Synopses & Reviews
"Isoardi has done a wonderful job collecting oral histories and integrating them into an engaging, sophisticated, and highly readable book. He provides great insight into the artistic goals, political aspirations, internal conflicts, and social terrain that shaped the experiences of the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra. He shows us quite clearly that jazz musicians continued to work within and gain sustenance from working class black communities long after the moment when some observers deemed the music irrelevant to them."and#151;Eric Porter, author of
What Is This Thing Called Jazz?"In these pages, Horace Tapscott says to the audience, 'This is one more you wrote through us.' And this is what Steve Isoardi has done here: given voice to the nearly lost history of a revolutionary community movement through its key players. Epic in scope, dazzling in detail and sensual as any Coltrane solo, this rare bookand#151;informative, intimate, lyrical, scholarly, nuanced, and essentialand#151;reads like no history book you've read before."and#151;Chris Abani, author of GraceLand and Becoming Abigail
"The Dark Tree is just wonderful. One cannot understand the history of black arts on the West Coast without a thorough assessment of this movement; Isoardi knows this history so well, and tells a much bigger story. The book does a fantastic job of capturing the nitty gritty nature of the music scene, and of resurrecting local figures in the Arkestra who have never gotten any press for their astounding musicianship. This is a remarkable book."and#151;Robin Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
"This is a revelatory document, virtuosically combining scholarship and oral history to connect the dots of African American music on the west coast. Far more than a mere historical 'overdub' of an underdocumented scene, this book disrupts the mythic notions of jazz history, showing instead how music and community unfold as one. Both a celebratory and a cautionary tale, it also delivers some of the most frank and eye-opening musicians' accounts since Arthur Taylor's Notes and Tones."and#151;Vijay Iyer, musician/composer, New York City
Review
and#8220;Dubbed Radical Light, the history of local art film oddities ends up touching on pretty much every important social movement and technical innovation from the 1880s to the 1990s.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;A voluminous book that distills everything youand#8217;d ever want to know about this genre, culled from 10 years of research. Consider this your avant-garde education, not to mention your duty as a resident of a bohemian city.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;In Radical Light, San Franciscoand#8217;s deep countercultural roots reemerge as an unbroken antitradition stretching from the postwar proto-Beats to the identitarian activists and small-gauge geeks at centuryand#8217;s end.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;[A] freewheeling samplerand#8221;
Review
and#8220;At just over 300 pages, captures an extraordinary history, with contributions by dozens of filmmakers, historians, critics and curators.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;This wealth of material, much of it long forgotten or ignored, will be catnip to historians, practitioners, and programmers alike, providing fodder for reexaminingand#8212;and inspiration for makingand#8212;movies that matter.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;It is hard to imagine a book like this emerging from another source or another city, touching on the lives and accomplishments of so many of our greatest artist. . . You can acknowledge the gaps in your own understanding of film history and find remedy with this book.and#8221;
Synopsis
The rise of cinema as the predominant American entertainment around the turn of the last century coincided with the migration of hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the South to the urban "land of hope" in the North. This richly illustrated book, discussing many early films and illuminating black urban life in this period, is the first detailed look at the numerous early relationships between African Americans and cinema. It investigates African American migrations onto the screen, into the audience, and behind the camera, showing that African American urban populations and cinema shaped each other in powerful ways.
Focusing on Black film culture in Chicago during the silent era, Migrating to the Movies begins with the earliest cinematic representations of African Americans and concludes with the silent films of Oscar Micheaux and other early "race films" made for Black audiences, discussing some of the extraordinary ways in which African Americans staked their claim in cinema's development as an art and a cultural institution.
