Paper #1: To Live Within the All of It:' The L.A. Rebellion Revisited
Through interrogations of exemplary films coming out of the L.A. Rebellion film movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, this paper elucidates a genealogy of film history that is particularly pertinent for projects of social justice and Black independent filmmaking today. To revisit the L.A. Rebellion in the contemporary moment — a moment in which overt racism, misogyny, and hypermasculinity are the political order of the day, and in which Black independent films such as Moonlight are garnering national attention and critical acclaim — is to reflect upon the condition of Blackness in the United States in general, and Black filmmaking in particular. As Black bodies continue to be subject to gratuitous state-sanctioned violence, standout films such as Moonlight also continue to offer counter-narratives to the Black imago. At the same time, the rarity of such films being produced and reaching mass audiences highlights the difficulty of getting this type of work funded, supported, and distributed. This paper concludes that the L.A. Rebellion restoration project initiated by the UCLA Film & Television Archive in 2011 demands reflection on the conditions of Black political filmmaking from the post-Civil Rights era to the present.
Paper #2: Tlatelolco and (Non) Evidence
My main query or investigation in this paper is how the most powerful and infuential public university system that politicized these students played a role in the access of archival footage, periodicals or any public evidence to such a grand act of citizen repression by the state. The university (UNAM) was established in the beginning of the revolution in 1910 Justo Serra as it's title suggests, to be 'autonomous' from the government, yet it becomes supervised by the the Director of Cultural Dissemination (1960) an arm of the Cultural Minister of the country. This investigation will take a partial historical recounting about how the public university system functioned as a final retelling of an event so important that has shaped cultural life and politics in a country that never established a clear record of what occurred on October 2nd and the many student uprisings that lasted until 1970. How did university institutions dedicated to cultural preservation, such as Filmoteca piece its amateur and in many cases citizen "orphan" films that may had been recovered, but remained anonymous of itÕs ownership to protect the individuals that had contributed to the record. As I have found these "ghost orphan" films only reappeared, or materialized for the first time for that matter once public outcry for government files and documents had finally been released in 1998.
Paper 3: Black Love Conquers All
Hollywood has played an instrumental role in the mass dissemination of popular culture. American cinema has created narratives, images and sometimes myths about specific cultural groups with the majority of those narrative orchestrators being White men. Not only do these biased images influence social behavior, but they leave marginalized audience members wondering, “what about me?” The media insists on presenting Black women in substandard roles of the oversexed jezebel, the prostitute, the superwoman, and the aggressive, intimidating bitch. Simply put, Black women do not fall in love in films; they have sex, they do not make love. They are shown as women who do not value romance. They do not experience love in the media and if they do, the discourse in constructed by men. The idea of Black women’s knowledge may conflict with the male-authored narratives because these authors are incapable of speaking from a Black woman’s standpoint. Through the analysis of literature evaluating depictions of “Black Love” in films, it is the researcher’s goal to describe whether historically filmmakers depict their female characters as empowered, or if these narratives are consistent with the common stereotypes associated with Black women in film.
