Camille Billops moved beyond predictable and well-tread ground to open up space for new narratives in her films—about Black families, Black women, and Black middle-class life—that pulled on her distinctive and unapologetic worldview.
Haile Gerima's Bush Mama remains a critically transformative film, particularly in its most subliminal, yet important, proclamation: the days of separating "art" and "artist" are over. For in Black cinema, those days never existed to begin with.
The general absence of the L.A. Rebellion from most film history text books and Burnett's relative marginalization within film and media studies speaks to the socio-economic myopia and privileges that define both areas of study.
