7

Numbering Our Days in Los Angeles, USA

If you don’t have history, you don’t exist.

—FILMMAKER ROBERT NAKAMURA, 20101

In contrast to the pageantry of the bicentennial celebrations, activist documentarians in Los Angeles cast a more critical eye on the subject of collective remembrance. They did so within the context of waning energy for the vanguard minority liberation movements, diminishing government support for community media, and the twin urban planning forces of aggressive corporate development and strategic neglect. While these filmmakers did not explicitly address the bicentennial per se, they creatively engaged with the myriad ways the present informs understandings of the past and vice versa. They captured the reverberations of traumatic events on the national psyche as well as advanced local struggles against displacement and the decisive practice of historical recovery. At times viewers even interpreted these films as sharing an unsettling relationship to the triumphant spirit of mainstream bicentennial programming. As Hollywood producers pioneered docudrama as a field of popular pedagogy, activist filmmakers—working independently or as part of collectives, within universities, or in collaboration with public media outlets or commercial studios—pushed the form and conceptual aims of documentary in new directions. They moved toward multimedia projects and stylistically hybrid features.² Their films transformed private memories into public history, insisting that Americans confront some hard truths.

RE-MEMBERING VIETNAM

The Vietnam documentary Hearts and Minds (1974) involved a collaboration between New Hollywood producers and a maverick filmmaker within the establishment New York news media. BBS Productions coordinated the project. Its founders, Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson, had numerous family ties to the major studios, and they met while working on television programs for Screen Gems. Interested in making more alternative films that were aligned with their left-leaning political views, Schneider and Rafelson started Raybert Productions in 1965. After creating a satirical feature about the Monkees entitled Head (1968), they added producer Stephen Blauner and changed their name to BBS. The studio developed a reputation for coordinating low-cost, counterculture features that Columbia would distribute. Their films tended to concentrate on themes of alienation from mass society and longing for new forms of community. BBS scored a number of runaway successes, including Easy Rider (1969), Five Easy Pieces (1970), and The Last Picture Show (1971), but also suffered some flops, including Drive, He Said (1971). During this time Schneider and Rafelson gave money and publicity to anti–Vietnam War rallies and became close with both Youth International Party cofounder Abbie Hoffman and Black Panthers cofounder Huey Newton.3

The idea for Hearts and Minds emerged out of a series of conversations between Schneider, Rafelson, and CBS documentarian Peter Davis. Davis was nationally known for creating public affairs programs that pushed the social justice purview of conventional liberal politics. Hunger in America (1968) looked at poverty among Mexican Americans in Texas, Navajos in Arizona, and African Americans in Alabama and Washington, DC. Subsequently, the Department of Agriculture expanded its food stamp initiative. The Battle of East St. Louis (1969) captured a three-day retreat comprised of eighteen black and white citizens from east St. Louis. The retreat was designed to improve race relations through mediated dialogue, role playing, and group exercises. Davis’s Emmy- and Peabody-winning documentary The Selling of the Pentagon (1971) exposed the Pentagon’s massive $30 million per year propaganda effort to persuade Americans as to the virtue of US military action in Southeast Asia. The documentary detailed the Pentagon’s support of film, television, and radio programs, as well as its attempts to manipulate the press’s overseas war coverage.

Upon seeing The Selling of the Pentagon, BBS contemplated making an anti–Vietnam War film. They first envisioned doing a portrait of Daniel Ellsberg, the former Pentagon analyst who had recently leaked more than seven thousand documents detailing government efforts to escalate US involvement in Vietnam. They contacted Davis and the project quickly expanded into a long-form investigative documentary. Davis shot the film between July 1972 and August 1973, including two months on location in South Vietnam. After editing the film over the next year, the documentary approached final cut by April 1974.

According to Schneider and Davis, the project tried to address “why we went to Vietnam, what we did there and what the doing of those things did to us.”⁴ To be sure, Hearts and Minds explicitly condemns the war. The documentary combines interviews, news broadcasts, archival excerpts from Hollywood war films, photographs, and observational sequences in order to excavate America’s Cold War motivations for first aiding the French and then increasingly asserting its own imperialist presence in Southeast Asia. But the film does not attempt to chart a strict chronological timeline or recount events in great detail. And although Hearts and Minds was part of the broader cultural front of the antiwar movement, it was made during the period of Vietnamization, in which President Richard Nixon began to withdraw US ground troops and shift the responsibility for fighting to the South Vietnamese. Davis did not imagine his film to be the same kind of social organizing tool as the late-1960s films of Emile de Antonio or Newsreel.

The rhetorical thrust of Hearts and Minds is centered on the war’s physical and psychic impact on Americans. It sought to influence how the war lived within American culture and how it would be remembered. In the film, top military and political brass, including George Patton IV, William Westmoreland, Walt Rostow, and George Trendell, staunchly defend the war. They directly reference or gesture toward the need to “contain” the Red Menace, the domino theory of how Communism would supposedly spread, and the belief that the United States is the great liberator of oppressed people around the globe. These same individuals calmly deny the US-inflicted brutality on the Vietnamese people and appear unaware of or apathetic toward their commitment to an anti-imperialist fight for national unification. In interviews with American civilians that rhyme with these perspectives, subjects reveal a willful ignorance about the conflict, or proudly affirm the hawkish goals and defensive positions of its architects.

Many American veterans, however, express feelings of anger and sadness at having suffered as well as having been the cause of so much pain. Captain Randy Floyd from Norman, Oklahoma, speaks about the moment that the abstract, technical exercise of executing a bombing raid transformed into an alarming awareness that he was destroying entire villages. Lieutenant Robert Muller from Great Neck, Long Island, explains that the repetitive act of killing eroded the stock narratives surrounding America as a benevolent, freedom-fighting superpower. The veterans’ testimonies are supplemented with footage of South Vietnam shot by cinematographer Richard Pearce and other journalists over the course of the war. The moving images give evidence of the horrors the American soldiers recount and show the consequences of US military involvement: exhausted marines in foxholes; petrified Vietnamese children whose flesh has been stripped away by napalm; the natural environment ravaged by the chemical defoliant Agent Orange; and resilient Hung Dinh villagers whose families have been killed by US bombs, and whose homes and livelihoods have been decimated.

Hearts and Minds foregrounds the fact that for a lot of individuals touched by the war, daily remembrance of the agony is inescapable. Some are forced to confront a physical loss. Pearce often first frames an individual’s face, then pulls back or reframes the interview in a follow-up sequence to reveal that the veteran in question has lost the use of one or more limbs. Thus, the documentary shows over time that Muller is paralyzed from the waist down and that William Marshall has a prosthetic arm and leg. “Loss” can also be interpreted as something abstract, as Muller conveys that what hurts most is not the inability to use his legs, but that he feels absolutely no sense of pride in his country or its leaders. For David and Mary Cochran Emerson of Concord, Massachusetts, the anguish that stems from the death of their son Bing surfaces through the momentary silences in their testimony and strained expressions on their faces as they attempt to hold forth on the moral right of America’s official position on Vietnam.

