Urban Guerrilla Planning in the United States: As Above, So Below (1973)

Larry Clark's second feature, Passing Through, is one of the most acclaimed of the films to emerge from the 'LA Rebellion' moment connected to the UCLA Film Programme in the 1970s, though, like many of these films, it's still extremely hard to track down. Currently available on YouTube, however, is his first film, As Above, So Below. Produced by pioneering arts administrator Vantile Whitfield's Performing Arts Society of Los Angeles (PASLA), an organisation founded in 1964 to help train inner city-youth in the arts, the film is a product of local organisations, interdisciplinary in their reach and collaborative in their ethos. Jazz will be utterly central to Passing Through, and in some ways, the forms of improvised cooperation within the sphere of improvisational music serve as one model here, and the film is saturated with the often improvised music of Horace Tapscott's group (recall, after all, that Larry Clark was nephew of jazz pianist Sonny Clark, and that, the previous year, he'd served as Director of Photographer on Mel Stewart's outstanding Wattstax). Around an hour in length, the film's credit sequences depicts a lone gunman on what look like military manouevres in a snow-covered forest. The film goes on to depict the recruitment of this gunman, Jita-Hadi (Nathaniel Taylor, who also stars in Passing Through) an ex-Marine, who's participated in US imperial meddling in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Vietnam, by an urban guerrilla group: a network of militants who operate in small groups yet who now constitute a linked, nationwide uprising. It's never quite clear in what precisely their activities consist: the activities of the militants are rendered as a series of training exercises rather than in detail (an encounter with murderous armed police at the end of the film might be read as its 'climax', though the film's narrative logic refuses anything like a three-act structure). But detailed plot isn't the point--it's the idea of armed resistance, and the dedication, quiet determination and efficiency necessary to accompany this that are at stake. The depiction of militancy echoes Ivan Dixon/Sam Greenlee's The Spook Who Sat By The Door, which had been quietly buried by its Hollywood distributors earlier that decade (the two films were screened together at UCLA), and Jules Dassin's Uptight, but the film is, in general, looser, rougher and less linear in its texture, as befits Clark's role in the LA Rebellion and the influence of Third Cinema. While most of the film depicts recognisable locations and interactions in a broadly realist fashion, surrealism is a factor, as in the sudden appearance of Jazz Age dancers outside a contemporary cafe in an incongruous fantasy sequence that insistently reminds us of its nature as mediated fantasy, or a lengthy shot, early in the film, of a blank grey sky accompanied by the sounds of machine gun fire and police sirens.

















Sound is also key: much of the film is set to the ubiquitous sounds of the Horace Tapscott group, driving scenes with rhythmic propulsion or offsetting them with bursts of free improvisation (with the great Arthur Blythe's alto very much in the mix). And much of the information, texture and atmosphere of the film comes from the equally ubiquitous radio transmissions that play as both diegetic and non-diegetic texture. The soundtrack is not as wildly multi-layered as fellow LA Rebellion director Haile Gerima's soundtrack to Bush Mama (Gerima appears in a cameo here), in whose opening sequences a barrage of sound, from jazz to the sounds of police helicopters to non-synchronous conversation to an audio collage of the questions of invasive welfare office workers, is poised between the psychological and the 'realist', suggesting a traumatic breakdown between inner and outer that aims at sensory overload, not to overwhelm through spectacle, but as a dialectical quality of form that encourages active spectatorship and aids thought. Clark's use of radios in As Above instead imparts a kind of documentary quality, an argument or thesis absorbed as part of the sonic texture of everyday life--in itself a political argument about the respective stakes of mass media and revolutionary counter-transmissions, perhaps inspired by radio in Vietnam (Radio Hanoi and 'Hanoi Hannah') or Cuba (where the exiled militant Robert F. Williams broadcast Radio Free Dixie). Sound makes historical connections without having to put clunky speeches in the mouths of characters: thus, out first glimpse of the film's hero is as a young boy in 1945, as the radio announces the release of Japanese Americans from detention camps, a still too little-known aspect of US history and one that's echoed later in the film as the radio announces similar measures for African Americans, along with curfews and psychiatric torture/'therapy', reminiscent of the racialised brutality of the mental health apparatus made infamous by One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest). (The radio reports draw on HUAC reports on Black militancy from the late 1960s--ironically enough, Clark recalls that one of his professors at UCLA wanted to report him to HUAC on the basis of this film, never mind that HUAC had by then disbanded.)




