Blaxploitation, Baby!

For Odie Henderson, the author of Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras: A History of Blaxploitation Cinema, that launch was more of a one-two punch: Sweetback first, a major box-office smash in the spring of 1971, and then, a few weeks later, Gordon Parks’s Shaft, another immediate hit. Both game-changers will screen at New York’s Film Forum as part of the sixteen-film series Blaxploitation, Baby!, which opens on Friday and runs through August 22.

The series is dedicated to Donald Bogle, whose numerous books include the 1973 classic Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, and more recently, Hollywood Black. Bogle programmed the world’s first blaxploitation festival at Film Forum in 1995, and he, too, traces the genre’s roots back to Sweetback, which he’s called “an open declaration of war on pushers, turncoats, and especially The Man.”

Van Peebles himself plays a virile stud in a sex show who races from Los Angeles to Mexico to escape a couple of racist cops threatening to frame him for a crime he didn’t commit. As a director, Van Peebles’s “use of solarization, multiple exposures, superimpositions, asynchronous editing, self-reflexive direct address, freeze-frames, and modal shifts from fiction to ethnography demonstrates the work of an artist versed in European art cinema, the underground cinema of the avant-garde, and Black cultural politics,” writes Gillespie. “Indeed, the film should be thought of as a culmination of Van Peebles’s artistic life up to that point, as an independent and studio filmmaker, an expatriate writer of French novels and comics, a composer, and a playwright.”

Shaft was directed by one of the greatest photographers of the mid-twentieth century. Parks’s range spanned from fashion shoots for Vogue to revelatory photo essays on the Jim Crow South and portraits of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and Muhammad Ali for Life. With The Learning Tree (1969), Parks became the first Black American director to make a Hollywood studio film, and he “delivered a coming-of-age story that showed African American life as it had never been seen by wider audiences before, and it was a quiet revolution of its own kind,” writes Amy Abugo Ongiri. “But Shaft was different.”

With a killer soundtrack by Isaac Hayes and starring the late Richard Roundtree as John Shaft, a street-smart New York detective battling both the Mafia and Harlem gangsters, Shaft “was a pure offering of love to Black audiences, even beyond its extraordinary main character,” writes Ongiri. “With this film, Parks didn’t just tweak the detective genre with an empowered Black hero; instead, he centered Blackness to reimagine a genre that in the past had associated whiteness with justice, law, and order but that he turned on its head to expose its racial politics—profoundly disrupting the inherent white supremacy that had undergirded it.”

Parks’s son, Gordon Parks Jr., directed the film that Henderson considers to be the Citizen Kane of its genre, Super Fly (1972). “One of the characteristics that makes Super Fly a valid contender for the top of the blaxploitation heap is its shocking amorality,” writes Henderson in an excerpt from Black Caesars at RogerEbert.com. “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song had a similar viewpoint, but its hero eventually realized that the community took precedence over his individual needs. Super Fly posits the exact opposite: Youngblood Priest’s (Ron O’Neal) actions are done solely for self, with no regard for his fellow man. Gordon Parks Jr.’s film forces the viewer into making a potentially fraught decision about its protagonist. Rooting for him is an act of capitalistic complicity; rooting against him is siding with the corrupt system that made his hustle necessary.”

On Friday, Henderson will introduce a screening of Foxy Brown (1974), which will be followed later the same evening by Coffy (1973), the film many consider to be the superior collaboration between director Jack Hill and perhaps the icon of blaxploitation, Pam Grier. Henderson will also introduce screenings of Gilbert Moses’s Willie Dynamite (1974) and Larry Cohen’s Black Caesar (1973), and on Saturday, Melissa Lyde, the founder of Alfreda’s Cinema, a long-running Black video art series, will introduce Jonathan Kaplan’s Truck Turner (1974), starring Isaac Hayes as a bounty hunter, Yaphet Kotto as a pimp, and Nichelle Nichols as a hard-driving madam. Reviewing Truck Turner for the Village Voice, George Morris found that it had “a moral and emotional center that is conspicuously absent in most blaxploitationers.”