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Thomson introduces Melvin Van Peebles and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song as the answer to that problem. After detailing the production and financial troubles encountered by Van Peebles, he goes into the distribution of the film. However, because only two theaters played it on the opening weekend and nobody would advertise or review it, it was ignored by the media. Additionally, there was no publicity money left over from production, so Van Peebles had to use the "dynamite" soundtrack (recorded by then-unknown Earth Wind & Fire) in order to create awareness for his film. This was the first time that a soundtrack was used to market a film – something that is quite common now. The blaxploitation films that came after would follow suit, each with its own funky soundtrack – Shaft had Isaac Hayes, Superfly had Curtis Mayfield. The essay then describes summarizes the plot of several blaxploitation movies (since it is, after all, in a book about music).
This is relevant because it transformed the way many films are advertised. Instead of going through the traditional avenues of trailers and critical reviews, Van Peebles used funk, the music of the streets at that time, to get the message out that a corresponding movie that was just as funky was playing. With the success of the album, more distributors decided to show the film and eventually, it became the highest grossing independent film ever (at that point). Thus, the distribution and advertisement of this film serves as a reminder to the mainstream of culture's power to create an underground success based solely on word of mouth and music.
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.
This article describes the aspirations and challenges faced by writer/director Melvin Van Peebles in making his controversial independent film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. He declares his main desire for the film was to “get the Man’s foot out of [his] ass…and out of all our black asses” – in fact he originally titled the film How to Get the Man’s Foot Outta Your Ass. With that idea in mind, he made a list of requirements necessary to get his message across effectively, keeping in mind his limitations (both economic and social).
Using the basic story of a black man getting “the Man’s” foot out of his ass, Van Peebles listed “givens” in order to prevent himself from writing something he wouldn’t be able to shoot. These givens include: no copping out (a victorious film for the black man), high production value (must look as good as white independent films and thus must be in color), wall-to-wall action and entertainment (to prevent boredom and create a commercial power base so “the Man” might actually fund him if it seemed profitable), half the crew must be third world people, tight security (due to the controversy he was causing), and a flexible script to deal with the unknown variables such as caliber of actors/crew.
With this list of givens, Van Peebles describes his advantages over the major Hollywood studios in this subject matter and the possibilities he could utilize. He understood the black pulse but by seizing it, he might hurt the black cause as well. Since he realized that the more action he had, the more the mainstream audience would let him get away with, he decided to pack “enough action for three movies”, overuse screen effects, and create musical montages as space-filler. Thus, through his economic and social constraints, Van Peebles describes the process in developing Sweetback’s characteristics, characteristics that would become the standard in Hollywood’s blaxploitation wave that followed.
This article is very interesting and valuable in that it describes not only the pre-production process of the film but how those factors and considerations created the style that Hollywood would eventually emulate in their blaxploitation wave - as seen in films such as Shaft and Superfly later that year. As many directors often dream about working outside the confines and restrictions of their studio heads, this shows how one might approach such a project and the precautions one might take. It is a great example of the full auteur process in a manner that deals with a subject matter and goal not necessarily acceptable to all people.
Candy, Vincent. "Sweetback': Does It Exploit Injustice :' It's a Funny Old World'. " New York Times (1857-Current file) [New York, N.Y.] 9 May 1971,D1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851 - 2004). ProQuest. University of Pennsylvania Library, Philadelphia, PA. 9 Apr. 2008 .
Candy describes a scene from the movie where a “jaunty black shoeshine man polishes the shoe of his white customer by riding it with the seat of his pants…the white man knows he’s beign made a fool of, and yet his shoes are being shined.” By mocking the white man and himself, Candy argues that the shoeshine main maintains a “franchise on his own sovereign independce.” The film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song however, is about a black man not content with wearing a "darky grin" while engaging in subservient role-playing.
After describing the basic elements of the plot – Sweetback kills two cops and goes on a run to escape to the Mexican border - Candy describes this journey as intolerable not only due to Sweetback’s hardships along the way (including a run-in with some not-so-friendly Hells' Angels), but also due to the “visual style that substitutes film school technical complexities…for dramatic content.” The visual style of montages, wipes, and effects that would become a staple of the blaxploitation films to follow help disorient the viewer from fully immersing themselves into the scene. However, Candy is so disoriented by it that it undermines the rest of the film for him.
