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Roderick Young

Filmography

Film Role(s) Year
Bush Mama (1975) Bush Mama

Bush Mama is Haile Gerima's powerfully moving look at the realities of inner city poverty and systemic disenfranchisement as experienced by Dorothy, a pregnant welfare recipient in Watts, played by the magnetic Barbara O. Jones. Motivated by the incarceration of her partner T.C. (Weathers) and the protection of her daughter and unborn child, Dorothy undergoes an ideological transformation from apathy to action.

Cinematographer 1975
Passing Through (1977) Passing Through

Eddie Womack, an African-American jazz musician, is released from prison for the killing of a white gangster. Not willing to play for the mobsters who control the music industry, Womack searches for his musical mentor, Poppy Harris. Larry Clark's film repeatedly turns to various musicians improvising jazz, leading a French critic to call it “the only jazz film in the history of cinema.”

Cinematographer 1977
Shopping Bag Spirits and Freeway Fetishes: Reflections on Ritual Space (1981) Shopping Bag Spirits and Freeway Fetishes: Reflections on Ritual Space

Barbara McCullough converses with members of L.A.’s vibrant black arts communities to explore the role of ritual in black life and art. Interviews are combined with still photographs, colorful video effects, music by Don Cherry and footage from McCullough’s landmark work, Water Ritual #1:  An Urban Rite of Purification.

Cinematographer 1981