Hearts and Minds had a highly uneven path to exhibition. After playing at the Cannes Film Festival, where writer Rex Reed announced that the documentary was “a brutal, mind-blowing experience,” it was screened at festivals in Atlanta and San Francisco.5 Columbia Pictures, however, expressed hesitancy concerning the film’s commercial release. The studio also feared that conservative viewers would stay home or even boycott Columbia’s other pictures. Furthermore, studio executives were anxious of criticism from the government as well as a possible libel suit.⁶ Unhappy with his interview, Rostow tried and failed to get a restraining order on the film. Columbia ended up selling the documentary to Rainbow Pictures. Warner Bros. would then handle distribution. Despite these complications, when Hearts and Minds finally played nationwide in both commercial theaters and noncommercial venues, it was a resounding critical success. New York Times reporter Stephanie Harrington confidently noted, “Unlike news photos, it does not merely present images of a collective tragedy but persistently focuses on individuals and how the war has blasted the whole of life for a particular person.” Los Angeles Times critic Kevin Thomas claimed that the film “may well be the most important documentary of our time.” Gary Arnold of the Washington Post observed, “Davis approaches the subject as a part of history.”⁷ Hearts and Minds won the Oscar for Best Documentary in 1975, a year when Hollywood was particularly divided on the relationship between art and politics. When Davis and Schneider took the stage to accept their award, they drew attention to the continued suffering in Vietnam and their hope for children to grow up in a world different from the one depicted in the film. They then went on to read a dispatch from the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam affirming the Paris Peace Accords.

The action provoked a range of encouraging and disparaging comments from luminaries present at the event. Hosts Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra prepared an announcement condemning the acceptance speech and supporting “patriotism.” The evening certainly revealed ideological tensions within the Hollywood community. But the fact that Hearts and Minds received such extensive attention was indeed significant. The recognition from intellectuals, journalists, and the Academy heightened its reach and visibility. Commenting on the centrality of the film in American culture as well as the ways in which it shrewdly interrogated long-held myths of United States exceptionalism, New York Times critic Vincent Canby called Hearts and Minds “the true film for America’s bicentennial.”8 For many of the veterans interviewed, testifying to their experiences allowed them to work through their feelings of pain, shame, and frustration. Bobby Muller went on to become a lifelong peace activist. The documentary also productively served as a catalyst for framing a conversation about Vietnam, the ideologically treacherous reasons for entering into the conflict, and the war’s fraught connection to American national identity in general and past military interventions and policies in particular. At the same time, the film’s direct confrontation with the consequences of the war for both the Vietnamese and the American people served as a warning against taking similar action in the future.

BORDER CROSSINGS

Throughout the mid-1970s, KCET documentarian Jesús Salvador Treviño remained passionate about the power of moving images to shape Chicano identity and advocate on behalf of Chicano people. When he was invited to develop the filmmaking wing of the theater collective El Teatro Campesino in 1974, he saw this as a chance to apply his talent to a fresh and vibrant artistic environment. He was also attracted to the prospect of living in a commune, located three hundred miles north of Los Angeles in San Juan Bautista. Still, there were broader forces that influenced Treviño’s decision to make a career change. He was growing disheartened about the state of La Raza Unida Party. Grassroots efforts in the early part of the decade made headway in unifying Mexican Americans across the political spectrum into a formidable political party, but the organization was having difficulty both winning campaigns at the local level and gaining a firm foothold within national democratic politics. La Raza Unida suffered from court indictments as well as infighting and ideological rifts among its leaders. José Angel Gutiérrez and Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales each vying for power prevented the party from enacting a unified national vision. Additionally, Democrats began running Latino candidates who courted the Chicano vote, thereby diminishing La Raza Unida’s base and political strength. Finally, the government’s crackdown on activism through propaganda and direct acts of violence made radical organizing associated with the Chicano movement a constant challenge.

Treviño had honed his craft at KCET, but the public television outlet was beginning to shift away from community documentary and in-depth public affairs reporting and toward magazine-style news shows and prestige drama. This mirrored national trends throughout the mid- to late 1970s and would accelerate in the 1980s. Public television managed to outlast the attacks of the Nixon administration and secure federal funding under President Gerald Ford, but there was no longer the same climate of pressure to align programming with progressive grassroots social movements. PBS retreated to the cultivation of middlebrow tastes by means of spotlighting ballets, symphonies, and literary adaptations. And the search for high ratings along with the upcoming bicentennial resulted in spectacular docudramas, which began to surface on television screens during the early 1970s. The Carnegie Commission’s investigation into the present and prospective future of public broadcasting between 1976 and 1978 yielded the assessment that PBS needed to be better funded, more accountable to minority viewers, and less susceptible to the desires of government and corporations.9 While KCET produced some bold social dramas during this period, particularly through its Visions (1976–80) series, the station pivoted away from the kind of local, community-based nonfiction produced by the Human Affairs department. New York Times critic John J. O’Connor called out KCET in his critique of public television at the turn of the decade, noting, “The system has become a repository for nicely reassuring, non-minority, middle-class values and attitudes.”¹⁰

As El Teatro Campesino’s in-house filmmaker, Treviño documented the troupe’s performances and collaborations with the Mexican group Los Mascarones and Peter Brook’s International Centre for Theatre Research. Treviño’s partnership with the collective was rewarding, but he soon found that he had difficultly squaring his own ideas about the responsibilities of individuals within the collective with how the organization functioned in practice. Not only was there an uneven distribution of duties and responsibilities in the commune, but Treviño clashed with members as to the exact role of filmmaking.¹¹ He found a new direction during the summer of 1974 at a conference on Latin American cinema at the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos in Mexico. As the invited representative of Chicano cinema, Treviño met and saw the films of Mexican directors Pepe Estrada and Sergio Olhovich, Cuban directors Julio García Espinosa and Miguel Torres, and exiled Chilean filmmaker Miguel Littín. Treviño returned to the United States convinced that class issues needed to be foregrounded in his films and inspired to read liberation theology and Marxist theory. When asked by the former Mexican president Luis Echeverría Alvarez to make a feature-length fiction film about Chicanos, Treviño eagerly accepted.

Raíces de Sangre (Roots of Blood, 1977) highlighted the fight of exploited garment workers to form a transnational union. Treviño shot the film between June and December 1976 in San Diego and the Mexican town of Mexicali, although the story is nominally set in the Texas town of Socorro and the Mexican town of Ciudad Juárez. Raíces de Sangre follows the Harvard-educated Chicano lawyer Carlos Rivera (Richard Yniguez) as he comes to understand his professional relationship to the labor rights organization Barrio Unido, and his romantic relationship with one of its core leaders, Lupe Carrillo (Roxanna Bonilla-Giannini). The narrative weight of Raíces de Sangre rests on the lives of the people who labor in maquiladoras (foreign-owned manufacturing and assembly plants in towns along the Texas-Mexico border). The film spends considerable time representing the workers’ material conditions and the exhausting routines they are forced to endure as employees of the Morris Shirt Company. Treviño told Cineaste, “I tried to tie the film as close as I could to reality.”12

The film opens with a scene depicting Mexicans hoping to cross the border to find lucrative employment opportunities in America, only to die of asphyxiation in the back of a jam-packed truck parked on the side of an empty Texas highway. This tragic scene was based on a real incident Treviño had read about earlier in the decade. The portrayal of the skirmish between participants in the Barrio Unido rally and festival and the police in the Fourth Avenue Park resembles the police abuses Treviño witnessed at the Chicano Moratorium antiwar march in Los Angeles. Furthermore, the characters in the film speak a true-to-life mixed Spanish-English dialect known as Caló, further emphasizing the film’s verisimilitude.

