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-from Informaworld - Taylor & Francis
"Journal for the study of race, nation and culture"
Holdings: 1996-
This review is very important to understand the timeline, context, and ultimate consequences of Hollywood’s blaxploitation movement, started by the independent film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. The Hollywood films that followed, like 1971's Superfly and Shaft, portrayed a black urban fantasy. In the case of Superfly, it is a heroic cocaine dealer who ends up using his “ghetto smarts” to outsmart “the Man” while confiding his despair in accepting that the only way for him to “make it” is to sell coke. As his partner says, “it’s the hand ‘the Man’ dealt us.” In the case of Shaft, there is the idea of an in-your-face sexual, cocky, hip black private detective that is embraced by white culture as the new black "answer." Comical to white viewers but dangerously desireable to black viewers. Both films – and the blaxploitation genre in general – exploit the black fantasy that with the “ghetto smarts” and current culture of drug dealing and other criminal activity at their disposal, they can outsmart and ultimately defeat “the Man.” Sweetback helped create and perpetuate this myth with a black folk hero that kills two cops who were beating up a young Black Panther that eventually emerges victorious when he escapes to Mexico. Are we supposed to cheer? The exploitation of this black fantasy – blaxploitation – has created this myth that ultimately holds down black urban culture. When violence against authority and drug dealing are glorified with a sense of pride, the actual impact on the community takes a back seat to the fantasy of the ghetto revolution. Mario Van Peebles’ New Jack City ironically shows the damage on the black community from his father’s ghetto lifestyle glorification. It shows how the liberating feeling of making a blaxploitation film paradoxically imprisoned millions of urban youths in a fantasy that has no bearing or practical use in the real world.
Corliss, Richard. "The 25 Most Important Films on Race: Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971)." Time Magazine Online. 04 Feb. 2008. . New York: 2008.
In a listing about the 25 most important films on race, Richard Corliss arrives at Melvin Van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. This time, over 35 years after its release, its context and place in film history is no clearer now than in 1971. While the Black Panthers used it as a mandatory recruiting video (a la the KKK with Birth of a Nation), Ebony Magazine denounced it. The wide range of responses and reactions seemed to be all on one extreme side of the spectrum or the other. However, Corliss acknowledges three matters that are undebateable: nothing had been seen like it before in a commercial theater, it "instantly shifted the dominant tone of black films from liberal to anarchist, from uplifting message movies to fables of ghetto smarts and stickin' it to the man," and it was an "out-of-nowhere hit," creating the new genre of blaxploitation. Corliss explains why Van Peebles himself was the anti-Sidney Poitier, a black hero that was too threatening and sexual to be allowed on screen. Van Peebles didn't care what whites felt about his film and that liberated him in a way that no Hollywood studio film had ever been liberated. The film even used child pornography (with Van Peebles' son Mario having sex with an adult woman) and because of all these factors, Corliss concludes it is impossible to analyze without some sort of bias.
This article is important and relevant because it finally places Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song into its several historical contexts without needing to provide clarity over which context is "right". Corliss understands the polarization of views this film has caused, as evidenced in the opening paragraph: "Libaration or exploitation? Radical politics or violent nihilism? Mature sexuality or child pornography? Modernist narrative or incoherent narrative? Trailblazer or piece of crap?" All of those views are right in a way, because when reviewing a film, the subjective experience is all that matters. You can never be wrong about an opinion on a film, so long as you have some piece of evidence to back up your claims. With an abrasive, in-your-face movie like Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, it seems that everybody was caught off guard and gave their instinctual reaction. In a cinematic climate where critical reviews and trailers create expectations that almost predetermine a filmgoers' reaction to an extent, the release of this film, outside the traditional Hollywood avenues, created a genuine experience for a variety of viewers. As one might expect, the reaction was just as varied.
