L.A. Rebellion
| Years active | 1967–89 |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Major figures | Charles Burnett, Larry Clark, Julie Dash, Jamaa Fanaka, Haile Gerima, Billy Woodberry |
| Influences | African cinema, Cuban cinema, Cinema Novo, European art cinema, French New Wave, Italian neorealism, Latin American cinema |
The L.A. Rebellion film movement, sometimes referred to as the "Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers", or the UCLA Rebellion, refers to the new generation of young African and African-American filmmakers who studied at the UCLA Film School in the late-1960s to the late-1980s and have created a Black Cinema that provides an alternative to classical Hollywood cinema.
In June 1953, Ike Jones became the first African American to graduate from the UCLA Film School. In the next 15 years, the numbers of African-American filmmakers remained small. One of those was Vantile Whitfield, who founded the Performing Arts Society of Los Angeles in 1964 and received a master's degree at UCLA in 1967. By the late 1960s, in the midst of affirmative action, the number of Black students steadily increased. Among this new crop of artists were Charles Burnett, an engineering student who had attended Los Angeles City College, and Haile Gerima, an Ethiopian filmmaker who had recently moved from Chicago. Unlike their predecessors, they eschewed Hollywood conventions and were influenced by films from Latin America, Italian neorealism, European art films, and the emerging cinema of Africa. They were among the first of what became known as the "Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers."
In the wake of the Watts Riots and other forms of social unrest, such as an 1969 shoot-out on the UCLA campus involving Ron Karenga's US Organization, Burnett and several other students of color helped push the university to start an ethnographic studies program. Elyseo J. Taylor, who was the only Black instructor at the UCLA Film School in the early 1970s, was an influential instructor in that program.
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