Raíces de Sangre includes many scenes set on the factory floor. This locale is at once a site of confrontation with management as well as a place of social bonding. When one employee becomes injured and is unable to keep pace with the required quota of shirts, her colleagues readily contribute garments to her pile. Characters toil busily at their sewing machines during the day, and have secret meetings to discuss organizational tactics at night. They talk of the need to form a union to negotiate wages, fight for job protections and safety protocols, and eliminate harassment. At their strike toward the end of the film, they cut electrical cords and dismantle machines so as to halt the flow of production.

At one moment in the film, Rivera reflects on the multigenerational Chicano experience of exploitation. He gazes out to the landscape in which he was raised and tells Carrillo that his family before him worked in the fields, struggling their whole lives to obtain economic stability. Now, he is participating in a related fight in the barrio.

The film ends on a somber yet hopeful note. Participating in a funeral march, Morris workers from both sides of the border carry the body of a killed organizer to the company officials and local police. They are honoring their fallen comrade who was killed during a rally, and making visible their rage. Separated by a barbed-wire fence, the two ranks of marchers display a fierce strength in their refusal to be broken down by corporate bullying and corrupt law enforcement. The film signals that this kind of transnational labor solidarity to fight a multinational company is a long time coming, here reaching a conceptual power that gives hope for the workers and their cause. Treviño told the Los Angeles Times, “The Chicano experience does not only take place on this side of the border, but it’s heavily influenced by the border itself and by Mexico.”¹³

Raíces de Sangre was completed in 1977, just when Treviño’s previous films were being re-exhibited. For example, Yo Soy Chicano played at Los Angeles Mission College, at one of the first Chicano film festivals at the East Los Angeles Library, and at the Magic Lantern Basement Cinema in Washington, DC. Raíces de Sangre was warmly received in Mexico but at first had a difficult time getting distribution in the United States. The fact that it was a feature-length bilingual realist drama that took a hemispheric approach to American culture did not make theatrical release easy. The film premiered in the United States at the 1978 Chicano Film Festival in San Antonio and went on to play in select commercial theaters, festivals, and at special events. It was particularly popular in Spanish-language theaters in downtown Los Angeles. Following a benefit screening at the Golden Gate Theater in East Los Angeles, professor Jason Johansen of California State University, Northridge, called the film a “landmark” of Chicano cinema. Variety called Raíces de Sangre a “solidly made call to political activism.”14 Treviño wanted viewers to see that working-class people on both sides of the border are deeply affected by the growing presence of unregulated, multinational corporations, and that both grassroots organizing and progressive legislation are needed to combat globalization.

UNSUNG ACHIEVEMENTS

The African American filmmaker Sue Booker left KCET at around the same time as Treviño to pursue freelance projects. She served as the creative consultant for the two-week KNBC series What Is It (1973) about black achievements across the humanities and sciences. The series consisted of actors performing the roles of famous black professionals or giving accounts of their accomplishments. Louis Gossett Jr. charts a historical trajectory of blacks in medicine from James McCune Smith, the first African American to hold a medical degree, to pioneer heart surgeon Daniel Hale Williams. Actor John Amos hosted an episode on black cinema from 1916 to 1930.

Booker drew on What Is It for her series The Rebels (1976). The series was part of KNBC’s bicentennial lineup and was also connected to UCLA’s Extension courses. The Rebels spotlighted ten individuals from the American Revolution to the Civil War. Each person was played by a famous actor and was interviewed in his or her historical setting. In the series, host Dr. Keith Berwick interviews theoretician of American independence Thomas Jefferson, early feminist Abigail Adams, black female abolitionist Sojourner Truth, as well as militant antislavery activist John Brown.¹⁵ During this period Booker also stepped into the role of a literary chronicler and social historian. She wrote poignant pieces for the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Sentinel on under-recognized figures within and beyond Los Angeles: Mayme Clayton, a black rare-book dealer, archivist, and owner of the Third World Ethnic Bookstore in the West Adams neighborhood; Sidney Saltzman, prominent member of the Dedicated Older Volunteers in Educational Services; and George Washington Carver, the prolific black scientist-inventor.¹⁶

GRAY POWER IN VENICE

Filmmaker Lynne Littman stayed on at KCET through the mid-1970s. Even as the station began to shift its focus away from hard-hitting social documentary, Littman believed that public broadcasting still offered opportunities for women not available in the commercial sector. She told the Los Angeles Times in 1973, “The studios don’t know how to treat you unless you are a secretary or a starlet. If you have any brains they give you a blank stare.”17 The same newspaper reported that by 1974 there were only sixteen women registered as part of the 1,390 West Coast members of the Directors Guild Association. Between 1949 and 1980, women directed 115 of the 65,000 hours of prime-time television. Entry into film schools was also a major challenge. In 1970, Women for Equality in Media organized a march on the West Coast American Film Institute headquarters to protest the small numbers of women awarded grants or offered training by the institution. Littman was one of nineteen individuals who eventually received a grant from AFI’s first Directing Workshop for Women in 1974.¹⁸ As she made films at KCET, she advocated for the increased presence and equitable treatment of women within the film and television industries.

KCET broadcast Littman’s Till Death Do Us Part (1975) as part of an “International Women’s Year” lineup of programs “by, for and about women.”¹⁹ The film concentrated on interviews with five widows, aged twenty-eight to seventy-four. They talk about their personal experiences of love and death and how they cope with the absence of their partners within a context of restrictive societal norms and economic hardship. The program foregrounds the women’s courage and stamina, the solidarity they feel with other women in similar situations, and how they have created independent identities for themselves. Reviewer Linda Gross enthusiastically wrote, “Littman is a sensitive and provocative interviewer. She doesn’t probe, she listens. The women reveal very intimate feelings but one doesn’t feel like an intruder.”²⁰ Till Death Do Us Part was rebroadcast with Joyce Chopra’s Girls at 12 (1975) as part of the series “Something Personal.” The film also played theatrically at Los Angeles’s Royal Theater as part of a women’s film series in 1977.

Littman explored the concerns of retired, widowed, and elderly women in Number Our Days (1976). The documentary took as its subject Eastern European immigrant Jews living in the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles. She made the film with her close friend and fellow feminist, USC anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff. The two had met at the Woman’s Building, at a talk Myerhoff was giving on her ethnographic research on the immigrant enclave. After years of researching the Huichol Indians in northern Mexico, Myerhoff began fieldwork on Venice Jews around 1972. Her project was part of an initiative for the study of ethnicity and aging sponsored by USC and the National Science Foundation. Number Our Days portrayed the daily routines and life histories of the elderly, giving voice to a community threatened by civic neglect and encroaching gentrification.

Venice at midcentury was composed of artists, working-class minorities, and elderly retirees. Beatniks as well as painters, sculptors, and graphic designers gathered at the Gas House and then at the Venice West Café. Artists Dennis Hopper, Robert Irwin, and Ed Moses had studios in the area. In the late 1960s the Peace and Freedom Party and the newspaper Free Venice Beachhead made Venice into a site of heated political activism, particularly for the antiwar movement. But the neighborhood’s proximity to downtown, along with the possibilities of bringing some of its prime beachfront property into the fold of wealthy Santa Monica to the north and Marina del Rey to the south, informed the tenor of urban development plans. The Department of City Planning moved to condemn and raze properties deemed substandard, unsettling bohemians who resided in the canals, elderly Jews who rented near Ocean Park, and African Americans who lived in the Oakwood neighborhood.