Mid-way through the film, dialogue and narrative scenes are intercut with a lengthy sequence in a church prayer meeting; reminiscent of a similar sermon that occurs at the end of Bill Gunn's Ganja and Hess and of the more dream-like church sequence intercut in Gerima's Bush Mama. Most obviously, the sequence reinforces the film's critique of the Black Church as mental opioid: one of the most eager participants is Kim (Gail Peters), the owner of the cafe whose endorsements of her Saviour, combined with the rambling secular odes of the customer who praises 'the white man', form a chorus of reaction, seen as two sides of the same coin; and there's a satirical dig as a church elder asks for donations, from one to one hundred dollars--no entry to the church without a wallet. At the same time, the visceral power of the sequence and its non-alignment with the main narrative renders it with a 'documentary' energy that leaps beyond the bounds of plot. In that sense, one might be reminded of Glauber Rocha's first feature, Barravento, in which the depiction of cadomble practices, religious ritual and social rituals of song and dance achieves an audiovisual immediacy existing in unresolvable tension with the didactic, anti-mystical speeches that condemn such practices as tools of backwardness and fatalism. (See Robert Stam's nuanced reading of Rocha's film here.) The placement of these sequences in Clark's film is somewhere between didactic formal argument and an aesthetic quality that doesn't so much contradict the film's unflinching advocacy of militancy as place them in dialectical tension. Here, as throughout, the film crackles with a desire to expose, highlight and further social contradiction as part of a process of revolutionary change.
 

And this dialectical quality is present, too, in the apparently incongruous occultist/Hermetic reference in the film's title (later appropriated for a truly diabolical horror film set in the Paris catacombs). This is a film of doubles--many of the characters we initially encounter turn out to be secret members of the armed cell, an Ellisonian disguise by which a perpetually-coughing junkie is actually a militant leader, something that reads as actuality in the film's plot, but that the film also suggests is a potentiality outside the film's universe. This is most apparent as a key scene replays in a kind of coda after--but really serving as--the 'completion' of the film's principal narrative strand. Early in the film, Jita-Hadi enters the cafe where he will meet Bee (Lyvonne Walder) who, unbeknownst to him, is one of the leaders of the guerrilla cell: their subsequent intimate encounter is one of the final stages, or tests, in his recruitment into the group. When they meet, she describes their encounter in terms of deja-vu, the uncanny feeling that what's happening in the moment is the replaying of a previous encounter. At the time, it's just a chat-up line, complete with talk about dreams coming true (or, in terms that sound closer to psychoanalysis, travelling to the farthest recesses of one's dreams). But sure enough, Jita-Hadi's entry into the cafe is repeated at the end of the film. At the film's climax, the customer in the cafe earlier seen praising 'the white man' seeks to inform on the armed cell, for which he's shot by cops, who in turn are shot by Kim (Gail Peters), the proselytising Christian owner of the cafe who turns out to be another  of the militants. As we cut from Tapscott's eerie inside-piano work to the entry of the full band in affirmative unison melody, the film cuts back to an earlier shot of Jit-Hadi driving a car and to his entry into the cafe. Passing the resurrected neighbour on his way in, over the soundtrack, we hear Bee's words of the initial encounter replayed over the soundtrack: "Hey brother, do you believe in foreknowledge? You know, deja-vu--it's like a birth to a new life, and you go on and on to other, still higher planes of life..." Thence the film cuts to the scene with which it began, the lone militant on manouevres in a snow-covered forest; except this time, we see him joined in conversation with a comrade, before the fade to black. What initially were a set of social encounters characterised by alienation or isolation--the lone militant, the reactionary conversations in the cafe, the wary glances of strangers--are now revealed to be potential nodes of solidarity. There are a number of ways we can red this: the revolutionary potentiality by which dreams coming true--travelling the furthest recesses of the dream--does not mean the dreams of the Church service, of the attainment of luxury goods, of the goodness of the 'white man', or what Henry Threadgill sardonically calls 'refined poverty', but the dream of a transformed society. The film does not, then, reveal a mystical secret, though there may be parallels between the underground guerrilla cell and the mystical or religious cult, a revealed knowledge into which one must be initiated for purposes of evading religious authority or state power, but the possibility of self-emancipation by any means necessary.

