972-73 when this film was shot, is presented as a highly downtrodden, economic "wasteland" akin to contemporary Detroit today. It has been completely abandoned by industry, and become an area riddled with the empty shells of industrial architecture. 

This general exterior environment is shown by Burnett to be not simply a space of "destruction", but one that allows for continuous play (even possible regeneration), especially through the use of vignettes of the children using the bricolage and detritus laying around them in a creative way--This is especially evident when Burnett frames his shots in formally beautifully ways, such as when he shows the children also play-fighting, and building "pointless" architectural creations out of railroad ties, interacting with the freight trains themselves, and jumping and playing over the rooftops of a variety of structures.

Also, while the main male characters circulate in and out of such oppressive spaces as the slaughterhouse (both a possible metaphor for the city itself, as well as the lives they must lead within it), they always come back to the hearth of their own home. And, while this hearth also contains friction due to the obvious economic plight experienced by the characters, it is one that provides strong and continued support.

Perhaps most pointedly, in the last scene of significant action (one in which nearly the whole cast is trapped inside their broken-down automobile on the side of an unknown road at the edge of town, trying to "escape" to the “outside” for a bit of fun), Burnett could have easily ended his film on a note of resignation, and the whole thing could have taken on a similar bleak vision of life in Los Angeles as displayed in all of those aforementioned LA films. But, he instead shows the family back at the rejuvenating site of their home, one that has been circulated back to numerous times throughout the entire film.

Indeed, it is within Burnett’s larger vision of all the micro-spaces that constitute Watts that one finds love--It is, within its streets, alleyways, destroyed industrial blocks, and dusty train tracks, a place in which one can always find some semblance of support (after all, it is a "neighborhood"). In this way, the film situates itself as a kind of diametric opposite to a work like Menace II Society, as Burnett shines a light of hope in an otherwise “bleak” and "lost" urban landscape.

Notes:

† Also, not just Los Angeles, but some of the most famous of “California films”, such as Vertigo and Bullitt, have spaces and streets which fold back upon and into themselves, as if they were the metaphorical figurations of a Westward Expansion that had slammed into the continental terminus of the Pacific, thus forcing the pioneering energies of an entire nation into whirlpools and eddies that go nowhere all along the coast.

[gavinhalm]

Almost Out of Time – Destabilizing Western Narrative Temporality in Two Films by Zeinabu irene Davis, and Pierre H. L. Desir

"Immediacy, simultaneity, instantaneity and ubiquity are all so many attributes of divinity that each allow us to escape the historic conditions of humanity"- Paul Virlio, "The Futurism of the Instant"

In Paul Virilio's most recent book-essay, from which the above quote is taken, the author sketches out a theory of temporality that envisions a contemporary world where time has been fragmented and compressed via technology to such a degree that there is nothing left but an ever-present "instant".

While acknowledging his concern for the loss of "temporal diversity", due to a world encased within a singular sense of instantaneity, in which "all distinction(s) between past, present, and future" are obliterated (though this is, perhaps ultimately, a very Euro-centric, eschatological vision of teleological "progress"), I would like to briefly trace here the possibility, within two films by Zeinabu irene Davis and Pierre H. L. Desir, of a filmic sense of time that not only destabilizes Western narrative temporality, through the use of pixelation and time-lapse photography, but also allows for the idea of time compression and/or destabilization to be one of creative positivity.

--

In Zeinabu Davis's film, Cycles, the director visually introduces a female character within the space of her own home and nearby locale working the daily "duties" of homemaking (cleaning, scrubbing, etc.) through a complex visual technique involving pixelation, in which the camera records short snippets of the world which confront the viewer in a manner that cuts into the traditional expectancies of continuity within Western narrative action.

These scenes where the main character scrubs floors, walls, and bathroom tubs still retain a progressive (traditional) narrative action, but in their fragmented presentation they create a heightened sense of gender-specific oppression as well as allow for moments of sensuality that would otherwise seem completely out of place if presented as a continuous set of scenes.

Indeed, it is the fragmentation of presentation of the main character's existence in these moments that creates an atemporal lacuna within the film's action, and allows for the main character's non-verbal, sub-conscious world to also infuse the story. It is the very in-betweenness which exists between what is left out in the action, during the use of techniques such as image pixelation, that enables the viewer to experience not only the level of oppression of the duties imposed upon the female character, but also her psychological state in which she rewrites oppression as personal salvation through sensuality.

