Week #6—Films of the Caribbean

As a native of Ethiopia who was reared through storytelling and trained in the theatre, Haile Gerima arrived as a student at UCLA’s Theatre Arts department in 1968 to learn how he could transfer his skills to the cinematic medium. Gerima and his African and African-American colleagues, most notably Charles Burnett, were very much products of their time, in that they were deeply engaged in the political and creative activity of the period marked by the Black Power and Black Arts movements. The filmmakers of the L.A. School merged their formal training at UCLA with their self-guided curriculum driven by inquiries about what it meant to make a Black film. Efforts were made to create a new cinematic language that would privilege people of African descent through form, content, and image. Conventions from other filmmaking movements, notably African and Latin American cinema, were transcribed to document the lives of African-American residents in the Watts section of Los Angeles. With respect to Latin American cinema, namely Cuban cinema, filmmakers from UCLA, also known as the Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers, or the L.A. Rebellion, learned to utilize portable 16mm filmmaking equipment to document the region as they were and capture footage that would merge fiction and documentary conventions. The conventions of Cuban cinema (i.e. B&W film stock, handheld portable cameras, natural lighting, location shooting, post-dubbed sound) were derived from Italian Neo-realism, a film movement that emerged during WWII when the destruction of studios forced filmmakers to shoot on location and depict moments throughout Italy as they were happening.

An artist immersed in the writings of Third World Marxism by way of Frantz Fanon from Martinique and Amilcar Cabral from Guinea-Bissau, Gerima was most concerned with the relationship between race and class to enforce systemic suppression. Bush Mama (1975) centralizes Dorothy, a widowed single mother dependent on welfare, as a character that undergoes a transformation from passive victim to an agent of change for herself, her daughter, and her immediate community. Gerima identifies the welfare system, law enforcement, and the government (i.e. recruitment into the Vietnam War) as the institutional forces that keep residents in Watts like Dorothy and her neighbors economically and emotionally deprived. The presence of these institutions are immediately felt at the opening of the film, as the soundtrack, which layers helicopter choppers, a police dispatcher, and a social worker that asks questions about welfare benefits, are matched with the camera zooming in on the film’s title, written on a brick wall. Gerima also captures Dorothy’s transformation through subjective reality, as his repetitive use of image and sound function as a loop to illustrate the way in which she processes each dilemma she faces. Throughout the film, Dorothy’s presence within the diegetic world is intercut with images that appear to emerge from her psyche.

Gerima and his colleagues made films set in Watts that were said to capture domestic colonialism, in which overwhelmingly Black, densely-populated urban areas were isolated from both governmental resources that would resuscitate the neighborhood’s economy and overall morale and political progress brought upon by the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. The filmmakers also sought to identify the situation of African Americans as part of a global struggle towards liberation. In her documentary Aime Cesaire: A Voice for History, Euzhan Palcy captures the life of the poet and politician based in Martinique. She captures how Cesaire argued for self-autonomy amongst the citizens of Martinique as a poet and, later, as the mayor of Fort-de-France, the country’s capital. Throughout the documentary, focus on how Palcy depicts Cesaire’s initiation as an artist and how he sought to inspire Martinique’s citizens as a poet and a teacher by establishing a spiritual connection with ancestral Africa. Later, think of how Cesaire seeks to negotiate his reputation as a poet with his duties as Fort-de-France’s mayor, and how his overall legacy is threatened by his conflicting views towards colonialism in terms of Martinique’s relationship with France.