"It has become that time of evening": The Horse (1973, dir. Charles Burnett)

Burnett made this short in California on a break from shooting Killer of Sheep, using some of the grant money for his much better-known feature. The conception is simplicity in itself. Based on a Faulknerian short story he’d written—he’d early on dreamed of adapting Faulkner—the film presents a group of white men waiting outside a derelict shack in the midst of vast farmland. An African American pre-teen stands apart from the group in the field, gently attending to a horse. We learn that he’s the son of Ray, the man the group have hired to shoot the horse; Ray eventually turns up as the sun has almost set, reuniting with his son and taking the gun which one of the men loads with a single bullet. The death happens off screen in a final freeze frame on the boy’s anguished covering of his ears as Burnett’s jump cut makes the screen literally leap with the sound of the shot.

In contrast to the busy soundscape of Burnett’s first film, Several Friends (1969), The Horse is sparse on dialogue and action, concentrating instead on the sounds emerging from its distinctive landscape. Ray is played by Burnett’s fellow LA Rebellion director Larry Clark, himself later to direct a film about Black cowboys, and Burnett’s film in its iconography and setting clearly gestures at the Western, perhaps most obviously the opening sequence to Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West (1968), at once enshrining and undermining Hollywood's the romanticised nationalism of frontier mythos. Leone’s nod to Ford occurred most obviously in his use of Monument Valley; but whereas Leone lets Claudia Cardinale ride across its distinctive, open rocky landscape on her journey across the new frontier, the landscape of Burnett's film is at once lusher and more constricted. The opening shots establish a vast, green open space, dwarfing its inhabitants; yet, set it as it is in a valley surrounded by steep hills, we almost never see the sweeping horizon that characterises the classic Fordian model. The trio of gunfighters in Leone’s opening sequence includes Woody Strode, one of the few African American actors permitted access to John Ford’s west which is Leone’s point of homage and critique: Strode riding across Monument Valley in Sergeant Rutledge (1960) serving as a kind of apologia for the racism of Ford’s earlier films emblematised in his 1964 Cheyenne Autumn. Despite their virtual invisibility on screen, Black cowboys were the inspiration for a number of staples of the genre: African American lawman Bass Reeves was the inspiration for The Lone Ranger, while the plot of The Searchers (1956) was likewise based on an incident involving a Black cowboy, transformed in Ford’s film into John Wayne as racist killer, motivated by an ideology of family loyalty, national expansion, and race purity. But, as this transformation of source material indicates, the Western in general has performed a long history on exclusion of the Black cowboys who in fact constituted a significant part of the Frontier workforce. Burnett’s film—though not a western per se—thus acts as corrective while simultaneously tapping into the genre’s dynamics of masculine violence and the racialised invasion or defense of land. As in the slaughterhouse scenes that dominate Killer of Sheep, White America gets Black America to do its dirty work. Yet, unable to bear the consequence themselves, its inarticulate white males are unable to state this outright. Instead, the film, with the weight of allegory, makes the point visually, in its opening shots of shoes, suggesting different class status or aspiration (from shined brogues to scuffed work shoes) which we might suppose made from the hide of horses like the one whose fate the film concerns.



