KAOS/LACMA Cultural Literacy Collider with Special Guest Larry Clark

Dive into a powerful educational series bridging generations through film, dialogue, and critical media literacy. Curated and facilitated by legendary KAOS Network founder Ben Caldwell and L.A. Rebellion filmmaker Alile Sharon Larkin, this series spotlights bold works by local filmmakers, surprise guest appearances, and unfiltered conversations on the role of storytelling in shaping cultural consciousness, both locally and globally.

For the March Cultural Literacy Collider, filmmaker and painter Larry Clark will join us to share clips from his award-winning films As Above, So Below and Passing Through and stories of his journey to FESPACO where he met Thomas Sankara, his many travels and festivals, and his epic almost-film in Somalia, as well as the work and painting he's been up to since.  

Larry Clark, a writer, director, cinematographer, editor, and now painter, helped give voice to an entire generation of African and African American filmmakers in 1970s Los Angeles. Together with fellow UCLA students and collaborators Ben Caldwell, Haile Gerima, Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, and Billy Woodberry, he made a number of singular, visionary films whose spiritual rhythms and aspirations embody the very essence of jazz itself, films that are both formally and politically defiant, though they remain underappreciated.

Clark's first feature, Passing Through (1977), is often cited as one of the best jazz films ever made. Featuring Horace Tapscott and his Pan-Afrikan People’s Jazz Arkestra and co-written by actor Ted Lange, it united a wide range of Black artists. It had its world premiere at Los Angeles’s Filmex and went on to win the Special Jury Prize at the Locarno International Film Festival. 

Free jazz, state propaganda, religious feeling, and revolutionary action all roil the air in As Above, So Below (1973). When Black veteran Jita-hadi (Nathaniel Taylor) arrives in South-Central Los Angeles after serving stints in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Vietnam—a veritable guided tour of postwar American imperialism—he immediately recognizes the symptoms of a population under occupation in the wake of the 1965 Watts rebellion. Politically radical and aesthetically inventive, As Above, So Below couples a far-reaching critique of American racial injustice with an expansive vision of the possibilities of Black resistance.

Co-presented by KAOS Network and LACMA’s Aspect Ratio.