Melvin Van Peebles kept a bullet in the chamber.
He always wanted to be a filmmaker and succeed in Hollywood, but life had led him in other directions.
African American born in Chicago in 1932, he had been a painter in Mexico and a journalist, playwright and singer in France.
He had even recorded an experimental jazz album,
Brer Soul
.
In the late 1960s he returned home to shoot a mainstream comedy,
Watermelon Man.
, which left him deeply dissatisfied. So a script that no studio was willing to finance him, the story of a young orphan raised in a brothel and harassed by racist police officers in the city of Los Angeles, was pulled out of the glove box, invested his savings in it and got a Today's disgraced patron, Bill Cosby, would lend him $ 50,000.
In just 19 days he shot a fertile and delirious film, an underground classic,
Sweet Sweetbacks Baadassss Song
. Energetic and broad-brush cinema, filmed, according to Van Peebles himself, with the nerve and urgency of someone who “starves to death and manages to sneak into a pantry”. In it he enlisted part of his family, including his minor son, future actor and director Mario Van Peebles. Young Mario appears in one of the most controversial scenes, a brothel orgy shot openly.
The film was finally released in March 1971, first in the African-American suburbs of cities like Detroit, New York or Chicago. Nobody gave a penny for it, but it raised more than ten million dollars. A success against the tide. Its author wanted to turn it into the cinematographic manifesto of a “new black cinema”, but the political subtext (very close to the aggressive separatism of the Black Panthers) went unnoticed by a large part of its audience, who preferred to see it for what it also was: a shameless and wild film, brimming with sex, violence and political incorrectness. Today we remember her as the great pioneer in the irruption of
blaxploitation
, one of those rare flowers that proliferated in the exuberant cultural garden of the 70s. A subgenre that these days turns 50, coinciding with an unexpected
revival
of black fictions and the always burning racial question in the United States.
The movie poster for 'Sweet Sweetback', the blaxploitation crime drama written and directed by Melvin Van Peebles, 1971. John D. Kisch / Separate Cinema Ar / Getty Images
All for the pasta?
The label
exploitation
, or
exploitation
cinema, is reserved for sensational, provocative, scandalous or lewd films that try to raise money by taking advantage of fads or exploring the limits of censorship. They are usually B (or Z) series products, vehicles of an opportunistic and stark commerciality, when not flagrant botch or examples of infringement of the worst kind. The
blaxploitation
Yet it managed to be much more than that. An eccentricity and an ephemeral fashion, without a doubt, and a generic umbrella that grouped films of very diverse fur, some better than others. But above all, as the writer and film critic Antonio José Navarro recalls, “a genre with deep local roots, which showed life in the African-American ghettos in a rather crude and realistic way”. Films that "broke molds worldwide by featuring black protagonists far removed from the whitewashed and lovable stereotype that Sidney Poitier represented." African Americans who could be "both heroes and villains, women of arms to take, rebels, vigilantes, prostitutes and pimps."A sordid portrait of a social microcosm that had remained hidden from the cinema and that those very free films brought to the surface with a contagious vitality and forcefulness.
The first film that collected the inheritance of Melvin Van Peebles was
The Red Nights of Harlem
(Shaft)
, released that summer of 1971 in which American cinema dyed its skin black. It was run by a son of African American farmers from the Deep South, Gordon Banks. It was murky, fierce and sarcastic, grossing a very estimable $ 9 million and turning its lead, model and actor Richard Roundtree, into a star. And his character, Harlem detective John Shaft, in his impeccable turtlenecks, a role model and a style icon. Today it could be said that Banks did not invent anything, that he limited himself to taking Van Peebles' genius insights to a more commercial, less visceral and more stylized terrain. But you have to at least admit that his was an amphetamine movie, rabidly
cool
and had a magnificent soundtrack.
A poster for Jack Hill's 1974 action movie 'Foxy Brown' starring Pam Grier.
Movie Poster Image Art / Getty Images
Black on white
The journalist and writer Lucas Soler, better known as Casto Escópico, author of several books on series B, diverse subcultures and cinematographic subgenres, considers that both that first
Shaft
(gave rise to several sequels, and in 2000 a remake starring Samuel L. Jackson) like Van Peebles's daring experiment "are highly esteemed cult films that have ended up creating a legend."
Jordi Picatoste, journalist and film critic, author of the book
The Tarantino Effect: His Cinema and Pop Culture
, considers that
The Red Nights of Harlem
"It is a good detective film, perhaps the best of the subgenre." It was the first “produced by a large studio, and it shows in the resources. In addition, the screenwriter is the author of the original novel and creator of the character, Ernest Tidyman, winner of the Oscar for best screenplay that same year for
French Connection
. The director, Banks, came from documentary cinema and this can be seen in the street images, which are one of the main attractions of the film ”.
In later years, dozens of films would explore the newly opened vein, refining and codifying the subgenre. There were scoundrels with as much class as
Superfly
(1972), criminal epics like
Foxy Brown
(1974) or
The Mack
(1973), parodies of horror film hits like
Abby
(1974) or
Black Dracula
(1972),
period
blaxploitation
set in the cotton plantations of the slave-owning South such as
Mandingo
(1975) or ultraviolence in a feminist key such as that offered by
Coffy
(1973) or
Cleopatra Jones
(1973).
