![]() That type of exploitation largely burned itself out by the end of the decade, but the energy didn’t disappear completely and it re-emerged in a flood of movies by young Black filmmakers in the early ’90s. That anger, engendering an act of refusal, fuelled blaxploitation even as the genre was appropriated by corporations who recognized the profit potential in an untapped, unserved Black audience, but as often as not the revolutionary impulse disappeared and the idea of a criminality inherent to Black communities reinforced the stereotype of Black people menacing the dominant society. Agent Carver explains the structure of the West Coast cocaine trade In Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971), Van Peebles has no interest in being admitted into mainstream society – he instead wants to tear it down. ![]() Caught between that image of criminality and its mirror in non-threatening submission, there was little room for a fully autonomous identity and so the anger of a filmmaker like Van Peebles came to be expressed through a ferocious embrace of violence as a response to repression, not as criminal transgression but as a revolutionary act. Whether subconscious or not, there was always an implicit recognition that the brutalization of People of Colour inevitably engendered a threat to white dominance – a recognition which still plagues American society – and in an endless cycle, the fear of a reaction to this brutalization generates further brutality, justified by the projection of criminality onto all Black people. Agent Carver (Charles Martin Smith) persuades Russell to go undercoverĮven this liberal project couldn’t overcome centuries of prejudice and the fear of Blackness which was a corollary of repression. Rather than being afforded full autonomy, these characters were still seen as Other but no longer as a threat to a complacent white certainty of natural dominance. But what might be seen as best intentions were nonetheless hugely problematic in films like Kramer’s The Defiant Ones (1958) and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) or Ralph Nelson’s Lilies of the Field (1963), where an apparent attempt to bring Black characters into the mainstream actually sought to reassure white audiences that those who had long been depicted as the menacing Other were actually not dangerous at all. Things improved only superficially as post-war liberalism took tentative steps to acknowledge the presence of People of Colour in post-war American society, most significantly perhaps in the work of Stanley Kramer. (Cory Curtis) watches his father (Glynn Turman) die In Hollywood, Black roles were largely relegated to servants and comic relief when not being presented in monstrously racist terms as in Birth of a Nation (1915) or patronizingly racist terms as in Gone With the Wind (1939). From Oscar Micheaux and others working with tiny budgets far from the mainstream in the 1930s and ’40s to radical filmmakers like Melvin Van Peebles and Bill Gunn whose work in the early ’70s unleashed the flood of blaxploitation in that decade, Black Cinema stood in opposition to a society which was at pains to repress and contain Black experience. in Bill Duke’s Deep Cover (1992)īlack Cinema has always, inevitably, been political. Laurence Fishburne as conflicted cop Russell Stevens Jr.
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