alternative production scenarios. For example, a number of filmmakers of
African descent were affiliated with UCLA. The group of students, known
as the L.A. School of Filmmakers, or the “L.A. Rebellion,” included Charles
Burnett, Haile Gerima, Billy Woodbury, Alile Sharon Larkin, and Larry
Clark. The L.A. School comprised a highly politicized group interested in
breaking with Hollywood narrative and stylistic conventions in order to
provide alternatives to blaxploitation and other distortions of Black stories
and subject matter. Rather than replicating Hollywood’s emphasis on clas-
sical realism, this group formulated a self-conscious, revolutionary cinema,
one that would be “a film form unique to their historical situation and cul-
tural experience, a form that could not be appropriated by Hollywood”
(Masilela 108). Greased Lighting and A Piece of the Action, both comedies, were
the only films with Black subject matter released by Hollywood this year.
The same year the highly acclaimed TV miniseries “Roots” aired over eight
nights in early January. But even with the subsequent peak in interest in
Black history inspired by the latter, Hollywood’s treatment of African
Americans did not expand beyond action films, comedies, or plantation dra-
mas. The L.A. School filmmakers wanted to make something new.
Inspired by diverse political, industrial, and artistic influences, the film-
makers were familiar with national and international film movements and
drew inspiration from a cross-section of film forms and styles; they moved
away from Hollywood conventions and looked instead to Latin American and
African film, Soviet Cinema, Italian Neorealism, the French New Wave,
and contemporary documentary filmmaking practices such as cinema verité
and direct cinema. These various influences were “examples of an artisanal,
relatively low-cost cinema working with a mixture of public and private
funds, enabling directors to work in a different way and on a different eco-
nomic scale from that required by Hollywood and its various national-
industrial rivals,” and they suggested the direction that many filmmakers
chose: low budget, socially active filmmaking with unconventional style
and story (Willeman 5). Burnett and Gerima, for example, wanted to cre-
ate films that spoke to their historical moment and industrial context, and
many of their films “are examples of situation-specific African-American
filmmaking: works that are simultaneously positioned on the geographic
and industrial margins of Hollywood and which self-consciously reject [its]
concerns and conceits” (Massood 23–24). Significantly, these filmmakers
purposely rejected Hollywood because its insistence on fantasy did not pro-
vide a model of socially committed filmmaking.
Burnett’s Killer of Sheep is a representative example of an L.A. School
film. It narrates the experiences of a working-class African American man in
1977 — MOVIES AND A NATION IN TRANSFORMATION 201