The L.A. Rebellion was a loose group of African-American filmmakers and artists who worked in the early 1970s to develop an alternative to the dominant style of slick, romanticized Hollywood movies about African Americans.
It was started in the 1960s at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television.
It was created by a group of black students who were frustrated with the lack of opportunities for people of color in the film industry.
The movement focused on creating unique films that told stories about black characters. These characters weren’t seen as typical stereotypes.
Instead, they were real people with real experiences. They were shown as they were, not as they were expected to be portrayed by society.
LA Rebellion Film Movement
What Is LA Rebellion Film Movement?
The L.A. Rebellion was a group of black and Latino independent filmmakers in Los Angeles from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. They were sometimes referred to as the “Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers.”
These filmmakers were part of the first generation to study filmmaking at UCLA; many of them had been students at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). They were influenced by the Black Arts Movement and the Black Power Movement, as well as by the New Hollywood era in American cinema.
The LA Rebellion developed their own style in an art form that had traditionally excluded them, creating an independent cinema that depicted characters and stories representative of the African-American experience.
Many critics have referred to this group as “LA Rebellion” but this title has never been used by the filmmakers themselves. Nonetheless, it serves as a useful umbrella term for describing their work.
What Is the LA Rebellion Film Movement?
The LA Rebellion film movement was a collection of filmmakers who graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles’s (UCLA) School of Theater, Film, and Television in the late 1960s through the early 1990s.
Tackling social themes head-on, the L.A. filmmakers shot with handheld 16mm cameras, incorporated jazz into their soundtracks, and portrayed ghetto life with gritty realism.
The movement was centered around UCLA’s film school. Their films were seen by relatively few people when they were released in theaters or on television in the 1970s, but they gained a new audience with the revival of interest in independent film in the 1990s and their influence can be seen in contemporary films like Boyz N the Hood (1991) and Menace II Society (1993).
Even though their movies were often set in South Los Angeles, the filmmakers were determined to show the world another side of a community that had long been ignored by Hollywood.
By combining an insider’s knowledge with a fresh perspective, they would give birth to a new genre of movies that explored urban life from a distinctly black and Latin perspective.
In many ways, these filmmakers helped usher in a renaissance for independent cinema by giving voice to disenfranchised communities that had traditionally been ignored by studio executives.
While they encountered some resistance from Hollywood’s old guard, they ultimately achieved success with their brand of gritty urban dramas.
LA Rebellion: Creating A New Black Cinema
Before the 1970s, there was no such thing as “black cinema.” There was no mainstream black film industry and few blacks worked behind the camera.
In Los Angeles, however, a group of young filmmakers emerged in the early 1970s to create an alternative.A group of young African-American writers and directors who called themselves the LA Rebellion–including Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, Haile Gerima and Billy Woodberry—created low-budget films at the American Film Institute that tackled black history, the Watts riots and other subjects rarely seen at the time in American movies.
Forty years later, these films are showing for first time in Los Angeles. These filmmakers were inspired by the Black Power movement and their goal was to create films about African-Americans that reflected their experience, not white Hollywood’s.
The result was an independent film movement that took place largely outside of Hollywood. With no studio financing or distribution deals, these filmmakers found support from black churches and community organizations like Crenshaw Christian Center and Operation PUSH.
But they encountered resistance from within the black community as well. Many were criticized for focusing on negative stereotypes and images of blacks as poor, helpless or criminal.
But Burnett argues his films offered a more accurate view of African-American life than Hollywood.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIC5pU4tM78
Movie Movements That Defined Cinema: L.A. Rebellion
Movement is a term used by film critics to refer to certain trends within the history of cinema. The first movement occurred in Italian cinema during the late 1910s and early 1920s.
The second movement was called German Expressionism and occurred between the years 1919 through 1923.The third movement took place in French cinema from the years 1929 through 1939.
After World War II, the fourth movement took place in American cinema between the years 1947 through 1958.This was followed by the fifth movement, which began in France and spread to Italy during the late 1950s and went on through 1962.
The sixth movement originated in America during 1965 and 1966, while the seventh movement began with Godard’s 1968 film “Week End” and continued through 1975 with films such as “Blow-Up” and “The Passenger”.
The final movement is called New Hollywood Cinema, which began in 1969 with movies like “Easy Rider” and “Midnight Cowboy”, and continued through 1983. There are also other movements that took place before these seven, but they were not as significant or prominent.
The L.A.Rebellion is a subcategory of New Hollywood Cinema that originated around 1970 with movies like “Little Murders” and “Medium Cool”.
It shared many similarities to other movements.
History Of The Cinema Novo Film Movement
The Cinema Novo movement in Brazil began in the late 1950s, when a group of filmmakers got together to discuss their work. They were dissatisfied with the Cinema Nôvo that had come before them.
They believed that the works of Cinema Nôvo were too focused on the bourgeoisie and didn’t have enough focus on the poor. This dissatisfaction was brought on by the belief that Cinema Nôvo wasn’t addressing the issues of its time.
Cinema Nôvo was primarily focused on filming plays, which relied heavily on dialogue. The playwrights who wrote these scripts were often already famous, so it made sense for them to adapt their plays for film.
However, this left little room for other types of films to be produced.The Cinema Novo movement began with a desire to tell stories that were more relevant to Brazilians.
To do this, they focused less on dialogue and more on visual elements like color and camera work to tell their stories.They also wanted to focus more on social issues rather than entertaining audiences.
The result was a new type of Brazilian film: one that focused on the poor, women and ethnic minorities instead of the upper class. The first film produced by this movement was “Black God, White Devil” in 1963, directed by Glau.
