Instructor: Walter Metz

Blaxploitation and Anti-Blaxploitation

When last we left off talking about race in American cinema, I presented critiques of 1950s Westerns (1956's The Searchers) for endorsing what I have called the discourse of liberal assimilationism with respect to race. That is, the films’ ideological project is to argue for the necessity of African-American people to fit themselves into the dominant (i.e., white) American culture. This project necessarily entails equating the "race problem" in America with African-Americans, not with the inherent institutional racism of American culture. In practice, this liberal assimilationist project focused on defining the proper role for African-Americans as one of passivity. That is, an angry, rebellious African-American was fundamentally non-assimilable, so representational roles needed to be constructed which passified the African-American subject.

Race in Early New Hollywood Films

We can see this project of passification in full bloom during the early days of New Hollywood. American films about race became more and more frequent in the post-war era, so that by the 1960s (surely a massive representational response to the Civil Rights Movement), race was one of the major pre-occupations of American cinema. However, during this early 1960s period, liberal assimilationism still precluded much other thinking about race in American films.

The liberal assimilationist Hollywood film developed all sorts of strategies for passifying the African-American subject

1. An essentialist strategy of defining blackness as maternal

CLIP #1: The Defiant Ones (Stanley Kramer, 1958): Ending (Poitier cradles Curtis)

2. The liberal white hero speaks for the passive African-American

CLIP #2: To Kill a Mockingbird (Richard Mulligan, 1960): Attacus’ defense speech

3. Defining assimilable African-Americans as perfect rather than flawed humans like the rest of us

CLIP #3: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (Stanley Kramer, 1967): Ending (Tracy’s speech)

Race in Early 1960s Independent Cinema

The rise of an Independent American Cinema in the early 1960s opened up the space for an exploration of the "race problem" from a different point-of-view, though one still associated with white filmmakers, it should be mentioned.

The Independent American Cinema presented different issues than those in the mainstream Hollywood assimilationist cinema

1. The Problem of Passing

CLIP #4: Shadows (John Cassavetes, 1959): The boyfriend discovers his girlfriend is black

2. "Economic Racism"

Race in the Hollywood Renaissance

The films of the American Renaissance began to grapple with racial issues in ways that moved beyond the liberal assimilationism of post-war Hollywood. The independent, low-budget film, Night of the Living Dead continues the more artistic explorations of race in the Cassavetes and Clark films on an exploitation level within the horror genre. As Richard Dyer argues in his article, "White," Night of the Living Dead reverses typical racist representational strategies, linking whiteness to death and the grotesque. The film’s most direct moment, the end, has a white vigilante mob kill the hero of the film, Ben, the African-American. The hand-held, gritty realism of the moment links the imagery to televised coverage of the white mobs in the South punishing Civil Rights marchers.

In the late 1960s, as part of what Thomas Schatz calls the "American Film Renaissance," Hollywood began making films targeted to specific niche markets. As I argued in the previous lecture, there are two ways of interpreting this moment: a) as a period which resulted in unprecendented artistic experiementation in American cinema; or b) as a hollow and crass Hollywood marketing ploy which merely "threw a bone" to subcultural audiences to make a profit. The Blaxploitation film, a film made at a Hollywood studio in the late 1960s and early 1970s for a specifically urban, African-American audience, offers a worthy case study for sorting out these competing definitions of the Hollywood Renaissance.

1. The Hollywood Renaissance as a period of experimentation

Hollywood in the late 1960s began to hire African-American talent for work behind the cameras for the first time in its history. In particular, African-American men were allowed to direct Hollywood films for a brief time in the early 1970s. The work of Melvin Van Peebles strikes me as the most successful of these films. Van Peebles was hired by Columbia in 1970 to direct a comedy about a middle-class white man who wakes up one day black. Watermelon Man, the film which resulted, is one of the Hollywood Renaissance films which most aggressively imports the aesthetic traditions of modernism to tell its story.

