In the 1960s, a group of African American students at UCLA created a collective of films, unlike most had seen before, which would be coined as the LA Rebellion. With sporadic plots and symbolism, the L.A. Rebellion featured films such as Killer of Sheep by Charles Burnett that utilized neorealist influences and jazz music. With the cinematic arena being whitewashed, the L.A. Rebellion was as a vessel for change in the movie industry. The films contributed to the depathologization of black music, the deepening of a positive societal image of blackness, and as opposition to a epidermalized cinematic industry. The L.A. Rebellion combatted hegemonic holds that white actors and white movies had on cinematic arena. In some respects, the L.A. Rebellion was more of a reformist movement than a revolution because of the fact that the film collective did not look to desolate the entire industry but rather expose and thus uplift film from dishonest, negative black representation. The students created an awareness to the way film represents black culture which has since helped to create a more racially accepting industry.
However, even through their efforts we can see black films like Boyz n The Hood still being the standard for popular black film in the U.S. It is not until recently that we see films such as Black Panther and A Wrinkle in Time that feature consistently positive and honest black representation. Looking at the movement through Gramsci’s lense it is clear that the L.A. Rebellion was lacking a organic intellectual. Sure they could make all the revolutionary films they wanted, but without a vessel in which to bridge the elitist, white cinematic community to the L.A. Rebellion filmmakers and their “radical” works, they effectively preach to the choir. Once cannot force another to watch a film let alone appreciate its message, especially if that message is politicized and racialized. Gramsci would argue that the L.A. Rebellion could have be far more effective for black cinema if it had an OI.
Your discussion of the L.A. Rebellion and black film reminded me of Raoul Peck’s documentary on James Baldwin and his many notes on race in America. Though intimately connected with the Civil Rights Movement and close friends with Malcolm X, Medgar Evans, and Martin Luther King Jr., he was also a famed writer and an artist whose personal network included the likes of Beauford Delaney, Nina Simone, Harry Belafonte and others. Nevertheless, Baldwin had grown up in Harlem before and during the Harlem Renaissance, experienced multiple instances of racial harassment from police, and grew up in a large and very poor household. Baldwin had a high school education, but remained largely self-educated and educated through mentorship and lived experience. Yet, Baldwin has written some of the most poignant critiques of society, race, class and sexuality in the U.S. and was a key figure in civil rights activism. In this way, Baldwin very much fits Gramsci’s concept of an organic intellectual, in which he, along with the NAACP, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X (who together, Baldwin claims had two much more similar philosophies on resistance by the end of their lives), among others, created a national counter-hegemonic narrative of race relations in the U.S..
While I am unaware of the students’ backgrounds who produced the films that encompassed the L.A. Rebellion, it seems that they too may very well fit the bill of a Gramscian organic intellectual – they had one foot in the lived realities of being black in America and one foot in the hegemonic culture which was likely to be found at UCLA, thereby positioning them well to be organic intellectuals.