--

Likewise, Pierre Desir's film, The Gods and the Thief, also takes the viewer out of a traditional Western experience of narrative temporality, but does so in a very different manner while at the same time opening up the space of the film to it's own form of "spiritual time".

After the male protagonist (in the form of a kind of earth-bound, Vodun spirit) cuts a wandering, discursive path through a forest, while following an equally mysterious woman, we see him eventually dragging a box (shown in a series of non-linear quick cuts) that inexplicably grows larger to the point that it becomes an almost Sisyphean burden whose actual purpose is left for the viewer to conjure.

The conclusion of this set of scenes now finds the viewer in a new space consisting of a farm and accompanying buildings, and this is where the film's temporality becomes highly abstract through the use of exceptional time-lapse photography–Shadows ominously growing over the land, multiple shots of clouds quickly forming in the sky, and the sun cutting along the very edge of a wide rectangular matte placed in front of the lens.

These renderings also allow for a kind of atemporal, spiritual transcendence to "infuse" the film's narrative. It is here, in the space of the farm, that the director has us experiencing the world in the same way as the male protagonist/spirit: by completely speeding up the physics of earth-bound temporality, all the while never letting the sun slip into darkness. In the end, all of human-experienced nature becomes an object in the hands of a spiritual psychodynamics that fragments, burdens, repeats, stalls, and frustrates a Western experience of a teleologically lived or progressive time.

--

After viewing these two films, what one can begin to see is that, even after all the attempts at transcending Western metaphysical concepts of time from Nietzsche through Derrida, contemporary thinkers such as Virilio are perhaps still conceptually trapped within a worldview that would have the compression of time (via technological apparatus from film to computer hardware and software) given only as an absolute moment of “(i)mmediacy, simultaneity, instantaneity, and ubiquity"–An inverse take on a Judeo-Christian, atemporal, and beatific Absolute Moment a la Dante in the "Paradiso". The problem for Virilio is that this Moment is one that, due to the stretching, cutting, destroying, rearranging, and compressing of time via modern technologies, becomes violently a-historical and a threat to humanity on a whole. 

What films like Desir and Davis' do is to show that these techniques (and technologies) can engender the exact opposite: they open up the spaces between, and the forces that drive, such fragmentation into the spiritual and psychological planes of our lived experience.

[gavinhalm]

Architectures of Containment: Built Environment in "The Bicycle Thief" and "Killer of Sheep"

In "Manipulation of Space and Time in Cinema", Teshome H. Gabriel delineates a dichotomous history that envisions Western films as preoccupied with the aspect of time over that of space, and "Third-World" (sic) cinemas emphasizing space as being more significant than time (Gabriel, 83). Gabriel justifies his thesis by stating that Third-World film originates "from folk traditions where communication is a slow-paced phenomenon and time is not rushed" (ibid.)

What is problematic about Gabriel's approach is that, making room for certain artists in cinema's avant-garde (such as Maya Deren), along with more Hollywood filmmakers pre-1970's (such as the American Western director, Andre de Toth), his thesis doesn't hold up as one can find many Western filmmakers that deal heavily with the concept of space (Antonioni is another exemplary filmmaker concerned with the spatial), and one could also argue that certain aspects of Brazilian cinema play significantly with time (Rocha's Antonio das Mortes, comes to mind).

For our purposes here, Gabriel's basic insight into the spatial aspects that supposedly dominate Third-World film will come into play within the somewhat "outsider", avant-garde approach Charles Burnett will take in Killer of Sheep, while at the same time illuminating scenes within Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief, in a manner that contradicts his general thesis, while at the same show these filmmakers creating architectures of constraint that mirror the larger social issues of oppression that they wish to address.

Urban Streets as Sites of Constraint

In the most important early scene of The Bicycle Thief, the main character has his bike stolen and pursues the thief in a manner that cuts linearly, and straight ahead, through the city. After loosing the pursuit, he walks back retracing the same path while looking from right to left, and though he hesitates moving in either direction, he never waivers in returning to the original site of defeat via a direct path back. 

What is so telling is that he resolutely keeps this path, instead of searching in one or the other direction. All of this is in metaphorical keeping with the name of his bicycle, “Fides”, which, in essence, describes a sense of trust in Italian, and now is completely ruined and cannot be found again, even through the spacio-temporal act of retracing. It is in this act of back-and-forth movement through the urban space that negates the possibility of him finding his lost bicycle as well as ever recovering the past and possibility of a "good life".

