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The New York Times/ ­- Arts, Qui, 12 de Abril de 2012
CLIPPING INTERNACIONAL (Civil Rights)
Jamaa Fanaka, Film Director, Dies at 69
By PAUL VITELLO Jamaa Fanaka, a filmmaker who
had considerable success in 1979 with “Penitentiary,”
a feature­-length movie he made while still in film
school, but who claimed to have been blacklisted
afterward for raising questions about a dearth of jobs
for black directors in Hollywood, died on April 1 in Los
Angeles. He was 69. The cause was complications of
diabetes, his family said. Mr. Fanaka was part of what
film scholars called the L.A. Rebellion, a small group of
black U.C.L.A. film school graduates who came of age
in the late 1970s, near the end of the so­-called
blaxploitation era. The group’s defining aesthetic was
to move beyond pimp stereotypes and funk
soundtracks in film portrayals of blacks. Unlike most of
the others, including the avant­-garde filmmakers
Charles Burnett (“Killer of Sheep,” “My Brother’s
Wedding”) and Julie Dash (“Daughters of the Dust”),
Mr. Fanaka, a Billy Wilder fan, wanted to make movies
that were both serious and popular. “Penitentiary,”
starring Leon Isaac Kennedy as a wrongfully
imprisoned man who finds redemption as a prison
boxer, received mixed reviews but became the most
financially successful independent movie of 1979. As
luck would have it he released it during the first boom
in affordable VCRs and movies on videocassette. He
made sequels to “Penitentiary” in 1982 and 1987. The
film was also considered an artistic breakthrough.
Allyson Nadia Field, a professor of cinema studies at
U.C.L.A. who last year helped organize a retrospective
featuring the movies of the L.A. Rebellion, called
“Penitentiary” “the transition moment between
blaxploitation and independent black filmmaking.”
“People think the beginning of independent black
filmmaking was ‘She’s Gotta Have It,’ ” she said,
referring to Spike Lee’s 1986 watershed hit. “But really,
it was Fanaka’s ‘Penitentiary.’ ” Mr. Fanaka became
one of the few black members of the Directors Guild of
America, but he found the guild to be insular — pretty
much like the rest of the film industry, he told
interviewers — saying it rarely acted on its promises to
encourage studios to hire more women and members
of minority groups. When his attempts to change that
quietly were ignored, Mr. Fanaka became dogged. He
brought a series of class­-action lawsuits against the
guild in the early 1990s, claiming that its
word­-of­-mouth system of alerting directors about job
opportunities was inherently discriminatory and a
violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The suits
sought a more transparent system of notification and
the establishment of minority training programs. But a
federal judge later threw them out on technicalities,
and Mr. Fanaka was termed “a vexatious litigant.” (The
directors guild declined to comment.) “He wrote the
briefs himself; he paid the court costs; it became his
mission for future filmmakers, was how he saw it,” said
Jacqueline Stewart, a professor of radio, television and
film and African­-American studies at Northwestern
University, who interviewed Mr. Fanaka for the L.A.
Rebellion retrospective. “It was very upsetting for him
to talk about it,” she added. “He said he felt like he had
been erased from history. It’s hard to prove these
things, but I think it’s safe to say at the very least that
his career suffered.” Mr. Fanaka rejected some movie
opportunities after “Penitentiary” because he
considered them to be in the blaxploitation mold, Ms.
Stewart said. Jan­-Christopher Horak, director of the
U.C.L.A. film and television archive, said of Mr.
Fanaka: “In a way his major accomplishment was a
kind of a failure — to have tried and failed to
significantly change the racial politics of his profession.
He was punished for it. The guild, the studios, they
treated him like a crank. But he was not a crank. He
was legitimately concerned about the future.” Mr.
Fanaka was born Walter Gordon on Sept. 6, 1942, in
Jackson, Miss., one of five children of Robert and
Beatrice Gordon. His parents moved to the Los
Angeles area when he was a boy. His father was an
electrician. After serving in the Air Force, he told
interviewers, he was adrift until he entered a
community college film program, which led him to the
U.C.L.A. film school. He made three commercial
feature films before graduating: “Welcome Home,
Brother Charles” (1975), “Emma Mae” (1976). and
“Penitentiary.” He graduated summa cum laude and by
then had changed his name to Jamaa Fanaka, derived
from the Swahili for “together we will find success.” His
survivors include three daughters, Tracey Gordon,
Twyla Louis and Katina Scott; a son, Michael Gordon;
his parents, Robert and Beatrice Gordon; two brothers,
Joseph and Robert Gordon; a sister, Carmen Sanford;
and nine grandchildren. At his death Mr. Fanaka was
working on his eighth film, a documentary about
hip­-hop culture. He told the film blogger Jeff Brummett
recently that he wished he had made more films, but
that he was proud of what he had accomplished, both
as a filmmaker and as an activist. “I exposed the
Achilles’ heel of Hollywood,” he said. This article has
been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: April 13, 2012 An earlier version of this
article misstated when Mr. Fanaka made the film
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