While Tinseltown rejoiced in blaxploitation, a generation of black film-makers came out of LA in the 1960s and 1970s to forge a series of forgotten masterpieces, writes John Patterson

ANYONE INTERESTED in attending film school in southern California in the late 1960s faced a near-embarrassment of riches. The well-off could attend the University of California's School of Cinematographic Arts, founded in 1929, which was where you went if you wanted to work in Hollywood, but didn't have a brother-in-law or cousin to get you into the industry. The more iconoclastically inclined could head seven miles north, to a former Catholic girls' school in Burbank, where in 1969 the Disney Company founded the California Institute of the Arts - or CalArts - to nourish film-making talent that Disney might later draw upon. If you made it to Hollywood via CalArts, chances are you did so only after a long immersion in radical ideas and artistic practice.

And then there was UCLA, the people's film school, a world-renowned, state-funded university offering very low tuition rates for native Californians, which made it ideal for those who were simply too poor to attend USC or CalArts. It was the only option for a young black man from Watts such as Charles Burnett, who dropped out of his boring apprenticeship as an electrical engineer in 1967 with the unlikely ambition (for a kid of his modest origins and means at that time) of becoming a film director.

Burnett's 30-year-old, now re-released masterpiece Killer of Sheep - a poetic, melancholy, vignette-based drama about a slaughterhouse worker struggling to get by in 1970s Watts - was his UCLA masters' thesis project and was never intended for release, but has since racked up a reputation among critics as one of the greatest unseen American movies. It remains, however, only the glorious centrepiece of a small-scale but, in the long term, highly influential revolution in ethnic and minority film-making at UCLA.

Burnett was just the most prominent and talented of a group of young, radical black film artists, later retrospectively dubbed the "LA Rebellion" movement. They were consciously anti-Hollywood, caught up in a wave of political activism and social transformation, and managed to construct a body of work now widely admired by critics and in-the-know African-American film-makers, but still largely unseen by the public.

AT UCLA, Burnett encountered an eclectic, argumentative, competitive and politically active group of students. Among them were such figures as Ethiopian-born Haile Gerima, whose stunning thesis film, Bush Mama - about a young black woman's alienation from her racist urban environment - was photographed by Burnett and Larry Clark (not the Larry Clark of Kids), who acted in one of Burnett's undergraduate shorts, The Horse, and himself directed Passing Through, a rarely seen but utterly remarkable graduation feature about jazz, the Attica prison riot, white exploitation of blacks in the music business and revolution, featuring footage of Horace Tapscott's Pan-Afrikan People's Jazz Arkestra. Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust) made her first feature, Illusions, in the UCLA programme, and Burnett also wrote and photographed director Billy Woodberry's Bless Their Little Hearts, another poignant, forgotten masterpiece of family struggle in Watts.

Together, these almost-forgotten projects constitute a coherent subgenre of African-American art movies, one quite unruffled by the prevailing winds of emergent black film-making in the late 1960s and 1970s, whose benchmarks were Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, Shaft and what Burnett calls "the whole black-exploitation thing". Their ambition, political commitment and formal inventiveness outstrip anything to be found in the mainstream in those years.

Because UCLA was so affordable, and especially since it offered film-makers the chance to get their hands on free cameras, many of these students took their own sweet time graduating: Burnett attended the school from 1967 until completing Killer of Sheep 10 years later, working as a teaching assistant and mentoring the younger students. Woodberry ran the department's equipment shop, and it was handy to be in with him if you wanted to shoot any film.

For Burnett, early inspirationcame from visiting lecturer Basil Wright, the English director of such 1930s documentaries as Night Mail and Song of Ceylon. (In the same period, incidentally, Scottish director Alexander Mackendrick was leading the film faculty at CalArts.) Guest speakers included such fading legends as King Vidor (director of the 1929 all-black movie Hallelujah!) and Josef von Sternberg.

IT WAS A FELLOW student who alerted Burnett to an entire lost subculture, a forgotten tradition of black film-makers. "Willie F Bell was from the south, and he put on a festival of these old 'race movies' by people like Oscar Micheaux , and that was the first time I'd ever seen or even heard about these movies made by black film-makers, really an eye-opening experience for me, because I wanted to tell my own black stories."

Like Micheaux, who faced almost insurmountable obstacles getting his films made and shown, many of the UCLA Rebellion film-makers have struggled to keep making movies. Burnett has remained active, but his work is art, not commerce, and has often proved difficult to distribute. Gerima made Sankofa, a film about slavery, in 1993, and distributed it himself, earning $3 million (€1.9 million). Dash has struggled for financing in Hollywood, and has been confined to making TV movies such as The Rosa Parks Story.

But by taking that fabled "Long March through the institutions", some of those former students have positioned themselves in academia, and are transmitting valuable lessons and inspiration to a new generation. Gerima has been a professor at Howard University since 1975. Clark, who today says Passing Through "wasn't made for release, it was made for the revolution", teaches film at UC Berkeley, and Woodbury teaches at CalArts, alongside film-makers like James Benning and Thom Andersen, whose essay-movie Los Angeles Plays Itself helped renew interest in the Rebellion group. There was no place for them in mainstream Hollywood, or none that they wanted, because they were proudly anti-Hollywood then, and remain proudly so today. - (Guardian)

Killer of Sheep opens at the IFI, Eustace St, Dublin 2, on Aug 8. www.ifi.ie