Likewise, in the final scene, when the main character is stealing a bicycle out of desperation, we find him surrounded by the leftover fascistic architecture of the Mussolini era, and watch as he circulates through the streets in trying to escape. It is this kind of movement through this particular culturally charged space that entraps the character both physically and metaphorically.

--

In Burnett's Killer of Sheep, urban space is also defined through bodily movement, but with a slightly different twist in the sense that it is circumscribed by both the main character's paths (to and from work, and to another friend's house, for instance), as well as the abstract shots of children at play amongst the ruins of decay within the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles (which, it should be noted, mirrors the urban decay and run-down post war "social" housing which the main character of The Bicycle Thief resides in with his family).

This split-personality of urban space expresses both the "enforced inaction" of the adults in Burnett's film, as well as the "vitality of the children" with their "exuberant and agile vigor" (James, 331), and symbolizes the plight both groups face: the ultimate slaughtering of personal dreams and upward mobility that both the adults and (eventually) the children wish to obtain.

Houses as Mirroring-Microcosms of Urban Space

The domestic spaces in both The Bicycle Thief and Killer of Sheep can be thought of as constituting similar ones that mirror the latent social issues of the respective cities, as well as the lives of their occupants. Yet, the two filmmakers approach their camera work in quite a different way, and this respectively gives a sense of lessening constraint in Thief, and greater constraint within Sheep.

In De Sica's film, a downtrodden, low (or, no) income family lives in very tight quarters. Yet, he seemingly liberates the feeling of constraint by allowing the camera to roam freely through the constrained domestic space with many follow and tracking shots. What seems be at work here is a method of bringing the larger movements that the husband and son trace throughout the city into the apartment, thus, De Sica is successfully allowing the hectic, exterior wanderings to metaphorically transpose themselves into the interior rooms in order to render them as spaces of conflict.

Burnett's film renders the domestic space quite differently by utilizing only a set of Ozu-like "still shots", whereby the camera hardly moves at all, whether this is in scenes where the main character is arguing with his wife in the kitchen, trying to buy an old automobile engine from an acquaintance, or fending off the drug dealers that try and lure the main male character back out into the street. It is this method of using an immobile camera that keeps the main character's house (along with that of his friends) rigidly formalized and “in line”, metaphorically as well as literally, with the circular and sealed-off space that is the depressed socioeconomic world of Watts.

Third World Space and Western Time

What one wonders most in regards to these two filmmaker's renderings of urban and domestic spaces is how much did Burnett learn from De Sica? It is well known that Burnett, along with many others within the LA Rebellion scene, were very interested in utilizing the various tropes and techniques of Italian Neo-Realism (James, 332), and De Sica was one of that movement's primary creatives. 

Also, what such a comparison of the filmed spaces of the street and home by these two directors does is to dismantle a facile reading of film history that would see the West as producing films mainly concerned with time (due to its conformity within the pincers of capitalistic commodity functions - Gabriel, 83), and the "Third World" filmmakers being more interested in space. 

The fact of the matter is, all film, regardless of where it is produced or who produces it, is concerned with both space and time--the two (meta)physical aspects of it are ultimately inseparable, and universal.

Bibliography:

Gabriel, Teshome H.; Michael T. Martin, ed., “Towards a Critical Theory of Third World Films”, Cinemas of the Black Diaspora: Diversity, Dependence, and Oppositionality, Wayne State University Press, 1995.

James, David E., The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2005.

[djflynt]

25 years ago this week, a racist jury in Simi Valley, California acquitted four racist LA police officers in the beating of Rodney King. The Black community was infuriated in LA (and throughout America) which sparked the LA Rebellion of 1992. No one captures that anger better than Ice Cube on his album The Predator, specifically the song "We Had To Tear This Motha_____ Up." In 2017, things are even worse. Cops don't just beat up Black folks, they shoot to kill. Whether you are clearly unarmed, are a child or are mentally unstable, it doesn't matter to them. If things don't get better soon, history will repeat itself...but this time all over America. #1992 #LosAngeles #LARebellion #RodneyKing #LatashaHarlins #IceCube #ThePredator #RebelMusic #DontLetMeCatchDarylGatesInTraffic #RiotsAreTheLanguageOfTheUnheard