Join us on Thursday 11/18 at 8:00pm EST for the next installment of the inaugural Collective Conversations Series co-presented by New Negress Film Society and Maysles Documentary Center.

This conversation will take place between Zeinabu Irene Davis, Ben Caldwell, and Barbara McCullough. These three LA Rebellion members share their experiences as filmmakers at UCLA and how they’ve engaged in communal practices throughout their careers. 

This virtual conversation series features scholars and filmmakers amplifying communal forms of filmmaking while centering the political act of collectivity. 

Selected film clips representing several film and media collectives will screen on loop at the Maysles Documentary Center as part of their Sidewalk Cinema.

Clips from the following films will be looping in the window from November 16-18:

Horace Tapscott Musical Griot (Barbara McCullough, 2017)

Winner of Best Feature Documentary Audience Award of the Pan African Film Festival,

Horace Tapscott Musical Griot is an insightful testament to importance of Black music, art and activism to the history of Los Angeles.  Horace Tapscott (1934-99), is an important and underappreciated jazz musician as well as community activist who was blacklisted in the 1960s due to his political affiliations, which led the LAPD to shut down his performances during the Watts Rebellion of 1965.  The film shares Mr.Tapscott’s story in the manner of a griot, or West African storyteller who maintains the oral history of a culture. Musicians Don Cherry and Arthur Blythe (both deceased) appear in the film.

World Saxophone Quartet (Barbara McCullough, 1980)

The “WORLD SAXOPHONE QUARTET”  is a colorful conversation with members of this innovative group.  Members are Julius Hemphill, Hamiet Bluiett, (both deceased) and Oliver Lake and David Murray.

Medea (Ben Caldwell, 1973)

Made as Ben Caldwell’s first project at UCLA, Medea is a collage film that explores the information that permeates into a child before it is born.