As in Killer of Sheep, music and sound design makes a subtle but important part of the film’s implicit argument. If the soundtracks of his other early films were alive with the sounds of Black history and Black sociality—the overlapping, sometimes raucous dialogue of Several Friends, as its characters kill time and shoot the breeze, or the history of Black Classical music, from William Grant Still through Dinah Washington, provided in Killer of Sheep—here, the soundtrack is dominated neither by dialogue nor by music but by the eerie creaking of farmyard equipment, which at times comes to resemble avant-garde instrumental or electronic score. Burnett surely has in mind the dialogue-free opening sequence of Once Upon A Time In The West, in which a soundscape of similar creaks, the buzzing of a fly, and so on, again take the place of music, yet in themselves become musicked, sounding something like real-life musique concrete. Whereas Leone’s white men are gunfighters awaiting the arrival of the villainous Frank (Henry Fonda, played against noble, Abraham Lincoln type), Burnett’s men are indeterminate in profession (though they mostly wear ties, suggesting some position of power or at least steady employment) and are awaiting instead Ray (played by fellow L.A. Rebellion director Larry Clark). Yet both films await an act of violence, and violence is a part of the being of Burnett’s tie-wearing White men as much as it is of Leone’s gunfighter types. Throughout American popular culture, but particularly in the Western, horses are simultaneously sentimentalised (Roy Rogers and ‘my pal Trigger’) and summarily dispatched with casual violence (as in the infamous cliff-edge leap in Jesse James (1939), after which the American Humane Association to monitor the treatment of animals in Hollywood films; this incident is sometimes attributed to the 1940 John Wayne vehicle Dark Command, in which, ironically enough, he co-stars with none other than Roy Rogers.) In itself, this doubleness functions along the same lines that constitute the implicit ideology of anti-Blackness, in which characteristics of sentimentalised fidelity are projected onto those who are also subject to gratuitous violence, bondage and the condition of social death. (In his reading of the film, Frank Wilderson suggests that “the horse is just an alibi” for racialised, homosocial violence.) The film hints—rather than states—the violence which white Americans force Black Americans to perform might easily be redirected at Black Americans themselves: the historical connotations of a group of massed white men and a handful of African American men in the midst of open country are hard to ignore. Burnett subtly underscores this with the casual, contained violence of the shot in which one of the men flings is pocket-knife into the porch ceiling above; the sudden explosion of racial epithet from one of the other men, ignored but not contradicted by the other characters; or the slow loading of the handgun at the end of the film. Whereas both Several Friends and Killer of Sheep, as Several Friends tend to focus on Black sociality, with white people a minimal presence, here, the focus on whiteness, and the way it outnumbers blackness in a social configuration, is key to the film’s suppressed drama.



The film opens with a fragment of Samuel Barber’s orchestral song ‘Knoxville—Summer of 1915’ (1948), a setting of a James Agee poem which depicts an urban community in the midst of a war that’s never mentioned by name.

It has become that time of evening
When people sit on their porches,
Rocking gently and talking gently
And watching the street
And the standing up into their sphere
Of possession of the trees […]

Confident in their ‘possession’, owning house, street, and its natural surroundings, safe within the domestic sphere of the white family and its generations of parents, grandparents, grandchildren, the inability of this community to anticipate the geopolitical conflict which will decimate their ranks (and, autobiographically, the deaths of both Agee’s and Barber’s fathers) finds expression only in generalities intuited by its youthful speaker – ‘Who shall ever tell the sorrow / Of being on this earth […] Oh, remember them in kindly in their time of trouble; / And in the hour of their taking away.’ The poem ends on a crisis of identity that troubles its picture of loving family and loving community as mirrors of each other:

And those receive me,
Who quietly treat me,
As one familiar and well-beloved in that home:
But will not, oh, will not,
Not now, not ever;
But will not ever tell me who I am.

Read this way, Ray’s son functions something like the speaker of Agee’s poem. But the identity he cannot name is one connected to a far more deathly unhomeliness than Agee’s combination of nostalgia with existential unease. After all, the white men of Burnett’s film barely even pretend to receive or quietly treat Ray or his son as ones familiar and well-beloved in the derelict shack that stands in for a home: the crumbling ‘house I live in’ under the weight of collapse in the closing years of the Vietnam war—with its racialised death count on both sides—inner city rebellion, and coming economic collapse. In Several Friends, a horse suddenly appears at the edge of the frame as its characters watch a fight in a parking lot. The shot is never repeated and never explained: blink and you’d miss it. The incongruity of that shot—as in the now-iconic scenes of masked children playing in Killer of Sheep—serves to emphasize a surrealism that bites back at a patronising realism which would trade in pity or abjection, fresh instead with all the possibilities of the marvellous. Here, however, the horse serves to index a whole set of racialised violence, both cinematic and extra-cinematic, all the more present, and prescient, for being unstated or unseen.

(Along with Several Friends and other shorts by Burnett, the film is currently available to stream for free as part of the Criterion Channel's Black Cinema season, as well as in a lower-quality stream on Youtube.)