TFT in the '60s and '70s nurtured pioneering black directors

An article in The Guardian (UK) about a retrospective of the films of TFT alumnus Charles Burnett ’69, MFA ’77 at the British Film Institute, paints a picture of the School in the 1960s and ’70s as a training ground where “an underground generation of black film-makers ..[forged] a series of forgotten masterpieces.” Critic John Patterson sees Burnett’s acclaimed Killer of Sheep as a natural outgrowth of the filmmaker’s eye-opening udergraduate experience:

“Burnett encountered an eclectic, argumentative, competitive and politically active group of students. Among them were such figures as Ethiopian-born Haile Gerima, whose stunning thesis film, Bush Mama – about a young black woman’s alienation from her racist urban environment – was photographed by Burnett and Larry Clark (not the Larry Clark of Kids), who acted in one of Burnett’s undergraduate shorts, The Horse, and himself directed Passing Through, a rarely seen but utterly remarkable graduation feature about jazz, the Attica prison riot, white exploitation of blacks in the music biz and revolution, featuring toothsome footage of Horace Tapscott’s Pan-Afrikan People’s Jazz Arkestra. Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust) made her first feature, Illusions, in the UCLA programme, and Burnett also wrote and photographed director Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts, another poignant, forgotten masterpiece of family struggle in Watts. Other notable students included Ben Caldwell (I and I, 1977) and Jamaa Fanaka (Welcome Home, Brother Charles, 1975).”

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Keywords

"charles burnett" "billy woodbury" "jamaa fanaka" "julie dash" 

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