Throughout the 1970s, absentee landowners and speculators raised rents and demolished old high-density apartment complexes to make room for luxury condos along Pacific Avenue. More middle-class Angelenos bought homes in the area, reversing the proportion of occupant-owners to renters. The Resident Homeowner Association and the Venice Canal Association sought to protect what urban historian Andrew Deener calls a “politics of quaintness,” consisting of a unified home size along with beautified waterways and sidewalks.21 Los Angeles Magazine reported in October 1974 that incomes per capita had risen 31 percent since 1968. In the same issue, writer Susan Squire outlined a walking tour from Pico to Washington Boulevard, where the “rapidly moving rehabilitation of Venice’s commercial district promises to take the best of the old, artsy-funky, free-for-all and down-and-out Venice and combine it with the best of the new money and the high tastes filtering into the area.”²² While the elderly often had to deal with crime and insensitive hecklers, displacement posed a greater danger. Reporting on the new boutiques, rising rents, and J. Allen Radford’s high-rise developments, journalist Dial Torgerson made the grim observation, “The poor shall not inherit the shoreline.”²³

At the start of Myerhoff’s research, around four thousand elderly Jews lived in the area, residing within a five-mile stretch of boardwalk (and cutting inland about a mile) around the Israel Levin Senior Adult Center. The elderly senior citizens had spent their childhoods in the shtetls of Russia, Poland, Romania, and Lithuania, and had come to East Coast or midwestern cities around the turn of the twentieth century or just before World War II to escape religious persecution. They had spent most of their adult lives in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Minneapolis, or Milwaukee, and then moved to Venice to spend their retirement years in a place that promised warm weather and cheap rents. They also appreciated the urban layout that catered to pedestrians, proximity to other Southern California Jews, and the chance to re-create aspects of their native culture.24 Number Our Days gave the elderly the ability to share their life stories, as they felt themselves heirs to a culture that had been almost completely destroyed. In the film, Myerhoff serves as narrator as well as friend, confidant, and what poet Marc Kaminsky describes as a “cultural next-of-kin” for the community.²⁵

Littman and Myerhoff opposed the ethnographic film conventions of distanced observation and authoritative voice-over. Myerhoff interacts with the elderly in front of the camera, making her encounters a central part of Number Our Days. She is not a fly-on-the-wall observer, but rather a participant in the action. She accompanies individuals and small groups on the boardwalk and converses with them about the process of maintaining traditions that connect their pasts to their contemporary lives. The Israel Levin Center exists as the social hub for the senior citizens. It houses Shabbat candle-lighting ceremonies, lectures and seminars, birthdays, music performances, High Holiday meals, and New Year’s celebrations. The film even opens in the center with people dancing to “Hava Nagila,” the traditional, upbeat Israeli folk song. The elderly enter the building as individuals, but are quickly brought together by the klezmer music being performed on the bandstand. Myerhoff, along with Littman and cameraman Neil Reichline, create a space for the viewer to share in these experiences and learn about their significance.

The senior citizens’ rituals are a means of retaining their Yiddishkeit (Yiddish folk culture). At the same time, they are strategies of resistance, ways of asserting themselves to a surrounding urban environment that ignores their very presence. Bertha faithfully pursues her routine of “feeding pigeons, walking two miles every day, and telling and retelling a cycle of personal stories, with messages about dignity and autonomy.” Talking with Myerhoff on a bench, Bertha describes the anguish of having outlived all of her children and husband, but also the companionship she feels with other center members. Shots of Bertha leading the Shabbat candle-lighting ceremony also show her as a leader of her surrogate family and a custodian of the collective memory of her people.

In another scene, Myerhoff listens to Pauline in her home as she talks about her feelings of accomplishment at having raised a family and cultivated a talent for sewing. Looking around at her prized items, Pauline mentions how her sewing machine was a means of materially providing for her family, but also a way of pursuing her hobby of making elaborate hats and dresses. She proudly talks about her ability to turn a schmatta (a common, often shabby article of clothing) into a fashionable garment, but regrets that she was unable to turn this hobby into a career.

Center director Morrie Rosen holds forth as a dynamic figure who teases, affirms, and supports the institution’s members. As Myerhoff describes it, he “fights with the outside world for their survival.” Since the early 1970s, Rosen has led the community in rent strikes and marches for affordable housing, and has remained involved in ongoing debates with business owners and government officials. Walking around the blocks surrounding the center, Rosen describes real estate developers as “profiteers” who came to Venice and are now displacing residents. He says that rising rents are forcing the senior citizens to find other accommodations in dilapidated apartments located far away.

The title Number Our Days references a psalm frequently recited at Jewish funerals. The activities of the elderly within the context of urban change signal that their days indeed seem to be “numbered,” for they are forced to confront the twin threats of death and displacement. Nonetheless, the film’s title also speaks to a deliberateness and intentionality with which the senior citizens confront each day. Their rituals are survival tactics, as they actively negotiate psychological, physical, and economic obstacles, and enjoy the community they have created for themselves. KCET’s broadcast of Number Our Days made the lives of these Venice residents visible to a large audience.26 The news media praised the documentary, but did not engage with the politics of place that had given rise to it. Los Angeles Times critic Lee Margulies described the film as a “poignant portrait of old age—the peacefulness and the loneliness, the dignity and the disregard, the pride and the pain.”²⁷ Number Our Days won the Academy Award for Best Short Subject Documentary in 1977 and continued to be broadcast on television. It was also exhibited in nontheatrical venues, including the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, as part of the “Kin and Communities: The People of America” symposium.²⁸ Members of the Israel Levin Center responded fervently to the film, relishing a kind of public recognition denied them in their daily lives. They felt like “stars” on-screen.²⁹

Number Our Days also generated much-needed funds. By 1978 the institution received $25,000 in unsolicited donations and more than a thousand letters from people around the country who were moved by the film. The money helped to pay for the upkeep of the center and to subsidize the senior citizens’ continued inhabitation of Venice. The film also attracted new members. Throughout the 1970s, membership grew by more than three hundred. Number Our Days was a catalyst for Myerhoff’s book on the community, published in 1978, as well as a series of “Life Not Death in Venice”—themed exhibitions, marches, rallies, and performances that progressed into the 1980s.

Despite the film’s acclaim, Littman found the prospects of continuing her documentary endeavors difficult. Describing a meeting with a major producer about creating a series of television programs based on Number Our Days, she recalled, “The first thing they asked was: ‘Do they have to be old?’ . . . Then I gathered that they shouldn’t be Jews. I got the idea they wanted to do ‘Number Our Days’ as a series about some young WASP surfers living in Venice.”³⁰ Looking ahead, Littman also believed that public television was fast becoming “broke” and “baroque,” encouraging its filmmakers to rely on outside grants or private funds to make socially conscious films on under-recognized groups. She worried that a “17th century approach to so much television drama” was becoming a norm.³¹ Littman left KCET to work as an executive producer for ABC before crossing over into theatrically released realist fiction.

AMERICA’S ASIAN PACIFIC PEOPLES

By the mid-1970s, Ethno-Communications ceased to exist as a formal program at UCLA, and one of its chief architects, Elyseo Taylor, had to leave when he was not awarded tenure. Still, the film department and affiliated area studies centers at UCLA endeavored to sustain minority media at the university. The Ethiopian writer and filmmaker Teshome Gabriel was one of the central lifelines for this initiative. Shortly after beginning graduate study in film at UCLA, he started teaching as a lecturer in 1974 and brought filmmakers from Africa and Latin America to campus for screenings and conferences. He went on to earn his master’s degree in 1976 and his doctorate in 1979, and he was hired as an assistant professor in 1981.

