For Whose Entertainment
Ben Caldwell
WORLD PREMIERE
- Price
- $12*
- Genre
- Screening
- Season
- Winter/Spring 2026
- DATE
- APR 25
- TIME
- SAT, 8 PM
- RUNTIME
- Approx. 90 minutes, with intermission
- COUNTRY
- USA
- PROGRAM
- Not yet available
* Discounts available for REDCAT members, students & the CalArts faculty and staff
Join the conversation in the REDCAT LOUNGE
About
For the first time since its creation in 1979, For Whose Entertainment by renowned filmmaker, artist, and educator Ben Caldwell has its first public screening.
The film is a critique of Black comedians and their work, in which Caldwell asks who Black comedians are trying to appeal to and entertain most: Black audiences or white audiences? Through the use of appropriated footage and collage, the filmmaker deconstructs Blackness in entertainment in the 1960s and 1970s. For Whose Entertainment brings together important figures in Black film and scholarship, including documentary filmmaker St. Clair Bourne and cinema scholar Teshome Gabriel, to discuss issues around Black representation in film and television. Caldwell’s film oeuvre and life’s work is built around psychic healing for Black people, a self-mandate formed after serving as a soldier in the Vietnam War.
There will be a post-screening conversation with Ben Caldwell, film programmer Jheanelle Brown, and scholar and multimedia/film producer Robeson Taj Frazier.
Caldwell … is an aesthete, a pioneer of fusing technology, art, and Black philosophies across mediums.
—
Nereya Otieno, Hyperallergic
The Jack H. Skirball Series is organized by Jheanelle Brown.
about the artist
Ben Caldwell studied filmmaking at UCLA, at the same time as Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, Haile Gerima, and Billy Woodberry, as part of a group of young artists who were to change African American independent filmmaking—a cultural phenomenon sometimes called “The LA Rebellion.” Caldwell taught several years at CalArts and became a major force in Community Arts Partnership (CAP).
In 1984, he founded KAOS Network/Video 3333, a community arts center dedicated to providing training on digital arts, media arts, and multimedia, at the heart of Leimert Park, historic center of the Los Angeles jazz culture, now hosting a diverse multi-ethnic multimedia arts center. KAOS Network was designed to empower the youth of the community and is the only organization of its kind in South Central Los Angeles where inner-city youths can participate in hands-on courses in video production, animation, website development, video teleconferencing, CD-ROM production, and use of the Internet. KAOS is also home to WORDshop, a weekly workshop for hip-hop artists, dancers, singers and visual artists. Each week over 150 youths participate in workshops and programs at the center. In addition to these workshops, KAOS Network has videotaped community events and produced documentaries for the state of California. KAOS Network is committed to creating a community of young people who are dedicated to learning new technologies, acquiring employable skills, and participating in digital arts and new media training.
KAOS Network is probably best known for its Thursday night “Project Blowed”a hip-hop and rap open mic night that gave birth to rappers and rap groups such as Aceyalone, Medusa, Busdriver, Freestyle Fellowship, and Jurassic Five, and continues to provide an atmosphere where up-and-coming rappers can hone their skills.
