watched this as a double feature, after To Sleep With Anger. this one is directed by another guy from UCLA, and although it was written and shot by burnett, it is an extremely different film. just to get it out of the way right away, this film is dominated by one of the most incredible one-shot performances i have ever seen, must be pretty much an entire reel. it’s a scene with the two leads, a couple, having a big fight in their tiny little kitchen. the movie is beautifully composed, with epic shots of the character walking along train tracks, the urban ruin of early 80s south-central LA, a jazz horn blowing mournfully. as mentioned, the performances from the two leads are virtuosic in a similar way to the composition and editing, making this a much more deliberate “modernist” or auteur film compared to burnett’s. another point of distinction is that this film is decidedly not optimistic—which is not to say that it is entirely negative, or depressing; but it is a film about hardship, and far more explicitly critical of the reality of the current paradigm working to oppress black people. depiction of the conditions of the revolutionary rupture is another strategy to the realization of an independent culture, the other strategy being the “socialist realist” preference for working from within the social ontology one supports. personally i prefer the latter tendency. i still want to follow nietzsche’s advice to not let freedom be defined as the will’s liberation from a yoke, but rather as will’s power to express.