Word: sweetback
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Despite the spare plot, Sweetback has a lot to say. Under a veneer of sex and violence, Van Peebles is telling the story of an alienated Black underclass...
...story is simple, but not simplistic. Sweetback (Van Peebles, the director) works as a performer in a brother. He makes his living displaying his sexual prowess for a racially mixed audience. The police "borrow" him from the brothel owner to serve as a generic black suspect...
...they don't know who they're dealing with. Instead of passively standing by as they rough up a Black activist, a previously withdrawn Sweetback beats the white cops to death--using the very handcuffs that restrain...
...then he runs. The rest of Sweetback consists of a few more cop killings, a few more sexual encounters, and a lot of running. Sweetback seems to travel by foot all the way from Los Angeles to the Mexican border...
While fleeing the police, Sweetback travels through Black society, and encounters a series of stereotyped experiences. He starts with sex, dodges activism, and receives no solace from religion or drugs. And invariably, the whites, from cops to bikers to hippies...