Los Angeles Plays Itself Page #14

by Kent MacKenzie.

You could call it neorealist.

Since it comes from outside

the Hollywood studios,

...you could call it independent,

...but it's not exactly Pulp Fiction.

"I used to pray every night

and fall into bed..."

"...and ask for something

that I wanted..."

"...and I never got it or..."

"...it seemed like my prayers

were never answered..."

"So I just gave up."

"And now I don't hardly

go to church or..."

"...don't say my prayers sometimes."

MacKenzie,

...who died too young after

making just one more feature...

...was the pioneer.

Fifteen years later,

...there was finally a neorealist

movement in Los Angeles...

...led by young black

film-makers from the south:

Haile Gerima from Ethiopia,

...Charles Burnett from Mississippi,

...Billy Woodberry from Texas.

Haile Gerima's Bush Mama...

...is another movie

about the police,

...but it is one of the

first to show cops...

...entirely from the other side,

...from the viewpoint

of the brutalized,

...the black people

of south Los Angeles,

...who are made to feel they live

in an occupied territory.

Neorealism describes another reality,

...and it creates a

new kind of protagonist:

Dorothy, the bush mama,

...is a seer, not an actor.

There is a crack in the

world of appearances,

...and she is defenseless before

a vision of everyday reality...

...that is unbearable.

Who knows the city?

Only those who walk,

...only those who ride the bus.

Forget the mystical blatherings

of Joan Didion and company...

...about the automobile

and the freeways.

They say, nobody walks.

They mean no rich white

people like us walk.

They claimed nobody takes the bus,

...until one day...

...we all discovered

that Los Angeles...

...has the most crowded buses

in the United States.

The white men who run

the transit authority...

...responded to the news not

by improving service,

...but by discouraging ridership.

They raised fares.

They stopped printing

maps of the bus system.

They refused to post route maps

or schedules at bus stops.

They put their money into more glamourous

subway and light rail projects.

Sued for discrimination,

...they accepted a consent decree...

...and then rejected its provisions.

Neorealism also posits

another kind of time,

...a spatialized, nonchronological

time of meditation and memory.

"The baby's dead..."

"You understand what I'm saying?

The baby's dead..."

"She's dead."

"What you doin' up there, woman?"

In Bush Mama, everything is filtered

through Dorothy's consciousness,

...and the film follows it...

...as it slides freely from

perception to memory.

Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep...

...seems suspended outside of time.

Burnett blended together the

decades of his childhood,

...his youth, and his adulthood,

...and added an

idiosyncratic panorama...

...of classic black music,

...from Paul Robeson

to Lowell Fulsom.

So a portrait of one family

and it's neighborhood...

...became an epic of black

endurance and heroism.

The police are absent in Killer of Sheep,

...and everyone has a car or a truck,

...although they're often more

trouble than they're worth.

The protagonist has a job.

He is the killer of sheep.

But a job can break your heart, too.

White America had declared a

crisis of the black family...

...as a cover for its campaign

of incremental genocide...

...against its expendable

ex-slave population,

...rendered superfluous by

immigrant labor power,

...so black film-makers responded by

emphasizing families and children.

Although Hollywood would

lend credence to the assault...

...by imagining "South Central"

as a dystopian theme park...

...of crack whores

and drive-by shootings,

...independent black film-makers showed

that the real crisis of the black family...

...is simply the crisis of

the working class family,

...white or black,

...where family values

are always at risk...

...because the threat of

unemployment is always present.

"Y'all better run along or

you'll be late for church.

So many men unneeded, unwanted,

...in a world where there

is so much to be done.

Billy Woodberry's

Bless Their Little Hearts...

...takes a drive by

a reverse landmark,

...one of the closed

industrial plants...

...that had once provided jobs...

...for the black working

class of Los Angeles.

Built in 1919,

...and closed in 1980,

...the Good Year factory in

South Central Avenue...

...was the first and largest of the

four major tire manufacturing plants...

...once located in the Los Angeles area.

Once upon a time,

...visitors could take a guided

tour and see how tires were made...

...just as today...

...they can take a studio tour...

...and see how movies are made.

Rate this script:4.6 / 19 votes