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While talking yesterday with a colleague about independent filmmakers who made their way into Hollywood in the late sixties and early seventies, such as Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma, I mentioned the many independent filmmakers of the period who are equally talented but didn’t find their way into Hollywood, whose careers never took hold, and whose work is largely forgotten. The era of so-called New Hollywood was a virtual graveyard of the work of great directors, and one landmark of the period, Haile Gerima’s rarely shown film “Bush Mama,” from 1975, screens at MOMA today.
“Bush Mama,” remarkably, is [Haile] Gerima’s thesis film from U.C.L.A. It’s one of the best student films ever made, inasmuch as it’s worthy to be shown alongside any film made under any circumstances at all.
Gerima is one of the filmmakers in the group called the L.A. Rebellion, which included Charles Burnett (one of the cinematographers of “Bush Mama,” whose movie “Killer of Sheep” is among the seminal films of the time), Julie Dash (the director of “Daughters of the Dust,” in which Cora Lee Day also played a major role), Billy Woodberry (whose film “Bless Their Little Hearts” will soon be revived, along with “Killer of Sheep,” in a new restoration from Milestone Films), and Monona Wali (whose film “Grey Area” was shown recently at bam Cinématek). The very existence of “Bush Mama,” along with its rarity, is a keen reminder that the history of cinema is still awaiting discovery—and that this history is also the history of its own exclusions, its foreclosed paths, its lost prospects, its secret influences, the shifting course of its future.
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“Bush Mama”: A Landmark Film, and a Reminder of Cinema’s Exclusionary History
