Word: sweetback
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Panther, the new film directed by Mario Van Peebles (New Jack City) from a screenplay by his father Melvin (Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song), is indeed a movie: an earnest, naive, fitfully engrossing film with urgent performances and a final plot twist that stretches credulity to the snapping point. But because the subject is the Black Panther Party for Self Defense-the notorious cadre of black radicals that incited and attracted much of the '60s edgiest violence-Panther is more than a movie. It's the cause of raucous dispute, a chance for opening and licking old wounds about...
...Abbey Lincoln, a film portraying the difficulties of family life in the segregated South. The well-developed characters showed that stories about African-Americans could be done without reducing the complexity of their lives to easy formulas. As the glitter-ridden elevator-shoed '70s dawned, the seminal "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song" sparked what would become the Blaxploitation era of filmmaking. Since then, Black film has gone on to be characterized by mainstream stars such as Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy and more recently by independent filmmakers such as Charles Burnett, Spike Lee, Ernest Dickerson, Julie Dash, John...
...Peebles leaves Sweetback, metaphor for the "Black Community," no one to depend upon but himself--and the protagonist seems to prefer it that way. He is the original tough, self-reliant, badass Black...
...Sweetback performs for a white audience, and they love it--until he challenges their authority. The story's the same for Van Peebles. Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song was a success, but the director's later work has been ignored. Hollywood exppropriated his style but not his message, when it created the blaxploitation genre. It took a new wave of independent filmmakers to bring the real Sweetback back to cinema...
...film series "Black Cinema After Sweetback" recognizes this influence both in its title and in its format. The series began with Sweetback and will be moving to the blaxploitation films of the 70s and to the Black film renaissance of the 80s. Highlights include House Party (directed by Harvard graduate Reginald Hudlin) and several films...