While this is a scathing review of what is now seen as a revolutionary independent low-budget film, it is not without its merits. Ultimately, Candy is comparing Van Peebles, not his character “Sweetback”, to the shoeshine man, performing this dance that somehow liberates himself while playing off the negative stereotypes that have plagued his race in America for hundreds of years. Given the fact that this review was made immediately following the film, while America was still entrenched in racial tensions, his non-flattering assessment is both sensible and understandable. However, by reducing Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song to such simple and absolute terms, Candy is ignoring the more important historical context of this film, a context that can perhaps only be realized through the power of hindsight.
Smiley, Tavis. "Melvin Van Peebles". Tavis Smiley. PBS. 27 May 2004. .
After some bantering where Melvin reveals he is actually “Sir Melvin” (“brother from the south side of Chicago has been knighted”), Tavis Smiley begins the interview with Melvin Van Peebles and his son Mario. Tavis asks Mario what it was like growing up in the shadow of his father, who responds saying that Melvin “never though being successful would make him forget his blackness…who he is.” They discuss Melvin growing up in an institution/industry where he is “mad at the system but not mad at the people.” Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song was therefore an indictment of the system but not necessarily everyone who functions within that system. Melvin acknowledges that all the film unions were all-white and he sought to make a film that utilizes people of all races in spite of the singular racial perspective portrayed in Sweetback. Next they talk about Mario’s film New Jack City (1991) and Mario confides that since the studio heads are all white, it’s tough to pitch a movie with complex non-white characters. More often than not, studio heads use black characters in simple way (i.e. comic relief or subservience). Thus, most of the Van Peebles’ films are done by racially mixed crews and funded by black producers. They move on to Mario losing his virginity on screen in Sweetback’s beginning at 13 years old, which Mario says was a great experience (he kept asking for retakes). The conversation continues about the paternal link between Melvin, Mario, and now Mario’s kids in his recent biopic of his father, Baadasssss (2003). After discussing how they make due with limited resources and time (Sweetback was shot in 19 days “without technology), they finish by talking about how to promote a controversial movie nobody wants to advertise.
This interview was very interesting to read because it shed light not only on some of the feelings behind the controversial production of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, but also illustrated the father-son relationship between Melvin and Mario Van Peebles. Sweetback is a film that is meant to affect the younger generation, instilling them with a sense of pride and refusal to tolerate intolerance. As this interview demonstrates, Melvin instilled his son with a sense of purpose and duty, not only to his family and race, but to under-privileged, under-utilized film crews as well. Although the character of Sweetback ultimately becomes a loner, it was the production of that film that brought people together in order to challenge society and the Hollywood system with new, provocative images and stories. As Melvin said, it was the system, not the people, that needed to be directly confronted.
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.
Bogle, Donald. "Chapter 8: The 1970s Bucks and a Black Movie Boom." Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films. Ed. 4. New York: Continuum, 2001. 231-241.
Chapter 8. The 1970s Bucks and a Black Movie Boom (p. 231-266; 231-241 relevant to film)
Film critic and NYU/Penn professor Donald Bogle (whom Spike Lee refers to as the top historian of African American film) segues from a chapter about the rise of black militants into the cinematic expression of that popular African American attitude. He recreates the setting of the early 1970s (Vietnam protests, youth movement, Black Nationalism), yet complains that the old same stereotypes “dressed in new garb to look modern, hip, provocative, and politically ‘relevant’” keep appearing.
The early 1970s marked the “age of the buck”, started by white filmmakers until it is fully explored without Hollywood hindrance by Melvin Van Peebles, the “black movie director and folk hero”, and his film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. After a short Melvin Van Peebles biography, he summarizes the plot of Sweetback, stressing the point that Sweetback does indeed escape the pursuit of the law, meeting “violence with violence in order to triumph over the corrupt white establishment.” This appeals not only to the black audience but to an emerging, revolutionary young white audience as well. The character of Sweetback answers the black public’s call for a serious, sexually assertive black protagonist. After years of asexual characters such as Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte, often relegated to subservience and/or comic relief rather than assert themselves against the establishment, Sweetback actually stands up to “the Man”.
