Blaxploitation: baadasssss cinema

(Coffy)

The wonderful music, the kitsch, the hype, and the promise of sex and violence may all have been alluring, but the glory days of blaxploitation didn’t result in many impressive films. But there were enough for an excellent Cinematek programme. And it must be said: not many phenomena were so funky important.

To complement its overview of African American cinema, in November Cinematek is taking a look at blaxploitation, Quentin Tarantino’s favourite sweetshop. Blaxploitation was both an opportunistic genre – as the name suggests – and a product of its time: the 1970s. For his Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971), one of the first and indeed one of the finest examples, Melvin Van Peebles raised the money himself and performed miracles by doing everything on his own. After that, it was above all the Hollywood studios that set out to reach the African American community (at last) with cheap films starring African Americans. That was before they decided to concentrate exclusively on blockbusters in the late 1970s. A substantial serving of eroticism, violence, and sensation helped to hide the fact that the storylines tended to be pretty thin and the budgets even more so. More often than not, the ghetto was the setting and pimps, dealers, prostitutes, hired killers, and tenacious detectives featured again and again. Occasionally, a corrupt white cop took a hiding and blaxploitation has to be seen in the context of African Americans standing up for their rights. But there was no room for politics.

The black elite tended to be critical and disparaging of the negative, caricatural image of African American culture presented in the films. But thanks to those films, many actors and technicians were finally getting a look-in. A number of stars emerged, including Richard Roundtree (Shaft), Jim Brown (Black Gunn, Slaughter), and Pam Grier (Coffy, Foxy Brown). But they came a cropper once the phenomenon seemed to have burnt out after the 1970s. Rehabilitation came for Pam Grier when Tarantino gave her the lead role in Jackie Brown. The others could console themselves with the thought that they had opened the way for the Denzel Washingtons, Wesley Snipeses, and Will Smiths of this world.

Play that funky music
For a long time, people looked down on blaxploitation and the phenomenon came to be forgotten; now, however, it has caught on as a cult. Tarantino played a part in that development. But even apart from him, film fans realised that among the two hundred blaxploitation films there were quite a few that were really enjoyable. The over-the-top hair styles, crazy platform shoes, and 1970s psychedelia now have a kitsch factor. And the sex and violence still turn people on.

The films are highly atmospheric and characters like Shaft are the personification of cool. And here and there one stumbles on a real gem (Foxy Brown, Super Fly, Across 110^th Street). But what really makes baadasssss cinema worth checking out is the immortal music of Isaac Hayes, Curtis Mayfield, Sun Ra, Johnny Pate, Roy Ayers, and James Brown. In most cases the music completely outclasses the rest of the film. It is not only incredibly funky, atmospheric as only soul music can be, and timeless; in some cases the tracks go a lot further than the films themselves in terms of content or of political militancy.

Blaxploitation • 1/11 > 2/12, Cinematek, 
rue Baron Hortastraat 9, Brussel/Bruxelles, 
02-551.19.19, www.cinematek.be