Essential Filmmakers Of The LA Rebellion Film Movement
The New American Cinema movement in Los Angeles during the 1960s is one of the most exciting times in cinema history. This group of filmmakers helped break up the studio system and make way for more independent films.
Toward the end of the 1950s, young film students at UCLA began a movement to make films that spoke for them. They made short films about their own lives that were raw and honest, with a new type of energy coming from them.
They wanted to change how Hollywood was making films, so they created their own production company called United Artists (UA) to help distribute these alternative films.The first of this new wave of filmmakers was Monte Hellman who showed his first film at The Museum Of Modern Art’s New Directors/New Films series in 1963.
He had been inspired by Jean-Luc Godard who, with his film Breathless, had introduced a new style of filmmaking to America called “the French New Wave.Many other young filmmakers saw Breathless and became inspired by it and started making their own films in this style, which included less structured storytelling and an emphasis on visual style and editing as well as experimentation with sound.
The list below features some of these filmmakers who were part of The New American Cinema movement in Los Angeles during the 1960s.
Essential Films From The LA Rebellion Film Movement
The Los Angeles Rebellion is a name given to the cinematic movement that arose during the late 1960s and continued throughout the 1970s. It was prevalent in the United States, with many of its filmmakers being based around the University of Southern California’s film school.
The term refers to the cinematic rebellion against classical Hollywood cinema and its perceived values, norms and practices. The movement focused on subjective expression, innovative film techniques and a rejection of mainstream narrative film conventions.
In the 1960s and 1970s, a new generation of African-American filmmakers emerged from the cultural explosion of Los Angeles, California. Their films captured the spirit of their time and helped to redefine American cinema.
LA Rebellion Film Movement Theory
Film theory is about the ways in which we can understand the ways that filmmakers manipulate their audience. It’s about how we can look at scenes and characters and plot devices and understand what’s being said here, what the filmmaker is trying to tell us.
Text-based theories have been very useful in understanding film, but they have their limitations. They tend to be based on genre conventions (the “rules” of a particular genre) rather than on an analysis of the text itself.
They also tend to be quite abstract and rely strongly on theoretical concepts like Lacanian psychoanalysis or Marxist dialectics.However, it’s not always necessary to refer to such complicated theories when you’re analyzing a scene in a movie.
Sometimes the best way to understand what a director is doing is through a more straightforward approach — an approach that simply looks at how narrative works within a film, how plot devices function, how characters are used to create meaning within a filmic text, how cinematic tools like shot composition, editing and sound are used by directors to create meaning.
The LA Rebellion Film Movement is one possible way of approaching film theory. Rather than coming up with complex definitions of film genres or psychoanalyzing individual images, it looks at the ways that narratives are constructed through visual devices.
Importance Of The LA Rebellion Film Movement
The Los Angeles Rebellion Film Movement centered around the UCLA film school, and the more than thirty filmmakers who came out of it. These filmmakers were not only responsible for a significant change in the Hollywood filmmaking industry; they changed the way a generation of people thought about cinema.
Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) was widely seen as an influential, paradigm-shifting work. Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard began making films together in 1954 with their first feature, The Four Hundred Blows, which became a cornerstone for the French New Wave movement.
The film movement began around 1959 when Dennis Hopper was filming his first movie, The Last Movie (1971). He made this film during his time studying at UCLA.
Other students at UCLA at this time included James Byron, Peter Bogdanovich, Richard Rush, Jack Nicholson and Hal Ashby.
The New Hollywood cinema movement of the ’70s was the result of a number of different factors that converged during that decade—the protest movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s, new forms of independent filmmaking such as New Wave Cinema and underground film, changes to the film industry itself such as the end of censorship and new production technologies including portable cameras that could be taken on location.
The End Of The LA Rebellion Film Movement
The Los Angeles Rebellion Movement is a collection of films that were made by the young generation in Los Angeles and was the first generation to have come into filmmaking with the ‘New Hollywood’ era.The movement began in the early 1970s and ended in the late seventies, spanning a decade.
The movement started out at UCLA when a group of students were denied entry into a screening of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?” on campus.This then lead to a rally where Mario Van Peebles gave a speech, which told everyone to go make their own movies.
Then as he was saying this, someone passed him a copy of Robert Altman’s film “MASH”. As Mario Van Peebles was giving his speech, he had no idea what he was going to say until that moment came.
This event then led to an explosion of films that would change cinema forever. The films produced during this time period were very different from the traditional Hollywood films being made at the time because they were much more experimental and were often very long.
They were also much more gritty than some of the films being shot during this time period and featured a lot of nudity and foul language, which became known as “The New Hollywood Censorship”.
LA Rebellion Film Movement – Wrapping Up
One of the most exciting things I’ve been involved with in my time here at the Getty was the recent Murals, Music, and Movies,LA Rebellion Film Movement, 1965–1980. The show brought together over 80 artists, filmmakers and musicians who were part of a movement that began in Los Angeles in 1965.
Artists as diverse as Henry Groskinsky, Mike Kelley, Paul Rucker, John Outterbridge and Carrie Mae Weems are all represented as well as seminal music groups like the Watts Prophets and the Last Poets.
The show is centered on murals – paintings on public walls – but it also includes movies, photographs and even some writings by those who were there. And it covers the entire period from 1965 to 1980.
It’s actually a bit hard to get a handle on just how big this movement was. Think about how many major cultural events happened in Los Angeles during those years – from the Watts Race Riots to the first Star Trek to The Who’s rock opera “Tommy” to Angela Davis’ arrest to, George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh.
And yet this film movement managed to stand out – not only within these decades but even within its own neighborhoods! The individual artists working within this movement are so diverse and so unique that it.