The reception of this movie, as Bogle notes, was mixed in spite of the overwhelming commercial success. The older black generation saw it as a “daydream of triumph” while the young militants saw it as a call to revolution. Since Van Peebles made the film under the pretense of pornography, he had pretty much free reign during production and only really felt the wrath of the white establishment during distribution and eventually, public backlash. However, Bogle notes that even though this film seemed revolutionary, at the heart was the same old brutal black buck, f*cking his way out of situations with black and white women and frequently resorting to violence as a means of escape and triumph. His separation even from white counter-culturists like the Hells’ Angels in the film heeded Black Nationalist calls for separatism, striking an urban chord with its depiction of the ghetto. Bogle confides, however, that although the ghetto pimp is glamorized as the protagonist, the film “fails to explain the social conditions that made the pimp such an important figure.” Ultimately, he decides that the film is more of a social documentary than a traditional motion picture, displaying a snapshot of that tense period in race relations, ultimately formulized later that year by Hollywood's Shaft and Superfly into a more film-like structure.
Bogle is accurate in his description of the film's reception and relevance. Although he acknowledges the historical significance of the film, he also notes that it is widely misinterpreted and received over a broad spectrum of opinions. The use of the stereotypical brutal black buck as the protagonist in Sweetback undermines the film's "revolutionary" categorization, but through the overuse of action and "film school aesthetics" applied in the editing room, a profitable genre was born.
This is a very interesting analysis, especially given the fact that it came so soon after the film was released. Riley is in tune with the angry, young Black Nationalists that this film caters to and describes exactly which chords it hits and why. However, the bias of this article is quite evident. Riley seems so excited to be reviewing a film made by a black filmmaker that he has trouble criticizing even the most insignificant of fallacies. His enthusiasm is evident of that of the black populace immediately after the film’s release, and although that enthusiasm will dissipate in the coming years, this article serves as a good barometer to measure the initial impact of Sweetback on the commercial public and film industry.
However, the rise of postmodernist theory (Lyotard) challenges and criticizes the given metanarratives enforced by the mainstream discourse. Postmodernist sensibility suggests a deconstruction of any foundational conceptions of knowledge. It opposes the indoctrination, the imposing of social representations operated by the saturation of rhetoric images hidden in the cinematographic medium. By reformulating the approach to these images, post-structural discourses give way to the complexity and multiplicity of the reality.
“Film Narratives and Historical Representation” provides a theoretical understanding of the articulation of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song in its discursive and historical context. The film appears as initiating a new way of cinematic representation which breaks with the positivist dominant discourse. Through a deconstruction of the images of Black people or the use of collage/bricolage (and through maybe its French New Wave influence), Van Peebles opposes the mainstream discourse and frontally displays the complexity of the world. He presents a distinct mode of representation which allows a multiplicity in the interpretation of reality. The director abandons the former “total representation” which “solidify” any identity in a type. If not directly addressing Van Peebles’ production, Gazetas proposes a powerful theoretical perspective on the philosophical stakes raised by Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song.
The book shows the hectic context of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song’s production and the difficulties at the time to shoot an independent Black movie. With a florid language and sense of humor, Van Peebles provides a view “from within” on the conception, financing, directing, editing and distribution of his movie. Thus replacing the production of the movie in its historical framework, the book comes back to the time when Black people were depicted only through Hollywood paternalistic and racist stereotypes and when everything had to be done for an African American to be completely in control of his work. It is also a testimony of a production phase that revealed itself to be as chaotic as the movie itself.
The Chapter 6 of Gladstone L. Yearwood’s Black Film as a Signifying Practice offers an in-depth semiotic analyis of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song aesthetic. The author underlines on Van Peebles’ refusal to conform himself in Hollywood cinematic grammar. Van Peebles indeed frontally attacks the illusion perpetuated by mainstream cinema by breaking with all its techniques. To this extent, rather than laying the emphasis on the plot progress, he quasi exclusively focuses on political and ideological questions. He uses stereotypes, but only to deprive them from their consensual values to move away from them, and successively to challenge the traditional perceptions about race. This work of deconstruction of character types conventions allows a complex depiction of the reality.
In the same manner, Yearwood studies the juxtaposition of images and sounds which introduces not only singular editing techniques but also particular meanings. The director’s will to work outside of Hollywood parameters contributes to create a whole new cinematographic experience.
The author also proposes a particular understanding of the sexual question in Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. While Lerone Bennett criticized the sexual depiction of the main character, Yearwood rather sees a rupture in both social and cinematographic terms in the way sex is featured on the screen.
