No 1: Killer of Sheep (Burnett, 1978):
Tate Modern, 7pm
This is the opening night of the LA Rebellion: Creating a Black Cinema season at the Tate. Full details of the films, which are on till April 25, can be found
here.
Here is the Tate introduction to the season:
Pioneering, provocative and visionary, the
LA Rebellion
films form a crucial body of work in post-war cinema. In the late 1960s
a number of African and African American students entered
UCLA
School of Theatre, Film and Television, and from the first class
through to the 1980s came to represent the first sustained undertaking
to forge an alternative Black cinema practice in the United States.
This season will provide the first opportunity in the
UK
to explore the full extent of this remarkable period and encounter the
artists who pioneered counter-cultural and community-based approaches to
filmmaking from the 1960s to the 1990s. Ground breaking films range
from Charles Burnett’s
Killer of Sheep 1977 to Haile Gerima’s
Bush Mama
1975 that are unique reflections on life in the black communities of
Los Angeles and recognised as some of the most important films of the
1970s. Drawing on the dynamic social and political climate of the
period, the films emerged from the context of the black liberation and
anti-Vietnam movements and in solidarity with the international
Third Cinema.
Other films re-work conventions of Hollywood cinema to reflect on the
black experience from the subtle dramas of Julie Dash to the explosive
films of Jamaa Fanaka. Newly discovered masterpieces, from Larry Clark’s
Passing Through 1977, one of the best jazz films ever made, to Billy Woodberry’s
Bless Their Little Hearts
1984, a remarkable ensemble drama set in south central Los Angeles,
have been restored and recognised as landmark films of the period.
Chicago Reader review:
The first feature (1977) of the highly talented black
filmmaker Charles Burnett, who set most of his early films in Watts
(including My Brother's Wedding and To Sleep With Anger);
this one deals episodically with the life of a slaughterhouse worker.
Shot on a year's worth of weekends for under $10,000, this remarkable
work is conceivably the single best feature about ghetto life. It was
selected for preservation by the National Film Registry as one of the
key works in American cinema—ironic and belated recognition of a film
that, until this recent restoration, had virtually no distribution. It
shouldn't be missed.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Here and above is the trailer.
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No2:
The Seventh Bullet (Khamarev, 1972):
Cinema Museum, 7.30pm
Here is the Cinema Museum introduction to tonight's offering:
A 35mm screening of USSR/Uzbekistan film,
The Seventh Bullet / Sedmaya Pulya (1972), directed by Ali Khamraev (84 mins). This special retrospective screening is part of the
7th Asia House Film Festival, supported by Prudential. The films of Uzbek director Ali Khramraev are long overdue discovery
in the UK. This stunning “Red Western” is a real revelation. Adapting
the gritty nihilism of Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns to local
landscapes, its story unfolds during the Basmachi Revolt of the 1920s,
in which Communist reformers sought to suppress an uprising by the
Muslim peoples of Central Asia.
Chicago Reader review:
Uzbek director Ali Khamraev enjoyed his greatest success with this 1972
action movie, a prime example of the "Red westerns" that flourished
during the Soviet era. With its dramatic landscapes and tense
psychological struggles, the movie might pass for one of the classic
Hollywood westerns of Budd Boetticher and Anthony Mann, except that the
antagonists here are not cowboys and Indians but valiant soldiers of the
Red Army and savage Islamists of the Basmachi Rebellion, which unfolded
in Central Asia after the Russian Revolution. The hero is a Soviet
officer, assigned to a village in the mountains of Uzbekistan, who
returns from an expedition to learn that a fearsome rebel leader has
slaughtered several locals and indoctrinated the rest; the officer sets
off in hot pursuit, confident that he can win back the villagers by
schooling them in the glories of communism. The movie is impressive as
genre filmmaking, though ultimately—like many of our westerns—it's most
fascinating as an expression of state power.
JR Jones
Here (and above) is an extract.
