Films with: Burnett, Charles

Blues, a musical journey

The blues is a seven-part documentary film series exploring the evolution of the blues, featuring rare archival performance footage of Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Willie Dixon ... et al., also including over 100 newly-filmed performances by contemporary artists such as B.B. King, Bonnie Raitt, Beck ... et al. singing classic blues songs.

DVD 4146

Charles Burnett collection

Killer of sheep: An African-American slaughterhouse worker searches for tiny moments of beauty in his predominantly bleak life. My brother's wedding: A young African-American man navigates his conflicting obligations while trying to figure out what he really wants in life.

DVD 5251

L.A. rebellion creating a new black cinema : DVD anthology 1971-2006 /

"The group of Black filmmakers that have come to be known as the L.A. Rebellion created a watershed body of work that strives to perform the revolutionary act of humanizing Black people on screen. The filmmakers in this group met as students in film school at the University of California, Los Angeles, between the late 1960s and the mid-1980s."--Booklet. This collection contains this broad representative sampling of their projects, as were exhibited in the film exhibition.

DVD 12514

Nat Turner a troublesome property /

Evaluates the authenticity of the earliest source, "The Confessions of Nat Turner", assembled by a white Virginia lawyer from jailhouse interviews. It then follows the controversy over the Nat Turner story played out through history. Alvin Poussaint and Ossie Davis recall how Nat Turner became a hero in the Black community. Religious scholar Vincent Harding and legal scholar Martha Minow reflect on America's attitudes toward terrorism. One of the most bitter race battles of the 1960s is reexamined, when William Styron published his novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner.

DVD 8994

Selma, Lord, Selma

Set in 1965, during the turbulent early days of the right-to-vote movement. The story of a young schoolgirl in Selma, Alabama, who is inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to resist the degradation that her fellow African-Americans are suffering.

DVD 9176

To sleep with anger

Harry, a devilish charmer from the Deep South, turns up out of the blue on the South Central Los Angeles doorstep of his old friends. In short order, Harry's presence turns a seemingly peaceful household upside down, exposing smoldering tensions between parents and children, tradition and change, virtue and temptation. Interweaving evocative strains of gospel and blues with rich, poetic-realist images, it is a sublimely stirring film from an autonomous artistic sensibility, a portrait of family resilience.

DVD 13010