Leigh Raiford is associate professor of African American Studies at UC Berkeley, where her teaching and research interests focus on photography, film, and art of the African Diaspora. She is the author of Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle.

A rediscovered masterpiece, director Larry Clark's portrayal of black insurgency in As Above, So Below is a powerful political and social critique. The film opens in 1945 with a young boy playing in his Chicago neighborhood and then follows the adult Jita-Hadi as a returning Marine with heightened political consciousness. It imagines a post-Watts rebellion state of siege and an organized black underground plotting revolution. With sound excerpts from the 1968 HUAC report “Guerrilla Warfare Advocates in the United States,” As Above, So Below is one of the more politically radical films of the L.A. Rebellion.