Film
Amiri Baraka Program
- 7PM
The influence of late revolutionary poet, playwright, and black nationalist Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones)—whose art was a call to arms for African-American liberation—is explored in this program of narrative, documentary, and experimental works.
Dir. Amiri Baraka
1968, 25min, Digital
This recently rediscovered documentary made by Baraka in the late 1960s offers a rare glimpse of grassroots consciousness-raising efforts in Newark, New Jersey centered around Spirit House, Baraka’s black nationalist theater and community center.
Dir. Anthony Harvey
1966, 55min, digital
This explosive adaptation of Baraka’s bombshell play—a provocative exploration of the sinister ways in which black bodies and culture are fetishized by whites—recounts a charged encounter between a mild-mannered African-American professional (Al Freeman Jr.) and a sexually aggressive, increasingly unhinged white woman (Shirley Knight) on the New York subway.
Dir. Ben Caldwell
1973, 7min, Digital
This experimental mini-masterwork from LA Rebellion figure Ben Caldwell evokes the past, present, and future of the African-American experience through hypnotic, rhythmically-edited images set to Baraka’s poem “Part of the Doctrine.”
Digital tape presentation courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
Go to the movies just once a month and a BAM membership pays for itself.
Black radicals prepare for revolution in Jules Dassin’s hard-hitting political thriller.
A boy comes of age in 1920s Kansas in the first African-American-directed studio film.
A chilling investigation into the assassination of the Black Panther party leader.