“Hour Glass” (1971), Haile Gerima’s first project at UCLA, draws on the lyrics and words of speeches and song. The glimpses of images explore ancestry and identity through collage. Caldwell edited images in rapid succession for his first project, “Medea” (1973), which depicts the information and history that is passed onto a child before its birth. Most were crafted early in the careers of both generations of filmmakers and, in some cases, they were the filmmakers’ first projects.
The experimental nature of the works exists beyond just the risks in style. Installation view of “Medea” (1973) by Ben Caldwell in Time is Running Out of Time (photo by Joshua White) The films and video art in this exhibition - all formal experiments in the medium - center women’s narratives, Black consciousness, and the complexity and diversity of the Black experience. While 47 years exist between the date of the oldest film in the exhibition and the most recent, the pieces made by the younger generation of artists critically work through many of the same subjects decades later. Time is Running Out of Time: Experimental Film and Video from the LA Rebellion and Today brings together the works of the LA Rebellion filmmakers and the early film and video works of younger generations of Black artists, filmmakers, storytellers, and scholars working in Los Angeles. This class of students, and those who followed, until the program ended in 1982, became known as the LA Rebellion. In the face of racism on campus, the students joined together in a tight cohort, learning and collaborating with one another. They arrived on campus in the aftermath of the 1965 Watts Uprising and the shooting at a Black Student Union meeting in 1969, which left two UCLA students and Black Panther leaders dead. The students began their term at the tail end of the Civil Rights Movement, and some, like filmmaker and storyteller Ben Caldwell, after they had returned from fighting in the Vietnam War. LOS ANGELES - The first wave of Black students who entered the ethno-communication program at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television did so at a particularly politically charged time in Los Angeles and the nation as a whole. Installation view of Time is Running Out of Time: Experimental Film and Video from the LA Rebellion and Today at Art + Practice, Los Angeles (photo by Joshua White)