Screening:  Watermelon Man (Melvin Van Peebles, 1970, 97 min)

2. The Hollywood Renaissane as a crass marketing ploy

However, unlike Watermelon Man, most of the blaxploitation films that Hollywood made merely added black characters to traditional Hollywood genre films. For example, many of the most successful blaxploitation films offered trite detective/gangster plots in which the black characters were played the hero detectives. This is the critique of blaxploitation cinema that Richard Wesley offers in his essay, "Which Way the Black Film."

1. The Complexity of the Ideological Practices of the Blaxploitation Film

It seems to me that a thorough understanding of the blaxploitation film does not result in the films falling into either one of these two categories. Instead, the films tend to be incredibly complicated in terms of their ideological stance. Consider the case of Superfly, a film which Wesley dismisses as exploitative and shallow. The film radically posits that it is the white police force that is the problem, and Priest, the character who in a traditional Hollywood film would be the crook, turns out to be the hero.

CLIP #8: Superfly (Gordon Parks Jr., 1972): Ending (Priest makes the Big Score)

However, at the same time, the film wallows in the individual success of its hero, not in the social transformation of the community. The film outright ridicules the black militants who are trying to achieve such a transformation.

CLIP #9: Superfly: Priest tells off the black militants

Thus, as much as Superfly presents the logic of separatism in defiance of assimilationism, it still stops short of moving beyond Hollywood’s worship of the power of the individual. Superfly has no vision to offer of how to achieve widespread social change.

2. Blaxploitation and Gender

Very often, blaxploitation is discussed only in terms of its representation of African-Americans. One of the lessons of recent critical theory is that our lives are defined by complicated, overlapping intersections of identity political issues. That is, being white or black is only one facet of who we are. Blaxploitation films implicitly produce narratives about gender in the midst of their more explicit exploration of race.

Blaxploitation films typically replicate dominant stereotypes about African-American sexuality, despite the films’ purported intentions to alter the representation of African-Americans. For example, one of the most common strategies of these films is to celebrate the black male’s sexual conquest of a white woman. The film thus works to re-inforce, not dismantle, the racist supposition that black male sexuality is bestial, and a threat to white womanhood.

CLIP #10: Shaft: Shaft scores with the white woman

However, some blaxploitation films perform work on race and gender that is very surprising. In a culture that generally ignores the black woman except as an icon of long-suffering maternal resiliance, Foxy Brown and the other films of Pam Grier position her as an empowered character who ends the film with discursive authority.

CLIP #11: Foxy Brown (Jack Hill, 1974): Foxy takes control of the white phallus

3. Blaxploitation vs. Anti-Blaxploitation: A Generic Approach

As I defined it above, using the case of Shaft, blaxploitation filmmaking is usually seen as a facile substitution of black characters into a traditional Hollywood genre. Some blaxploitation films began to revise their generic material to explore the abuses of African-Americans in these generic traditions. Such films I will call "anti-blaxploitation" films. As just one generic example, I will use the case of the vampire film, a subgenre of the horror film. In the case of Blacula, Hollywood produced a typical blaxploitation film, in which the Dracula monster in this film just happens to be black.

CLIP #12: Blacula (William Crain, 1972): Ending

However, Bill Gunn set out to make his black vampire film about issues pertaining to the systemic empovishment of the black community. In his creation, the anti-blaxploitation film, Ganja and Hess, the black vampire is evil because he is a successful middle-class African-American businessman who preys on the black underclass. Here, vampirism becomes linked to class oppression, where the black middle-class is literally responsible for the draining the life out of the empoverished blacks who live in the ghetto.

CLIP #13: Ganja and Hess (Bill Gunn, 1973): Dr. Green preys on the black working class

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This page was last updated on May 30, 2001

Questions or Comments? Please phone me at (406) 994-6403 or send e-mail to:  metz@montana.edu

Walter Metz, Department of Media and Theatre Arts, Montana State University--Bozeman