“Narrative Transformation in Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” provides a deep study of the film aesthetic and its subversion of the mainstream parameters. Through a dialectic analysis, the author explores the subtle and sometimes hidden meanings present in the director’s mise-en-scène and editing and reasserts the film as groundbreaking both in social and cinematographic terms.
Surowiecki, James, Making It, Transition, No. 79, 1999, 176-192
This conversation with Van Peebles offers a intimate perspective on the trajectory of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song’s director and his approach of cinema. The text begins with a presentation of the artist, underlining the multiplicity of his activities, from painter to first Black trader in Hollywood to American expatried in Europe. It explains his personal vision on the articulation of race in the United States and its interpretation on screen: in films like Watermelon Man or Sweet Sweetback, race is considered as an quasi exclusive social condition. It also sheds a new light on the singular acting of Van Peebles, whose expressionless acting was considered as especially bad. The article rather analyzes this un-expressiveness as political, a means to assert that the main character is only the product of social determinism, showing an almost Brechtian sensibility. In parallel, it also explores the influence of the French New Wave on his aesthetics.
The conversation in itself gets unto Van Peebles’ awareness of the impact of Sweet Sweetback on Black cinema with the director developing his particular considerations about the blaxploitation genre. He offers his understanding of the character of Sweetback and his trajectory and evolution throughout the movie, from an underclass passivity to political consciousness.
Later on, Van Peebles deals with his smart marketing strategy and the obstacles that he faced during the production and distribution phases, and with censorship.
This article proves to be interesting regarding Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song inasmuch as it provides rare insights of the director’s approach to his film. While Van Peebles does not like to talk about the aesthetics of his creations, here he presents certain crucial aspects of his filmmaking methods.
She particularly studies the two different classical figures embodied by Sweetback: the Trickster and the Badman. The merging of these two signifying references allows the (anti-)hero to oppose the Man – the Whites in general -, as a mythic figure struggling against oppression. The particular character of Sweetback, ambiguous and amoral, distinguishes thus himself from the unquestionable goods and villains.
The absence of linear structure in Sweet Sweetback’s Badaasssss Song (loose cohesiveness, repetition…) is also a characteristics of African American myth-making and directly contradicts the dominant Hollywood narrative form.
Van Peebles operates thus a reversal from the mainstream clean cinematographic techniques and narrative structures (linearity, typology of characters) to create a really transgressive film which relies on multiple African American storytelling characteristics. All these “signifyings”, combined with mainstream elements, tend to challenge the dominant framework of understanding cinema.
This article presents an in-depth and strongly referenced semiotic analysis of Sweet Sweetback’s Badaasssss Song which goes beyond the mere contextual understanding of the film. By studying the set of African American codes and isolating their different meanings and significances, Bates sheds a new light focused on the film itself and its relationship to African American culture.
Thirty four years after Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song’s release in the theaters, its author, director, producer, soundtrack-composer Melvin Van Peebles reviews the impact of his film , replacing it in the historical framework of the particular relationship of African Americans with the cinema industry.
Van Peebles begins with the primary inconsistent descriptions of Black people in Hollywood’s movies, from the “buffonesque” pre-war image to the moralistic figure of the “New Negro”, which hypocritically still presented the old racist and paternalistic attitude. While Black characters were more or less present , the whole cinema industry did not open itself to Black directors, actors and cinema workers. As a result, until the end of the 1960s, Black audiences did not crowd in theaters. Van Peebles’ arrival in San Francisco as a French delegate to present his first film set up a new deal by opening the studios to Black artists. However, the succeeding blaxploitation wave, if directly appealing to the African American audiences, constituted according to Van Peebles a reactionary reversal of the first “Black films” of the 1970s to maintain a status quo. The director had to wait the 1990s to see a “new wave” of young Black directors to eventually see a new “artistic diversity”, with Black directors and actors involved in every part of the cinematic landscape. The article ends with a point of view on the current state of Hollywood and the need for democratizing the production of films, now permitted by the new technologies.
“Lights, Camera & The Black Role In Movies” provides a lucid personal view “from within” about the tremendous impact of Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song on the cinema industry. It replaces the landmark movie in its historical framework and underlines the personal motivations of its director who had faced a particularly bad treatment of Black role in movies.