Passing Through

Completed as his Master’s degree thesis project during his graduate studies at UCLA, Larry Clark’s Passing Through takes jazz as a prism through which to examine the perpetually colluding forces of American capitalism and American racism. The narrative follows a talented saxophonist, Eddie Warmack (Nathaniel Taylor) who, recently released from prison, hopes to persuade his grandfather and mentor to join him in establishing an artist-owned musical collective—to the chagrin of the mob-affiliated crooks controlling the music industry with an iron grip. Featuring camera and sound work by Clark’s UCLA classmates Charles Burnett and Julie Dash, the film situates this artistic milieu in the context of ongoing political struggles in the U.S. and abroad—not least via pointed visual references to the political fights for independence that swept the African continent in the 1970s—and deploys the liberatory aesthetic and formal spontaneity of free jazz to compose a stunning, vividly realized tribute to a thriving Black creative community, far from the blinkered myopia of the midcentury Hollywood canon.