Howard University has become incubator for cinematographers

Ask the cinematographers themselves what the secret is, and you’ll get a range of answers: Dickerson, who came to Howard in 1972 to study architecture, credits an atmosphere of free-ranging experimentation that permeated not just the campus but Washington film culture at large. (He’s gone on to become a director in his own right and is visiting the Howard campus this week to lead a series of seminars.) Jafa, who came later and studied under Gerima and his L.A. Rebellion colleague, Ben Caldwell, recalls Caldwell speculating about a film version of traditional black art forms. “I was interested in [finding] the cinematic equivalent of Cecil Taylor or Jimi Hendrix or James Brown,” Jafa says. “My temperament was very much to question: What is black cinema? ‘Not Hollywood’ wasn’t a viable definition for me. How do we transpose these aesthetic, philosophical, existentially driven values onto this medium that did not develop in response to our needs and expressive desires?”

Associate professor Alonzo Crawford, who has taught cinematography since 1974, agrees that, if Howard has a secret to minting talented cinematographers, it’s in the mix of theory and pragmatism that go hand in hand with one of the country’s premier African American educational institutions. “I impress upon the young people that there’s more to it than just pointing the camera,” he says. “It’s very interesting that the fundamental building block of the motion picture is termed ‘shot.’ Therefore, the camera must be a weapon. And the shot has to be at the enemy or the [source] of your oppression, or else you blow your own brains out with it.”

(Courtesy Jenny Baptiste and Sundance Film Festival) - Film still from the movie “Mother of George,” featured at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. Cinematography by Bradford Young.

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Stars arrive at the Sundance Film Festival: Actors and actresses flock to Park City, Utah, for the annual independent film festival.

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Crawford teaches the basics, too: He puts his students through overnight “boot camps,” where they’re urged to “shoot and shoot and shoot.” He immerses them in Caravaggio and Rembrandt in order to study the painterly use of light. Dickerson, Jafa and Young — each of whom Crawford taught — internalized those values in their own manner, he says. “They all relate that to their social and political consciousness. So when it comes to lighting someone a certain way, there is Hollywood and then there is Brad, who’s doing it a different way.”

Young has developed a versatile but also consistently poetic, oblique visual style. He lights his subjects softly, which not only looks lovely but has deep aesthetic and political implications, according to Hans Charles, a Howard alumnus and Young’s frequent camera assistant. “On a micro-level, he’s coaxing out different hues within different skin tones,” Charles explains. “On a macro-level, he’s trying to express the diversity within the African diaspora.”

Andrew Dosunmu directed “Mother of George,” worked with Young on ”Restless City” and has also worked with Jafa and Sayeed. He notes that as divergent as they are in visual style, they share a philosophical sensibility.

“I think being men of color, the way they want to photograph people of color is a big objective for them,” he says. “They all come from Howard [and] they’ve seen the way people of color have been photographed since the inception of cinema, that the way we’re represented is not truly justified, and I think that drives them a lot.”

For his part, Young credits another film professor, Daniel Williams, and especially Gerima as the spiritual godfather of what may be, by now, fairly codified as a bona fide successor to the L.A. Rebellion — the Howard Continuum. “I think Haile is the beginning of it all,” Young says. “He made us believe and understand that if we were going to engage in image-making in a filmmaking context, a form that was forged with ‘The Birth of a Nation,’ we had to be on point.” If you were coming from Howard, he notes: “You weren’t just going to be cinematographers who would be part of a whole Hollywood machine. You’re going to represent excellence in our community. Because you’re emerging from the mecca of black education.”