Students who started in Ethno-Communications in the late 1960s maintained their affiliation with the university throughout much of the next decade in order to use the department’s editing suites, camera equipment, and screening facilities. Visual Communications (VC) kept close ties to UCLA as well as to the city’s Asian American communities. The organization also relied on grant funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Emergency School Aid Act, the Japanese American Citizens League, and the Rosenberg Foundation. VC documentaries positioned personal experiences often not addressed in mainstream media within a sociopolitical context. The collective’s films concentrated on exclusionary immigration laws, coalition building across ethnic and racial lines, art as a performance of memory, and the struggle to maintain communal bonds over time and across geography.

Robert Nakamura’s Wataridori: Birds of Passage (1976) looks at the immigrant experiences of three Japanese Americans in Southern California. The fisherman Koshiro Miura talks about how he, along with other issei fishermen, helped pioneer the West Coast fishing industry and how they value the camaraderie of working among skilled, dedicated professionals from their home country. They had thirty ships that sailed from their headquarters in Turtle Bay. Miura shares that they were financially successful in the years leading up to World War II, but that their livelihood was destroyed when the US Navy confiscated their boats and the government began interning Japanese Americans. Sepia-toned photographs of family members as well as on-location shots from Manzanar fill in the oral history with concrete images, as Miura laments that these traumatic experiences are still with him today.

Nakamura’s father, Harukichi Nakamura, tells of how he left Oshima, Japan, with high hopes of coming to the United States, a place where, he had heard, “money was scattered like winter leaves.” Given the stringent immigration laws, he was forced to enter illegally through Mexico, and then started a one-man gardening business in Los Angeles. He recalls long hours on the job, the cumbersome commute of riding a bicycle while holding his lawn mower and rake, and the prejudice expressed by people in the neighborhoods in which he gardened: “Very often, little boys would throw stones and chant ‘Jap, Jap,’ as I rode down the street.” His voice-over plays against images of his routine mowing lawns and trimming hedges. Nonetheless, Harukichi speaks enthusiastically about how he made enough to live on and cherished his friendships with fellow Japanese gardeners. There are indeed moments of levity and solidarity. Observational scenes show the friends playing cards, telling jokes, and swapping stories. Harukichi says that they offer one another emotional and financial support. Similarly shot scenes also show Harukichi taking pleasure in his hobbies such as judo, an activity that allows him to pass down knowledge to future generations.

FIGURE 23: Still from Wataridori: Birds of Passage, 1976, 16mm; directed by Robert Nakamura. DVD, Third World Newsreel, New York, 2012.

Nakamura’s third subject, Haruno Sumi, arrived in the United States on the day of the San Francisco earthquake in 1906 and immediately moved to Los Angeles. She recounts what it was like growing up in Little Tokyo and the bustling commerce of the emerging business district. She goes on to describe the difficulties of being one of two Asian girls at Polytechnic High School. She was constantly made to feel isolated and lonely. Later, she recounts how her husband leased land in the Imperial Valley but lost everything in the 1920s cotton crash and was forced to move to a small farm in Del Mar, near San Diego. The narration is intimate, as her voice-over accompanies footage of her preparing tea in her kitchen, as well as displaying photographs of her family, Little Tokyo streets, and neighborhood institutions. The camera constantly explores the surface of the photographs, suggesting a memory coming into focus. Presently confined to her house due to bad health, Haruno finds solace in the radio, her dog, and painting. A large picnic of the Kagoshima Kenjinkai mutual aid society concludes the film, revealing a joyful intergenerational gathering. Children, teenagers, parents, and elders pass around prepared food, talk, and play games. Harukichi claims that although he has his roots in Japan, his home is here in the United States.

VC also looked to pan-Asian topics and shared working-class experiences among Third World peoples. Eddie Wong’s Pieces of a Dream (1974) examines generations of produce farmers in the Sacramento River Delta. The documentary shows that the first to locate there were the Chinese, beginning in the 1860s. Around the turn of the twentieth century, the Japanese came to farm the land. Recently, Filipinos have called the area home. Pieces of a Dream addresses both individual and collective forms of hardship faced by the immigrants: Chinese discuss the effects of the Exclusion Acts and the Alien Land Laws; Japanese recall the cell-like conditions of immigrating through Angel Island and the abuse they later suffered as farmers working under white property owners; and Filipinos talk about deteriorating infrastructure, economic competition from big agribusiness, and a depleting population. And yet, Pieces of A Dream does not simply catalogue hardships, but also depicts evolving forms of social affiliation within the domestic and commercial enclaves of the Delta region. Festivals and religious institutions are major gathering centers, and there is a pride people feel when interacting directly with the land. The documentary also devotes time to tensions within and across different Asian communities. Elders discuss how members of the younger generation leave the Delta for cities and never return. Filipinos denounce their exploitation by the Chinese and Japanese. Pieces of a Dream ultimately represents peoples’ complex relationships to a place, from feelings of protection and loyalty, to nostalgia and happiness, to animosity and heartache.

Wong’s Chinatown Two-Step (1975) offers a more contemporary look at maintaining urban social ties. The film profiles the Imperial Dragons, a drum and bugle corps that draws from primarily middle-class Chinese American youth. The camera follows the Imperial Dragons during rehearsals and competitions. It is as if the spectator can train with the ensemble rather than just watch them. Participating members and their parents talk about the history of the drum corps and praise the organization’s ability to bring Chinese families together in a fragmented metropolis; the Imperial Dragons is a way to teach their children about vernacular traditions. As many of the residents profiled in the documentary have moved out of Chinatown proper to surrounding suburban enclaves, the music brings geographically disparate groups together.

The Japanese American jazz-fusion band Hiroshima is at the center of Duane Kubo’s Cruisin’ J-Town (1975). Band members Dan Kuramoto (flute, saxophone, bandleader), Peter Hata (guitar), June Kuramoto (koto), Johnny Mori (percussion and taiko), Dave Iwataki (keyboards), and Danny Yamamoto (drums) composed much of the music for VC films. Hiroshima combined Latin, African American, and Japanese musical styles and attracted fans from these traditions. As the film opens, Hiroshima provides a rhythmic sonic backdrop for observing the street life of Little Tokyo. The music sets the tempo for walking among the vegetable markets, fruit stands, the Daimaru Hotel, and the Amerasia Bookstore. Cruisin’ J-Town then shifts between interviews with musicians and shots of their performances. Individuals talk about how learning to play the traditional Japanese instruments involved a musical maturation as well as a political and cultural awakening. June Kuramoto says that her love of her deceased grandmother’s string instrument, the koto, was met with scorn from her Anglo classmates and skepticism from some members of her own family. The latter encouraged her to assimilate by playing the piano. Nonetheless, she is pleased with how playing the koto puts her in touch with her ancestors. Dan Kuramoto states that his musical pursuits defy stereotypes of a “traditional” Japanese profession. He elaborates on music as a way to share culture with his own Asian American community as well as with a broader audience who might not know anything about the history or identity of his people. A scene of an energetic taiko performance shows three generations of Asian Americans gathered at the Senshin Buddhist Temple. Verité-style camerawork positions the viewer next to the drummers as they seem to bounce around the stage, quickly rotating between drums.

