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1. 1 2018-08-15T08:02:42-07:00 Phil Ethington e37d40405599cccc3b6330e6c4be064cc03ef7a5 1970s Phil Ethington 3 Decadal Tag vistag 2018-08-15T08:04:06-07:00 Phil Ethington e37d40405599cccc3b6330e6c4be064cc03ef7a5

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• 1 media/IMG_4542_sm.jpg 2018-07-31T17:34:19-07:00 Phase II: Defiance, Resistance to Police Violence, and Ghetto Pride, 1971-1980s 8 image_header 2019-06-05T15:44:55-07:00 Stunningly fast, "Black Cinema" took a radical and militant turn, from the integrationist movies of Poitier's career, to a militant, picaresque, ghetto-realism in the work of Melvin Van Peebles and Gordon Parks, Jr.
  
  "Dedicated to all the Brothers and the Sisters who have had enough of the Man." Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, independently produced in 1971 by the experimental musician and artist Melvin Van Peebles, inspired two generations of filmmakers with its artistic audacity and anti-Hollywood positioning. 
  
  Although he had an advance contract to develop three films for Columbia Pictures, Van Peebles could not persuade any major studio to produce this audicious film, so he financed it independently.  Significantly, one of his principal backers was Bill Cosby, whose $50,000 loan proved crucial to the project.  Shot on very low budget, Van Peebles improvised and acted the central character himself.  The film is very pornographic, only possible thanks to the fall of American censorship.  Indeed, it is widely recognized that Van Peebles and his co-stars performed unsimulated sex.  The hero, Sweet Sweetback (in street slang of the sex workers, that translates to Sweet Cock) is portrayed at two ages: as a minor (Mario Van Peebles the director's son, aged 14 at the time) the young towel boy who is raped by the female sex workers for whom he works, and then as a adult male sex worker (Melvin Van Peebles, shown mid-coitus in the arms of the same gal during the title credits). Sweet Sweetback follows the classic picaresque genre: the confession of a street hoodlum, who has a moral tale to tell.  
  
  In the plot, two central characters battle the LA Police: Sweetback and Mu-Mu, a Black Panther.  Together, they escape custody when Sweetback beats two LAPD officers unconscious.  Sweetback is later harbvored by the Hells Angels, whose leader is a white woman, has sex with him in front of the entire gang.  The film is about as defiant as one could imagine for the year 1971, at the height of the Nixon Administration.  
  
  At the very same time, the great photographer Gordon Parks, 1912-2006) and his son,  Gordon Parks Jr. (1934-1979), created an entire genre of Black Nationalist, proud-ghetto, masculine, urban superhero movies, beginning with Shaft, 1971, starring Richard Roundtree as an underworld crime-fighter.  In quick succession, Parks Jr. wrote and directed Superfly (1972) and Parks senior wrote and directed the sequel to Shaft, Shaft's Big Score (1972).  In two short years the poorly-named  "blaxploitation" genre had taken-off.  The term suggests that the tough life of African Americans in poor and crime-ridden neighborhoods for the entertainment and profit of whites, but the content of these films is overwhelmingly defiant, nationalist, and aggressive against the growing "carceral state," in which big-city political departments militarized their tactics and weaponry, and imposed a literal police state on the urban core of every major American city, from New York to Los Angeles.
  
  
  C.   Shaft, (1971) Gordon Parks Superfly (1972)  Gordon Parks Jr. Note on Parks Jr death 1979
  Shaft's Big Score (1972) Gordon Parks