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In the 1974 film Foxy Brown, all the brothers
gather round as Foxy Brown (Pam Grier) comes to
town.
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The 1974 ad campaign for Foxy Brown sums up the kitsch attraction behind blaxploitation cinema: "Pam Grier is a chick with drive who don't take no jive." One of blaxploitation's super-heroines, Grier did whatever it took to right the many on-screen wrongs in her life. She drove cars into houses, pulled shotguns from behind her back and stuck razor blades in her Afro, just in case someone grabbed her by the hair. Other heroines followed, like Tamara Dobson (Cleopatra Jones) and Gloria Hendry (Black Belt Jones), but Grier remains blaxploitation's top Wonder Woman.
It's been years since her last action-heroine performance and Grier has been relegated to character actress status. At the same time, blaxploitation has been tossed onto the movie genre trash pile, sharing the heap with splatter horror, kung fu and biker films.
British filmmaker Isaac Julien aims to boost blaxploitation's critical credentials with his documentary BaadAsssss Cinema, airing Saturday on the Independent Film Channel. Using a crisscross selection of archival film footage and quotes from the various members of the blaxploitation family, from football player-turned-actor Fred Williamson, directors Quentin Tarantino and Larry Cohen to film critic Elvis Mitchell, Julien paints blaxploitation movies like Foxy Brown and Black Caesar in a less kitschy light. BaadAsssss Cinema boasts behind-the-scenes footage of Gordon Parks Sr. working alongside composer Isaac Hayes on 1971's Shaft. Grier defends her role as blaxploitation's leading sexual heroine. Through the film, Julien re-evaluates blaxploitation movies in an attempt to move the genre beyond the 1970s and the United States. The danger is that an overly critical evaluation of cult cinema is enough to squeeze the fun out of it.
BaadAsssss Cinema shows two sides to the blaxploitation story. Melvin Van Peebles, director of Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, the 1971 film credited with launching the blaxploitation movement, promotes films like Superfly and Shaft as deep, profound works of revolutionary politics. Others deride them as crass exploitation. During the blaxploitation heyday, NAACP, CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) and the Rev. Jesse Jackson led protests against these films. Speaking recently from London, Julien says he understands both blaxploitation camps.
"All of these films were directed toward the black audience," Julien says. "They were cheaply made. So, in its truest sense, they are B movies. But Sweet Sweetback is really an art film, in fact, the quintessential avant-garde film. While they're B movies in a cultural sort of way, I think it's unfair to call Shaft and Super Fly B movies."
Films like The Mack and Shaft's Big Score! found their core audiences in downtown movie theaters, alongside the porn arcades in New York City's Times Square, on Broadway in downtown Los Angeles and nestled in Chicago's Loop. These were theaters where audiences could talk back to the screen without hesitation. The fury and suffering felt by a hero like Shaft spoke to audiences looking for a one-way ticket to a better life.
Julien sums up blaxploitation's politics like this: "Blaxploitation came on the heels of the Black Panther movement and increased discussion about Black Power," he says. "The hero is a persistent theme in American culture, but blaxploitation films are about black heroes who are provocative and unapologetic. These are not goody-goody-two-shoes movies."
Beneath the pimp fashions and frank sexual content, blaxploitation movies address issues of gender, race and patriotism. Integral to the post-Vietnam War, post-civil rights atmosphere affecting America, blaxploitation gave a new voice to dreams, tensions and anxieties facing the black community. As Van Peebles says in the film, "(With Sweet Sweetback) I was giving black folk a sense of self that I think had been stolen from them."
Van Peebles discusses blaxploitation like a historic show-biz relic. On the other hand, Julien uses BaadAsssss Cinema as a means to connect past movies like Hell Up in Harlem and Foxy Brown with current Hollywood.
"I see blaxploitation as a contemporaneous genre, connected with someone like Samuel L. Jackson," he says. "I wanted to show Oscars footage of Denzel Washington and Halle Berry. I thought it was significant that their performances in Training Day and Monster's Ball were not the positive portrayals that people want to see. They were both fantastic, but also subject to criticism, like blaxploitation."
Potentially, 2002 could be a banner year for blaxploitation. On IFC, BaadAsssss Cinema jump-starts a four-day series featuring blaxploitation films. Trash, Jacques Boyreau's slick new coffee table book, celebrates the poster art of cult movies, including blaxploitation titles. Later this month, Jackie Brown, Tarantino's blaxploitation-inspired drama, is re-released as a special Collector's Edition DVD.
Granted, a mainstream comedy like Undercover Brother pounds a nail in the blaxploitation coffin when it unloads familiar and reassuring jokes about its black hero. At the same time, actor Vin Diesel's multi-racial, extreme sports spy in XXX is a welcome, trans-cultural tweak on the blaxploitation hero.
For its audiences, BaadAsssss Cinema acts as a launching pad for revisiting past blaxploitation titles. For Julien, his research provided the material for a video installation set to debut in Baltimore in 2003.
"Speaking as a filmmaker, I know that I'm no longer the snob I used to be concerning blaxploitation," Julien says. "Blaxploitation movies no longer exist as part of a distinct black cinema, but maybe we don't need them in that way. Actually, maybe we don't deserve them."
BAADASSSSS CINEMA and the Independent Film Channel tribute to Blaxploitation films of the 1970s air through Saturday.
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