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Launched at New York University (Nyu) in 1996, the Black Genius series was conceived by author Walter Mosley, Manthia Diawara (Director of the Institute of Afro-American Affairs at Nyu) and writer, film scholar and emeritus Nyu professor Clyde Taylor, as a… Continue Reading →...

Forged in the white heat of Vietnam and black-liberation struggles of the late 1960s, UCLA’s radical film-making movement paved the way for black directors. As a new retrospective starts at Tate Modern, one of the original participants recalls how they started

‘It wasn’t trendy,” says Julie Dash down the line from South Carolina. “We were the broke nerds wearing $2 jelly shoes because we put all our money into film-making.” She chuckles, warm and husky. In the late 60s and early 70s, Dash was a key member of the UCLA movement that spawned a host of pioneering African-American and African film-makers. This group and its work was dubbed the “La rebellion” in 1986 by cultural historian Clyde Taylor – a label that stuck so firmly, Tate Modern has seen fit to use it for its retrospective on new black cinema.

The Rebellion flourished on rocky ground. In the wake of the...

The so-called "La Rebellion" that emanated out of UCLA in the late '60s and '70s was the pioneering stake on a genuine "black cinema." Barnstorming "race films" of yore and contemporaneous blaxploitation were ghettos of cheap opportunism compared to these movies, a tributary of the "personal" indie-film waterway sourced from John Cassavetes's Shadows (1959). A revolutionary esprit attached to the movement, crossing vectors with the Black Power zeitgeist, even though it didn't receive its defiant moniker until 1986, when prof Clyde Taylor put together the first retrospective for the Whitney—and even though it began as the university's conscientious "Ethno-Communications" initiative, matriculating students of color in the hopes of channeling and ameliorating the hellacious r...