In 1977, a fresh graduate filmmaker from UCLA shoots a film in the Watts ghetto in Los Angeles, where a large community of people of color is residing. The film is rarely screened – it’s a so-called „student film”, made for graduation purposes – and it takes a couple of years until it is actually seen. But once one finally sees it properly, the film becomes an undebatable classic of black cinema, endlessly cited for its deep and oftentimes poetic observations about a world that is mostly invisible, for the legitimate feeling of rage that is palpable between any two shots of the film. „A portrait of a family and of the neighborhood that it lives in became a chronicle about the resistance and heroism of African-Americans”, writes Thom Andersen in his magnificent essay-film, Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), in which he playfully magnifies representations of L.A. in cinema that are all but flattering. Uncoincidentally, after having put most of the visual output of the city’s representations through sword and fire, Andersen's documentary ends on a segment that is dedicated to the L.A. Rebellion movement, as a positive counterexample of sorts, in which the notion of respecting a city’s intimate geography is conjugated with a more transgressive way of practicing cinema.

Victor Morozov

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Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. He studied film theory in Grenoble, Paris, Dublin.

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