I attended a screening entitled "Black Art Black Artists: Short
Films," as part of the series "L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black
Cinema" that ran from February 2-24 at the Museum of the Moving Image.
Organized by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, the series revisited
the work of African and African-American student filmmakers in UCLA's
School of Theater, Film and Television from the late 1960s-80s.
Following a university initiative to facilitate
"ethno-communications,"1 this influx of young black voices into the
university became known as the L.A. Rebellion. The UCLA exhibition
project to honor that movement was part of the Getty Foundation's
cultural initiative "Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980,"2 a
collection of programs and exhibitions aimed at the celebration of the
"birth" of the L.A. art scene. The works employed in the screening I
attended were compelling for their dissonance and unity; they are
abstractly linked through the notion of "black art," but just what
that art contains and conveys is what the screening concerns itself
with.
The screening of "Black Arts, Black Artists," a collection of short
films, took place in MOMI's main theater, where the works were
projected onto a large screen without any introduction. I chose this
particular screening from the series because it seemed to be the only
collection of shorts organized around a clear theme: here, it seemed
to be the veneration of black voices in art, as seen through the lens
of the L.A. Rebellion filmmakers. Screened at 3 P.M. the day after the
"Nemo" blizzard covered the streets of Astoria (and the rest of New
York), the program was met by a small, unenthusiastic audience of
museum-goers. It is not unreasonable to suggest that the extreme
weather was a deterrent to museum attendance, though it would be hard
for me to say conclusively that more people would have attended had
the roads been more hospitable for travelers. There about ten people
in the theater, consisting mostly of older couples and at least one
pair of students. The younger pair in front of us left during the
first film. That they were both African-American in a predominantly
white crowd seemed to foreground the issues that would be raised by
the screening: patronage, exploitation, and marginality in the arts,
to name a few.
The context felt more attuned towards entertainment (or rather,
distraction) than education or exposure, a failing I attribute to the
general lack of supplementary information on the L.A. Rebellion, the
UCLA archive, and the significance of the former to the cultural
landscape. Short, inadequate program notes on a one-page flyer
summarized the films being screened, but did little to further clarify
or contextualize these pieces. Who were these artists that made them?
How do they reflect the themes of the L.A. Rebellion as a movement? In
what historical/cultural context were they produced? Why were these
films in particular chosen to fit the theme established by the
curator?
An impartial friend who knows nothing about curating moving images
attended the screening with me, and made the argument that the films
selected did not hang together well, which I attributed to the lack of
a lecturer to introduce the films. I would add that seeing the series
at an actual moving image symposium or conference with a curator,
artist, or scholar in attendance to contextualize the films and
facilitate discussion of their themes would have radically changed the
viewing experience and made for a better program. There are obviously
resource limitations involved with screening a series that demands a
particular area of knowledge during the day to a small audience in
Astoria, but without this essential component of the lecturer, the
program felt somewhat inscrutable and a little inaccessible. If the
goal of the series is to facilitate understanding of the L.A.
Rebellion as an historically specific artistic movement to audiences,
then the series in this particular context failed to do so. Stewart in
fact did appear in person on the last day of the series, for the
screening of the 1999 feature film Compensation. The only other guest
listed throughout the series' run at MOMI was filmmaker Haile Gerima
for a screening of his 1979 film Bush Mama. I would imagine that these
screenings would be much more informative and engaging, as they would
facilitate a definite discussion. I am hypothesizing as to the
curatorial intent of the screening in lieu of a definite thesis.
The screening incorporated five pieces: the first, Black Art, Black
Artists (1971), a short film by Elyseo Taylor, used voiceover
narration and jazz with visuals of past and contemporary black
artists, to extrapolate on past expectations put upon black artists,
as well as contemporary issues such as patronage by white buyers. The
framework for the screening, I believe, comes from a question raised
in this film: does the black artist imbue his work with his lived
experience as a person of color? The following two texts would most
clearly evoke a sense of black identity, but the final two would prove
more illusive.
The second (and most affective) film, Four Women (1975), directed by
Julie Dash, exhibits a colorful, emotional dance by Linda Martina
Young set to Nina Simone's stirring ballad "Four Women," which
deconstructs and scrutinizes cultural stereotypes of black women
(Mammy, tragic mulatto, Jezebel, and Sapphire). Preserving the vision
of utilizing one female artist to convey four different "tropes," the
use of Young to evoke four different women belies their constructed,
performative nature.
These first two films were beautiful 16mm film projections, and the
final three were digital projections. Somehow, during the transition
between these two formats, the visual component of the third (now
digital) video, Define (1988), was lost, which was a disorienting
experience. "Is this deliberate?" seemed to be the unspoken question
on everyone's mind, though the audience did not stir, and sat through
the audio track. Nothing was said, and the next film played without
incident, but the rhythm of the screening was lost. They re-screened
the short with visuals following at the end of the program, but the
damage had been done: no one was left in the theater by that time but
us. Define concerns itself with the construction and regulation of
ethnic (and in the film, appropriately ambiguous) female identity for
the dominant culture, combining surreal performance art with pedantic
theorizing. The visual component was (naturally) integral to the
artist's vision of marginalized culture as a site of fascination and
exploitation for the dominant one. Without it, the voiceover loses all
meaning.
The fourth work Bellydancing—A History & an Art (1979), by Alicia
Dhanifu, was the most perplexing selection in the lineup, and was
unfortunately granted only one line of program notes. The documentary
film gives a brief history of the art of belly dancing and explains
its methodology and movements. Historical scenes of belly dancers are
recreated, following which Dhanifu demonstrates various techniques
that make up the dance. The film finishes with tightly rendered shots
of Dhanifu dancing to traditional music. At first glance, this film
felt like a peculiar inclusion because it did not seem to mesh with
the previous films, which are overtly political. Though the piece is
clearly celebrating black culture and art, I was at first confused as
to what place it holds with the previous three films, which were so
clearly shaped by radical identity politics. However, the film's
examination of cross-cultural African heritage seems to invoke a more
expansive consideration of "blackness," leaning towards a
multicultural examination of otherness and alternative voice.
The final short, Festival of Mask (1982), directed by Don Amis, is a
digital video (transferred from 16 mm) documentary that focuses less
on "black" art, instead situating black cultural heritage within the
multiculturalism of the annual Craft and Folk Art Museum's Festival of
Masks celebration. Multiple cultures come together within this
celebration, and are all documented faithfully by Amis, who seems to
exercise a certain consciousness tied to the ethnic awareness of the
L.A. Rebellion movement. In Stewart's words, the film depicts "L.A.'s
diverse racial and ethnic communities (African, Asian, Latin American)
expressing themselves through a shared traditional form."6 As
Stewarts' notes also mention, Amis was one of the few black students
working at UCLA working in documentary film, and it is an interesting
inclusion as the final work of the piece. The black documentary
artist, whether through his selection of subject (methodology) or
methodology (giving all cultures equal screen time) is reflective of
this alternative black voice fostered by the L.A. Rebellion, even if
the final product is not overtly political or easily defined. Would we
know that a black artist made this documentary had it not been
included in this screening? This is the tension the curator seems to
be playing with by bookending Festival of Masks with Black Art, Black
Artists: the notion that the black artist evokes something of their
lived experience as a person of color into their artwork, whatever
that something may be (a discussion begging to be had). The
curator/archive/museum's job in a screening such as this, is to bring
that tension to the forefront, and make sure that discussion is had.
