Program 81 min.
As Above, So Below. 1973. USA. Written, directed, edited, and produced by Larry Clark. With Nathaniel Taylor, Lyvonne Walder, Billy Middleton, Gail Peters. Cinematography by Roderick Young. Score by Horace Tapscott, performed by the Pan African Peoples Arkestra. 16mm preservation print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. 53 min.
“A rediscovered LA Rebellion masterpiece” (UCLA). While blaxploitation movies were conjuring heroic fantasies of Black Liberation and films like Robert Kramer’s Ice and Stuart Hagmann’s The Strawberry Statement concerned themselves solely with the coming revolution of dissident whites, Larry Clark’s As Above So Below (like Ivan Dixon’s The Spook Who Sat by the Door and Ossie Davis’s Gordon’s War, also released in 1973) tapped into Viewmaster America’s worst nightmare: the armed insurrection of a fiercely organized Black guerrilla movement. Centering on the disillusionment and radicalization of a Black ex-Marine sent to crush a leftist uprising in the Dominican Republic, thereby protecting white capitalist interests, Clark creates a bitter parody of a sociological “White” Paper, addressing the “Problem of the Negro”—the systematic incarceration and ghettoization of Black Americans and their reduction to a set of caricatures: studs, winos, storefront preachers, tricksters, and sellouts—with irony, burlesque humor, and a brilliantly unnerving collision of fiction and nonfiction filmmaking techniques, including his use of sound excerpts from a 1968 HUAC report on “Guerrilla Warfare Advocates in the United States.”
Hour Glass. 1971. USA. Written, directed, produced, and edited by Haile Gerima. Cinematography by Larry Clark. With Mel Rosler. Digital restoration courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. 14 min.
In Haile Gerima’s early student film at UCLA, shot by his colleague Larry Clark, a proto-hip-hop soundtrack of The Last Poets’ “Run N****r,” with its persistent warning that “ time is running out,” is heard over images of a young Black man agonizing over his rightful place in America.
The Horse. 1973. USA. Written and directed by Charles Burnett. Cinematography by Ian Conner. Assistant camera by Larry Clark. With Gordon Houston, Maury Wright, Larry Clark. 16mm preservation print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. 14 min.
Several years before his corruscating debut feature Killer of Sheep, Charles Burnett made this tense and terse short film that speaks volumes about Blackness in America. An elliptical tale involving a Black boy, his father, four menacing white men, and a horse on its last legs, the film was “influenced by one of my favorite short stories by Faulkner, ‘The Bear,’” as Burnett recalls. “I wanted to make a film—because I was born in Mississippi but raised in Los Angeles—that took place in the South. I wanted to show the decadence and the transformation of the South at that time.”