There was, finally, a whole flood of movies to the limit that, in the opinion of the journalist and scholar in oddities Manuel Valencia, contributed "freshness, irreverence, anger and a cool and vacilon style".
Valencia declares himself a "very fan" of this ephemeral fashion that he considers "admirable, fair and necessary".
For him, the
blaxploitation
It is among the best of the subversive heritage of the 70 Americans, "which were very crazy years, full of passion and social, cinematographic and cultural effervescence." He fell in love with those "cheeky and daring" movies in the same period of his life when he discovered "the neighborhood kiosks and the old video stores." As a product of a time when everything was still to be done and everything was allowed, those films were born with the expiration date printed on the flap. But Valencia defends that time (and the sensitivity of a new generation of non-judgmental moviegoers) has ended up proving them right: “Like good wines, they improve over the years. Before they were a good drink, today they are a joy ”.
A poster for the 1973 Jack Hill action film 'Coffy' starring Pam Grier. Movie Poster Image Art / Getty Images
For Antonio José Navarro, “we must not lose sight of the fact that many of those were rather precarious productions and filmed in a hurry to get on the bandwagon of a fashion”.
Altogether, "they retain an undoubted charm and a certain sociological interest, but some have not aged quite well and today they ask to be seen with a sense of humor and a certain indulgence."
One of the most eloquent exceptions is, in the opinion of the critic,
Panic on 110th Street
, a criminal plot released in 1972: “It was directed by a competent filmmaker, Barry Shear, and it is a terrible and very eloquent story of racism and police corruption, shot in a decaying New York, unhealthy and full of rats ”.
The shadow of old Harlem
For Casto Escópico, "with notable exceptions, these films have aged poorly." They were
cinematic
fast food
: “Cheap and
fast-food
products. It is noted that most did not have large technical teams.
Kitsch
lovers will
still enjoy these exotic outfits and aggressive and exaggerated performances even today. The journalist recognizes the genre's virtues as having consolidated in the imaginary a new archetype of popular fiction: “The
pimp
, the pimp whores from the suburbs. The novel
Pimp
, by Iceberg Slim, is a perfect autobiographical portrait of that essential character in African-American cinema ”.
In order to rescue specific films from that “modest and testosterone-filled series B cinema”, Soler is left with “the strident pop colorism and the deranged espionage plot of
Cleopatra Jones
, starring Tamara Dobson”. Along with this personal bet, two of the classics with the best reputation of the subgenre: “
Coffy
, starring an icon, Pam Grier, and
Algodón en Harlem
”. The first, directed by high-octane action film stuntman Jack Hill, chronicles the double life of a nurse who spends her nights killing heroin dealers. And the second, would come to be a precursor of the genre, adaptation of a novel by Chester Himes. For Jordi Picatoste, “it is a minor film beyond its pioneer status. It is violent and sexual, like almost all the subgenre, but it lowers the dose of the novel both in one thing and in the other ”. He stays with
Superfly,
"If only to immortalize a performance by the great Curtis Mayfield before he suffered the accident that left him a quadriplegic", although he is quick to say that the film seems to him, at times, "loose and heavy."
For Manuel Valencia, the specialist consulted who feels the greatest enthusiasm for the genre,
Black Dracula
and
Foxy Brown
are his two main
blaxploitation
films
: "They have aged, bursting into a thousand pieces any subsequent era and any cinematographic stigma".
Poster for 'Cleopatra Jones' (Warner Bros), starring Tamara Dobson.John Kisch Archive / Getty Images
In recent years, cinema made by African Americans (a tradition that, as Navarro points out, “goes back to the silent films of between 1909 and 1914 and already had isolated pioneers of such interest as Oscar Micheaux”) experiences a strong boom that It has resulted in a remarkable retrospective interest in
blaxploitation
. The renewed validity of the racial question in the United States, according to Picatoste, has brought films that go in very different directions, "such as
Moonlight
,
Fences
,
Black Panther
or
The mother of the blues
." And in recent years a late sequel to
Shaft
(2019) and one to
Superfly have been released.
(2018), However, the true heritage of gender must be sought, in his opinion, "in Quentin Tarantino, who is the one who amplifies gender and vindicates it whenever he can, because it is part of his sentimental education."
Contemporary tributes such as
Jackie Brown
and
Unchained Django
are owed to him
, which are not
blaxploitation
in the strict sense, but are nourished by that universe and its referents. For Lucas Soler, "action and comedy productions starring blacks and nostalgic operations such as
Yo soy
Dolemite
(2019), with Eddie Murphy", show that the shadow of old Harlem is long, that in those vibrant and turbulent years an earthquake was generated which still produces replicas today. Navarro invites you to “trace and recognize the imprint of those films from five decades ago in interesting samples of contemporary African-American cinema such as
Nosotros
,
Antebellum
or
Let me out
”.
And Valencia ends with a forceful phrase: “Good things never go out of style.
Black power!
”.
The movie poster for 'Scream Blacula Scream', the horror sequel to Blacula's blaxploitation, starring William Marshall, Pam Grier and Bernie Hamilton, 1973. John D. Kisch / Separate Cinema Ar / Getty Images
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