Synopsis
"With this book, Stewart establishes herself as the authority on early Black cinema. The historiography is meticulous, original and compelling. Stewart puts theory and history into productive conversation. An extremely important work."and#151;Linda Williams, author of
Playing the Race Card"As a child in West Virginia, I loved the movies, but I had little idea that my people's history was being constructed (and deconstructed) as I watched them. Jacqueline Najuma Stewart's bold new book lets us see how black history was, in part, made at the movies. The history of the Great Migration has rarely been so vivid or compelling."and#151;Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author of America Behind the Color Line: Dialogues with African Americans
"Jacqueline Stewart's Migrating to the Movies finally brings the unmistakable sparkle of brilliance to the field of racial constructions in early cinema. Part of Stewart's magic in this book is her substantial gift for critical insight, while the other part of this inimitable brew is her uncanny grasp of this particular topic. As an avid student of silent film for the past decade, I've been patiently waiting for a work that would juggle the obvious sociological weight of the raw material while also grappling with the technological and aesthetic complexities at stake. Migrating to the Movies is the first book to achieve this, and it is an indispensable volume on racial constructions of vision and the scopic gaze in the early twentieth century."and#151;Michele Wallace, author of Dark Designs and Visual Culture
Synopsis
This kaleidoscopic collection of essays, interviews, photographs, and artist-designed pages chronicles the vibrant and influential history of experimental cinema in the San Francisco Bay Area. Encompassing historical, cultural, and aesthetic realms,
Radical Light features critical analyses of films and videos, reminiscences from artists, and interviews with pioneering filmmakers, curators, and archivists. It explores artistic movements, film and video exhibition and distribution, artists' groups, and Bay Area film schools. Special sections of ephemeraand#151;posters, correspondence, photographs, newsletters, program notes, and moreand#151;punctuate the pages of
Radical Light, giving a first-hand visual sense of the period. This groundbreaking, hybrid assemblage reveals a complex picture of how and why the San Francisco Bay Region, a laboratory for artistic and technical innovation for more than half a century, has become a global center of vanguard film, video, and new media.
Among the contributors are Rebecca Solnit and Ernie Gehr on Bay Area cinema's roots in the work of Eadweard Muybridge and others; Scott MacDonald on Art in Cinema; P. Adams Sitney on films by James Broughton and Sidney Peterson; Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner, Lawrence Jordan, and Yvonne Rainer on the Bay Area film scene in the 1950s; J. Hobeman on films by Christopher Maclaine, Bruce Conner, and Robert Nelson; Craig Baldwin on found footage film; George Kuchar on student-produced melodramas; Michael Wallin on queer film in the 1970s; V. Vale on punk cinema; Dale Hoyt and Cecilia Dougherty on video in the 1980s and 1990s; and Maggie Morse on new media as sculpture.
Copub: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Synopsis
"A superb collection, as exciting, in many ways, as the works it chronicles."and#151;Akira Mizuta Lippit, author of Atomic Light (Shadow Optics)
Synopsis
L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema is the first book dedicated to the films and filmmakers of the L.A. Rebellion, a group of African and African American independent film and video artists that formed at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the 1970s and 1980s. The groupand#151;including Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, Haile Gerima, Billy Woodberry, Jamaa Fanaka, and Zeinabu irene Davisand#151;shared a desire to create alternatives to the dominant modes of narrative, style, and practice in American cinema, works that reflected the full complexity of Black experiences. This landmark collection of essays and oral histories examines the creative output of the L.A. Rebellion, contextualizing the group's film practices and offering sustained analyses of the wide range of works, with particular attention to newly discovered films and lesser-known filmmakers. Based on extensive archival work and preservation, this collection includes a complete filmography of the movement, over 100 illustrations (most of which are previously unpublished), and a bibliography of primary and secondary materials. This is an indispensible sourcebook for scholars and enthusiasts, establishing the key role played by the L.A. Rebellion within the histories of cinema, Black visual culture, and postwar art in Los Angeles.