FIGURE 24: Still from Cruisin’ J-Town, 1975, 16mm; directed by Duane Kubo, with Hiroshima; produced by Visual Communications. Courtesy of Visual Communications Photographic Archive.

A scene that captures Hiroshima performing with El Teatro Campesino musical director Daniel Valdez at the Embassy Auditorium demonstrates the bridge-building power of music. Prior to the concert, members speak with Valdez about the importance of music to their respective cultures. They affirm that music is so beloved by the masses because it is so common, so nourishing, so rooted in daily life. Their onstage collaboration does more than reveal a new kind of polymorphic sound; it models the socializing power of music and the possibilities for other, political solidarities that could extend beyond the concert hall.

FIGURE 25: On-location production photograph for I Told You So, 1974, 16mm; directed by Alan Kondo with Lawson Inada; produced by Visual Communications. Courtesy of the Visual Communications Photographic Archive.

The Japanese American poet Lawson Inada is the focus of Alan Kondo’s I Told You So (1974). Inada’s impassioned reading of his verse, interviews with his friends and family, and observational sequences on the streets of his multiethnic hometown of Fresno, California, all create an understanding of how the Chicano, African American, and Japanese communities informed Inada’s upbringing and continue to enrich his career as a poet and teacher. Kondo captures Inada sharing his works in progress with fellow writers as they discuss the volume that will become the famous Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1974).32

As in the initial years of the collective, VC exhibited their films individually at elementary and high schools, Japanese American Citizens League chapters, branch libraries, East Los Angeles College, UCLA, and the Koyasan Hall in Little Tokyo.³³ VC also created special events, such as a series of screenings in May 1976 at the Theater Vanguard in West Hollywood—“Asian America: Films by Visual Communications”—which included Chinatown Two-Step, To Be Me: Tony Quon, Pieces of a Dream, Kites and Other Tales, Crusin’ J-Town, and Wataridori: Birds of Passage.³⁴ Los Angeles Times critic Linda Gross summarized each of the films and commented that they were “meticulous, and moving studies of Americans who own a dual heritage.”³⁵

VC expanded on its documentary practice of arranging text and photographs that they had begun in the early part of the decade. In addition to creating the photo-block display America’s Concentration Camps (1970), they published the anthology ROOTS: An Asian American Reader (1971). Nakamura coordinated the photographs and Eddie Wong edited the accompanying writing. The volume was broken down into three sections, “Identity,” “History,” and “Community,” and contained short essays and images from academics, activists, artists, and civic leaders. In his preface, Franklin Odo emphasized the importance of the grassroots perspective when narrating the social character of a people: “There is, however, equal emphasis on the contemporary expression of the Asian American condition by the people themselves. ROOTS is, therefore, not only a handy repository of secondary writings on the subject but a documentary collection from our time.”36

FIGURE 26: Advertisement for Asian America film screenings at the Theater Vanguard, West Hollywood, May 16 and 23, 1976. Courtesy of the Visual Communications Photographic Archive.

A selection of images drawn from VC’s vast archive of photographs on the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, and Samoan experience in the United States appear in their 1977 photo-book In Movement: A Pictorial History of Asian America. As stated in its opening, the book is “visual evidence of the trials and hardships of immigration and resettlement; racist exclusion and exploitation; the building of communities which provide for Asian minorities a measure of pride and appreciation for their own ethnicity in an unfamiliar and at times hostile environment.” In Movement places images of Japanese tuna fishermen, Korean apricot farmers, Filipino bartenders, Chinese herbalists, and Korean grocers within accounts of their coming to the United States and constructing homes, commercial establishments, and neighborhoods. In Movement foregrounds VC’s own origins along with its mission: “By gaining knowledge of our history as a community, as a people, we can participate in the determination of our own destinies.”³⁷

VC members committed themselves to local forms of direct activism, fighting back against the corporate reshaping of selective parts of the metropolis under mayor Tom Bradley. They participated in the Little Tokyo People’s Rights Organization, protesting the public-private partnerships spearheading aggressive redevelopment plans in the area. Duane Kubo galvanized residents to combat the city’s efforts to raze the long-standing network of local establishments within a small, dense, mixed-use area known as the Weller Street triangle; eviction notices had gone out to 124 individuals and families, 19 businesses, and 21 cultural organizations. Particularly sensitive was the prospective demolition of the cherished Sun Hotel, which housed retirees and community groups. VC’s film Something’s Rotten in Little Tokyo (1975–77) attacks the Kajima International Corporation’s plans to build the New Otani Hotel as well as an adjoining parking lot and upscale businesses on the Weller Street triangle. Kajima had recently built the nearby Sumitomo Bank building that loomed over Little Tokyo. The corporation, along with the Community Redevelopment Agency, imagined that the $30 million, twenty-one-story luxury hotel complex would cater to tourists and wealthy businesspeople as well as make Little Tokyo an attractive place for international capital.³⁸

In partnership with LTPRO, VC members attempted to halt evictions, preserve the existing commercial infrastructure, and persuade the government and private entities of the need for new affordable housing units. They staged sit-ins, stormed City Council sessions, and picketed construction sites. They also made films about their efforts to garner attention and support for their struggle. Furthermore, activists debated local shop owners who reasoned that revamping the area would lead to a boost in business. Ultimately, Kajima created the New Otani hotel, and many Weller Street organizations and residents were displaced. Still, VC’s involvement was instrumental in creating an organizational base for citizen participation for future developments in the area. This became particularly important for the creation of the Little Tokyo Service Center, government-subsidized affordable housing units, and eventually the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center.

SOUNDING SOUTH CENTRAL

Like the members of VC, the black filmmakers who informally comprised the L.A. Rebellion also maintained ties to UCLA as well as to their home communities. Charles Burnett continued to be interested in social documentary even as he was increasingly drawn to the creative control he could have with scripting and staging. The stylistically hybrid Third Cinema of Latin America and Africa was also a considerable influence on Burnett. In 1974 he helped organize the Third World Film Club, where students watched the films of Sergio Giral (Cuba), Pastor Vega (Cuba), Miguel Littín (Chile), Jorge Sanjinés (Bolivia), and Glauber Rocha (Brazil). The club advocated for the US government to facilitate greater cultural exchange with Cuba. In creating a political cinema that connected to their own experiences, Burnett and his circle consciously positioned their practice against Hollywood entertainment, most of which either excluded people of color from the plots, relegated them to the far corners of the frame, or portrayed them with demeaning stereotypes. However, L.A. Rebellion filmmakers did not necessarily completely reject the low-budget cycle of black studio action films that by the early 1970s had come to be known as blaxploitation. Many despised the studios’ pursuit of profit and the ways in which blaxploitation features sensationalized the social tensions that they addressed. And yet, these films provided employment opportunities for minority talent, represented working-class black experiences given scant attention in commercial cinema, and defied saccharine models of classical Hollywood storytelling.

