As Above, So Below and Passing Through, Larry Clark’s second and third films, are steps towards political action in the United States of the seventies : those of dissident characters, associated with the Afro-American and anti-colonial freedom struggles, as much as those of UCLA filmmaker searching for counter-hegemonic forms and historiographies. In As Above, So Below, an army veteran is recruited by the black guerilla. The film functions mainly by breaks in register (short satirical scenes, counter-use of official statements, visual archives), after which the heterogenous material and characters finally converge, and armed struggle takes us into the complete fiction of activist anticipation. Camille Bui
16mm preservation print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive