Word: sweetback
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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...
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...
...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...