Furthermore, in creating their own productions, UCLA-trained filmmakers critically engaged with the characters, themes, and settings of this film cycle. As cinema studies scholar Jan-Christopher Horak argues, “The L.A. Rebellion’s aesthetic strategies and ethics emerged as a direct reaction to Blaxploitation’s amplification of particular signs and symbols of African American life (e.g., the urban, the criminal), but the Rebellion films also referenced those ‘false’ images in order to work toward a more nuanced and comprehensive view of Black experience.” In his analysis of the films by Jamaa Fanaka, Horak claims that “while Fanaka mimics, parodies, subverts, and critiques Blaxploitation genre conventions and expectations more closely than any of his Rebellion compatriots, he also constructs an explicitly political text that deconstructs Blaxploitation cinema’s male chauvinist and often racist narratives.”39

Burnett worked on an eclectic mix of films during his time teaching at UCLA and reading scripts at the Westwood-based casting agency Chasin, Park & Citron. He directed, edited, produced, and wrote the short film The Horse (1973), about a black child on a deteriorating Southern farm who witnesses the killing of a cherished colt. Burnett also crewed, along with the talented Wattstax cameraman and photographer Roderick Young, on Haile Gerima’s MFA feature Bush Mama (1975). The naturalist film centers on Dorothy (Barbara O. Jones), a pregnant welfare recipient living in Watts, and her husband T.C. (Johnny Weathers), a recently returned Vietnam veteran who is imprisoned under false charges. The film depicts the oppression and radical political awakening of Dorothy as well as the torment experienced by T.C. as a result of his time in combat. Additionally, Burnett was a cinematographer for Fanaka’s Welcome Home Brother Charles (1975), about an ex-convict who wields his superpowered genitalia like a weapon as he takes revenge on the people responsible for sending him to jail. And for Jacqueline Frazier’s drama Hidden Memories (1977), about the stresses and anxieties of teen pregnancy, Burnett recorded sound.40

Burnett’s MFA project, Killer of Sheep (1977), is a subtle portrait of daily life in South Central. The film concentrates on Stan (Henry Sanders), a slaughterhouse employee, Watts resident, husband, and father of two children. Burnett shot Killer of Sheep over a series of weekends in 1971 and 1972 and began editing the film shortly thereafter. The intricate sound mix was finally completed (with music rights cleared) by 1977. A $3,000 Louis B. Mayer grant, which ended up being a little less than a third of the film’s total budget, helped finish the project.⁴¹ Killer of Sheep expanded on Burnett’s Several Friends (1969). Even though he penned a loose script and the film’s protagonist had experience as an actor, Burnett did not simply invent a fictional story. The project retained the documentary charge of his previous projects. Burnett wanted to have people in the community, friends, and even family members “re-present” actions, conversations, and encounters that were part of their daily lives. Burnett’s high school friend Charles Bracy played Stan’s companion and confidant and also recorded sound. Burnett’s own daughter, Angela, played Stan’s daughter.

Killer of Sheep engages a palette of emotions that opposes commercial film and television’s insistence on an action-driven story with morally legible personalities. Instead of pursuing an upward trajectory toward a familial triumph and a clear feeling of closure, the film unfolds as a series of small events and interactions from approximately Friday afternoon through Sunday morning. Cinema studies scholar Paula Massood notes that the film follows “a cyclical and episodic structure” rather than a streamlined flow of action.⁴² Killer of Sheep depicts Stan’s alienation from his job, his sense of strained compassion for his family, and his ambivalence toward his fellow South Central residents. Burnett would later recall that when making the film, he was thinking about “documenting” the kinds of social phenomena that occur on a routine basis. Thus, the film captures such activities as Stan Jr. and Angela occasionally bickering and playing outside; Stan working his night shift on the killing floor of the slaughterhouse; Stan and his wife attempting to conjure a feeling of intimacy while slow-dancing; and friends and neighbors drifting in and out of the house.43

FIGURE 27: Still from Killer of Sheep, 1977, 16mm; directed, written, produced, and photographed by Charles Burnett; sound by Charles Bracy. 1920 × 1080 ProRes 422 (HQ) transfer from the UCLA Film & Television Archive’s restored 35mm interpositive, courtesy of Milestone Films.

In Killer of Sheep, what is heard is as important as what is seen. Sound had of course been crucial to Burnett’s two solo projects. For example, in Several Friends, the overlapping voices and impromptu dialogue of the individuals joking with one another in the car and in their homes does not serve a strictly expository purpose; instead, it creates a soundscape of lively camaraderie. Burnett’s film The Horse makes thoughtful use of recorded music, opening and closing with composer Samuel Barber’s 1947 symphony Knoxville: Summer 1915. The mournful sounds of violins, bassoons, and clarinets establish a despondent tone for the vignette—foreshadowing the characters’ departure from the ranch and the execution of the horse—and also aurally express the child’s profound grief. The final freeze-frame image shows the child covering his ears with his hands so as not to hear the sound of the killing.

Killer of Sheep is an auditory archive of African American vernacular music: the hot jazz of Louis Armstrong, the resounding operatic singing of Paul Robeson, the rhythm and blues of Dinah Washington, the ragtime piano of Scott Joplin, and the electric blues guitar of Lowell Fulson. Burnett was surrounded by these sounds growing up in Los Angeles, a city that was a popular migratory destination for Southern blacks and a nexus for African American music. Burnett also encountered this music on family trips back to New Orleans and Vicksburg, Mississippi. In turn, audiences of Killer of Sheep are meant to be able to hear resonances and continuities between different musical styles and modes. The film signals that African American music extends to every region of the country, across every genre of popular song, and to every epoch of the recording industry. The film’s soundtrack comprises a shared African American culture that orients viewers in the present toward a rich cultural past. Thus, Killer of Sheep’s soundscape performs an important social function. As Burnett commented in a 1991 interview: “I think that it is the artist’s job to establish links with the past, to give some self-respect to the people, to create the sense of a center. I think that erosion of memory is the design of the establishment. . . . Without history you are nothing. Memory is like coming on an island, something to catch up on and hang onto.”44

The sound design also constitutes a form of commentary and a vehicle for reflection. Music adds a degree of psychological depth to the characters. For example, music expresses a feeling of frustration when Stan’s family and friends embark on what they anticipate will be a pleasant outing to Los Alamitos racetrack. Packed into a car, they head out of Watts with Louis Armstrong’s 1928 recording of “West End Blues” playing on the soundtrack (“West End” refers to a summer resort in Orleans Parish, Louisiana). The music and the motion of the car begin in sync, the ignition of the engine coinciding with Armstrong’s blistering opening fanfare. Then, the song’s slow, plodding melody corresponds to the automobile’s steady movement along the road. Soon, however, the solos by Armstrong (trumpet, vocals), Fred Robinson (trombone), and Jimmy Strong (clarinet) begin to express varying degrees of irritation and sorrow. The car gets a flat tire and the group is forced to give up the outing and return home. At the moment the car circles around and begins to ride back on the rim, the song comes to a melancholic close. Here, the thwarted road trip is explicitly symbolic of working-class African Americans being denied access to the California dream of leisure and mobility so often pictured in the postwar age as an automobile gliding along a wide-open freeway.

Music registers the emotions of the characters. In the way that jazz and the blues have historically offered cathartic expression for African American grief without necessarily ensuring simple resolve, the group’s misery is articulated through the “West End Blues.” An upset Bracy looks at the flat tire and contributes an additional solo to the song:

Shit, man, I told you to have a spare tire

got me coming out here to the middle of nowhere

I got to get me to this race out in Los Alamitos,

look here in the ninth race I got me a stag man that I know is going to come in

I got me some money man, and you ain’t got no spare?

look, look, look, awwwwwww shit

I’m out here singing the blues, got my money on a horse that can’t lose

and now we’re out here with a flat, I always told you to keep a spare, but you were a square that’s why you can’t keep no spare, now how we gonna get there, huh?