Synopsis
While he was still in his twenties, Horace Tapscott gave up a successful career in Lionel Hamptonand#8217;s band and returned to his home in Los Angeles to found the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, a community arts group that focused on providing affordable, community-oriented jazz and jazz training. Over the course of almost forty years, the Arkestra, together with the related Union of Godand#8217;s Musicians and Artists Ascension (UGMAA) Foundation, were at the forefront of the vital community-based arts movements in black Los Angeles. Some three hundred artistsand#151;musicians, vocalists, poets, playwrights, painters, sculptors, and graphic artistsand#151;passed through these organizations, many ultimately remaining within the community and others moving on to achieve international fame. Based primarily on one hundred in-depth interviews with current and former participants, The Dark Tree is the first history of the important and largely overlooked community arts movement of African American Los Angeles. Brought to life by the passionate voices of the men and women who worked to make the arts integral to everyday community life, this engrossing book completes the account began in the highly acclaimed Central Avenue Sounds, which documented the secular music history of the first half of the twentieth century and which the San Francisco Examiner called and#147;one of the best jazz books ever compiled.and#8221;
Synopsis
Los Angeles has nourished a dazzling array of independent cinemas: avant-garde and art cinema, ethnic and industrial films, pornography, documentaries, and many other far-flung corners of film culture. This glorious panoramic history of film production outside the commercial studio system reconfigures Los Angeles, rather than New York, as the true center of avant-garde cinema in the United States. As he brilliantly delineates the cultural perimeter of the film business from the earliest days of cinema to the contemporary scene, David James argues that avant-garde and minority filmmaking in Los Angeles has in fact been
the prototypical attempt to create emancipatory and progressive culture.
Drawing from urban history and geography, local news reporting, and a wide range of film criticism, James gives astute analyzes of scores of filmsand#151;many of which are to found only in archives. He also looks at some of the most innovative moments in Hollywood, revealing the full extent of the cross-fertilization the occurred between the studio system and films created outside it. Throughout, he demonstrates that Los Angeles has been in the aesthetic and social vanguard in all cinematic periodsand#151;from the Socialist cinemas of the early teens and 1930s; to the personal cinemas of psychic self-investigation in the 1940s; to attempts in the 1960s to revitalize the industry with the countercultureand#8217;s utopian visions; and to the 1970s, when African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, women, gays, and lesbians worked to create cinemas of their own. James takes us up to the 1990s and beyond to explore new forms of art cinema that are now transforming the representation of Southern Californiaand#8217;s geography.
Synopsis
" The Most Typical Avant-Garde transforms our sense of the history and geography of American independent cinema, by demonstrating the many and varied contributions of filmmakers who have worked in and around LA. James's range and thoroughness are astonishing. Indeed, those who have worked at chronicling independent cinema will be disappointed with only one thing: the fact that we didn't write this remarkable book!"and#151;Scott MacDonald, author of the Critical Cinema Series
About the Author
Allyson Nadia Field is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies and African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She also serves on the faculty of the Moving Image Archive Studies program and the Faculty Advisory Committee of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. She is author of
Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity.
Jan-Christopher Horak is Director of the UCLA Film and Television Archive. In addition to his long career in film archiving and curating, he is a professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. His most recent book is Saul Bass: Anatomy of Film Design.
Jacqueline Najuma Stewart is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago and author of Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity. She directs the South Side Home Movie Project and serves on the National Film Preservation Board. She is currently completing a book on the career of the African American actor, writer, and director Spencer Williams.
Table of Contents
CD Playlist
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. Ancestral Echoes: Roots of the African American Community Artist
2. Ballad for Samuel: The Legacy of Central Avenue and the 1950s Avant-Garde in Los Angeles
3. Linoand#8217;s Pad: African American Los Angeles and the Formation of the Underground Musicians Association
4. The Giant Is Awakened: The Watts Uprising and Cultural Resurgence
5. Warriors All: UGMA in the Middle of It
6. The Mothership: From UGMA to the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra and UGMAA
7. To the Great House: The Arkestra in the 1970s
8. Thoughts of Dar Es Salaam: The Institutionalization of UGMAA
9. At the Crossroads: The Ark and UGMAA in the 1980s
10. The Heroand#8217;s Last Dance: The and#8217;90s Resurgence
11. Aiee! The Phantom: Horace Tapscott
12. The Black Apostles: The Arkestra/UGMAA Ethos and Aesthetic
Appendix. A View from the Bottom: The Music of Horace Tapscott and the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra
Roberto Miranda
Notes
Bibliography
Index