Like any artists from marginalized groups, Black directors have to find a balance between demonstrations of political and social consciousness and expression of artistry, what Stan Brakhage calls the “aesthetic ecology.” This is particularly difficult, especially for artists who, dealing with a structure of domination, feel pressed to “assume responsibility for producing resisting image.” This appeal is moreover enhanced by the need to fill out the vacuum in the depiction of black subjects.
The threatening phenomenon is the instauration of a racial essentialism which compels artists to obsessionally focus on their environment. As a consequence, there are real difficulties to break with the dominant cinematographic discourse which maintains, even subtly, racist aesthetic and status quo.
In this article, Bell Hooks addresses the tremendous problems faced by directors when trying to escape from a racially defined dominant aesthetics. It provides insight on the difficulties of challenging and reformulating the representation of Black people at the movies. In this sense, it is directly linked to Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, which uses stereotypes as a mean to reject the racial paradigms of institutionalized cinema. Van Peebles’ film appears as one of the first attempts to challenge the dominant discourse and propose a rich and transformative alternative aesthetic to the self-reinforcing dominant discourse.
Call#: Van Pelt Library F869.L89 N4158 2006
Rotker asked about five major SEWRPC technical advisory committees, where policy recommendations eventually approved by the full commission are first formulated with help from staff and consultants.
11/21/97
Episode 84
A parable of politics and race in America. The story of Chicago's first black mayor, Harold Washington, told on the anniversary of his death. We first broadcast on the tenth anniversary of his death and reran this on the 11th. Washington died November 25, 1987.
Act One. Yesterday. A history of the brief mayoral career of Harold Washington, and its lessons for black and white America, as told by people close to him. Many of them are activists and politicians: Lu Palmer, Judge Eugene Pincham, Congressman Danny Davis, then-alderman Eugene Sawyer. There are people from his administration--Jacky Grimshaw and Grayson Mitchell--and some reporters who followed his story: Vernon Jarrett, Monroe Anderson, Gary Rivlin, Laura Washington (who became his press secretary). Plus a few ordinary voters, and a political opponent of the late mayor. Act One continues after the break.
Act Two. The present and the future. Thoughts about why there are no black mayors in the nation's largest cities today--New York, Los Angeles, Chicago. Plus a visit to a white Chicago ward, to see if ordinary voters have learned any tolerance in the last ten years since Washington's death.
Song: "At Last" Etta James
Call#: Van Pelt Library PS153.N5 S9 1993
Call#: Van Pelt Library LC2781 .M15 2002
McCabe, Susan. Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge UP, 2005.
McCabe touches on Pabst passim. Of particular interest is her discussion of "H.D.'s unremitting admiration of Pabst--from Joyless Street to having 'vanquished the border-sphere' in Secrets of a Soul" (162). McCabe suggests that H.D. was attracted to Pabst's "feminine" film style which influenced her own film aesthetic.
Call#: Van Pelt Library PS228.R32 N54 2002
This article compares the novel, “Gone with the Wind,” with another novel written around the same time, “Absalom, Absalom!” It compares the development of male characters in the novels, Rhett Butler and Quentin Compson. Both novels focus on the aristocracy of the South as well as the Civil War and the ante-bellum south. It looks at the effects of miscegenation on both of the characters development. Both see the influence as negative and it effects how they ultimately view the South and its future.
Railton argues that few essays have focused on bother of the novels and few have focused on race within the novels. He argues that race relations are a very strong theme within both books but it is rarely dealt with in essays about the books. Railton not only compares and contrasts the development of the two male characters. He, also, examines how the two novels fit into the broader spectrum of thought in the 1930’s. He looks at how the two novels interacted with southern historical thought at the time.
This article gives some perspective into the creation of the movie. It delves into the themes of the novel which enter into the film, and gives an analysis of race that is different from many essays. The comparison with “Absalom, Absalom!” also allows for new interpretations of the film as a product of its time.
Call#: Van Pelt Library E185.8 .S53 2004
Call#: Van Pelt Library E185.8 .C77 1999