Bracy’s rap is a means of coping with disappointment through creative expression. He appears annoyed but also empowered in the moment of the performance. On another level, the presence of the song in the film reflects on Burnett’s own self-conception. Armstrong’s virtuoso performance of “West End Blues” was the piece that announced to the world his arrival as a young trumpeter who could play with discipline and skill with his Hot Five ensemble and also stand out as an unparalleled soloist. So too does Burnett’s Killer of Sheep constitute his own proclamation of his affiliation with the L.A. Rebellion and his ambitions as an independent artist.45 Armstrong’s journey from the South to some of the country’s major media centers, where he found both a stage and a loudspeaker for his talent, is also Burnett’s journey.

The struggle for socioeconomic mobility and the challenges set by failing technology are taken up in other parts of the film. In one scene Stan and Eugene purchase a motor and laboriously haul the cumbersome hunk of metal down multiple flights of stairs to the back of their pickup truck. As soon as the car lurches forward, the motor tumbles to the ground, suffering irreparable damage. After they spent so much energy to move the motor, the scene ends with a feeling of stalled motion and suspended time, which in turn relates to Stan’s broader frustrations with trying to get ahead.

Another example spotlights children playing in a rubble-filled enclosure, which appears to be the former site of several businesses, a factory, and some homes. Within the dirt and debris-filled enclosure children stack logs, throw stones against the side of a stucco building, climb and jump over an expansive wall, and spin a toy top on the ground. An extreme close-up of a child pounding a concrete cinder block with a wrench gives rise to the booming voice of Paul Robeson singing his 1947 cover of “The House I Live In”: “What is America to me? / a name, a map or a flag I see / a certain word, democracy / What is America to me? / the house I live in / a plot of earth, a street / the grocer and the butcher / and the people that I meet / the children in the playground / the faces that I see / all races and religions, that’s America to me.” Originally written by Abel Meeropol and Earl Robinson in 1942, “The House I Live In” bridged Popular Front and civil rights movements. It was widely sung at May Day rallies and made famous in the short Mervyn LeRoy, Albert Maltz, and Frank Ross film The House I Live In (1945), featuring Frank Sinatra. In Killer of Sheep the song appears ironic. The disjuncture between the lyrics and the images on-screen suggests that the promise of an egalitarian America has not been realized. The “plot of earth,” “street,” “playground,” “house,” and commercial institutions that make up “America” exist in tension with the crippled economy of broken engines, railroad cars rusting in place, and dilapidated buildings.

FIGURE 28: Still from Killer of Sheep, 1977, 16mm; directed, written, produced, and photographed by Charles Burnett; sound by Charles Bracy. 1920 × 1080 ProRes 422 (HQ) transfer from the UCLA Film & Television Archive’s restored 35mm interpositive, courtesy of Milestone Films.

Burnett wrote in his essay “Inner City Blues,” “I think that it is the little personal things that begin to give a hint of the larger picture.”46 The enclosure in Killer of Sheep is indeed revealing of the post–Watts Uprising, postindustrial environment of Watts. By the mid- to late 1960s, manufacturing jobs were vacating the central city at an accelerating rate, leaving mainly nonunion, low-paying service and garment industry work. The Chrysler plant closed in 1971, followed by B.F. Goodrich in 1975, Uniroyal in 1978, and US Steel in 1979. Mayor Tom Bradley expanded white-collar opportunities for minorities in the city’s public-sector professions, but blue-collar jobs in the central city region shrank considerably. And the westward move of aspiring middle-class black families to Leimert Park, Baldwin Hills, and the West Adams district contributed to the widening socio-spatial gap separating black Angelenos. Urban theorist Edward Soja notes that by 1980, South Central lost forty thousand people and the median family income dropped to $5,900, which was $2,500 below the median for African Americans in the city overall.⁴⁷ Killer of Sheep’s depiction of the rubble-filled enclosure speaks not only to the situation in Los Angeles, but also to a larger conflict between the lofty beliefs surrounding American narratives of economic mobility and the reality faced by working-class and working-poor minority communities across the country. A decimated mass transit system, inadequate job training, industrial relocation, and underfunded schools hurt the infrastructure of South Central. With the onset of a new decade, the reduction of public funds for community programs, resistance to school busing, pushback against taxes, and an influx of drugs compounded the sense of social fracture in the city.48

The scene that immediately follows the children in the enclosure features Stan in the slaughterhouse. The juxtaposition easily lends itself to a metaphorical reading that would imply a grim future for the children (seen as sheep being led to the slaughter, and the older generation of South Central having a hand in the process). Nevertheless, the outdoor scene in the enclosure and the film more generally precludes an interpretation as bleak as that. The children are determined to amuse themselves in a place certainly not intended for this purpose, infusing a feeling of spontaneity and even joy into the experience of the location. They refashion the debris into a playground, refusing to let the weight of the rubble still or silence their imaginations. There is a bricolage-like aesthetic to what they create. The scene itself is aflutter with activity, as all the individuals are in motion, climbing, jumping, throwing, and spinning. They demonstrate the creativity and courage of a community that, as the 1970s progressed into the 1980s, was increasingly ignored by the mainstream media and the civic leaders of the city.

The same year that Burnett finished Killer of Sheep, Wolper Productions completed Roots (1977). The eight-part docudrama tells the multigenerational slave narrative of the West African villager Kunta Kinte. The series concludes with Kinte’s descendants moving from North Carolina to a newly purchased plot of land in Henning, Tennessee. Roots and Killer of Sheep each focus on the socioeconomic struggles of a black family. However, a gulf separates the two films in their representational approach and reception. Their coexistence speaks to the contentious nature of the historical moment, highlighting the distinct possibilities and severe limitations of minority inclusion. While Roots enjoyed the largest television audience to date in the history of the medium, Killer of Sheep was at first rarely seen. It was only exhibited at UCLA and then circulated among a limited number of college campuses, churches, and museums.

Roots’s docudramatic form conjoined Hollywood period fiction with the truth claims of documentary. The result was a narrative that was swift and sweeping, presenting a strong, character-driven, uplifting story. The miniseries signaled that society was advancing in a progressive direction, toward a more racially integrated polity and increased economic opportunities. The creators of Roots took special care in the scripting, casting, and advertising of the project to ensure that a vast cross-section of Americans could identify with the experiences of the characters on-screen. As long as minority lives were packaged for commercial screens as stories of triumph that affirmed American myths of upward mobility, they could be tolerated and even embraced.

By contrast, Killer of Sheep constituted a slower, more patient, artisanal cinema, a cinema of detailed looking and listening to everyday rituals and routines. Crafted in a way that resists the tempo, style, and plot arcs of popular cinema, Killer of Sheep’s social landscape registers the hardships and pains, both economic and psychological, of life in South Central. But this is not all the film captures. Stan’s family and others in the neighborhood appear resilient, determined to confront life’s challenges with dignity and resolve. Killer of Sheep asserts their humanity as well as protests Hollywood’s skewed representation of minority lives and the changing political direction of the metropolis. Burnett’s empathetic portrait constituted a new grammar for depicting marginalized communities whose relationship to one another, the city of Los Angeles, and the nation was deeper and more complex than most Americans were ready or willing to realize.