Week #5--Challenging Revamped Stereotypes of Blacks in Hollywood

As gathered from last week’s screenings of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and the documentary Baadasssss Cinema, films marketed towards a predominantly Black audience in the ‘70s marked an abrupt shift from previous presentations of Black people onscreen. As America’s social fabric was changing due to the magnification of economic and social disparities along the lines of race and class, Hollywood unintelligently presented itself as a refuge for escapism, distributing long-dated genre films such as musicals, westerns and romantic comedies. The film industry’s inability to transform its practices also illustrated how inadequate it was to present images of Black people that were a departure from the prevalent stereotypes displayed throughout American cinema. While Sidney Poitier was, and still stands as, a trailblazer in becoming a dominant leading man of African descent, people responded to his presence as sterile and accommodating, even if as Mr. Tibbs he slapped a plantation owner in In the Heat of the Night. Black audiences were most critical about how Poitier’s characters were presented as asexual, something that was completely disrupted by Melvin Van Peebles’ portrayal as Sweetback. The character’s transformation from a complicit sex laborer to someone actively escaping his situation can be read as a transitional point in how the Black male lead is portrayed in American cinema.
But while Black men were depicted onscreen as physically and sexually aggressive, unflinching in the presence of authority, and able to survive to the end of the movie, these portrayals would themselves present new stereotypes. In spite of making his film as explicitly political as it was violent and sexual, he still faced criticism, particularly from Haile Gerima. Gerima took Van Peebles to task for creating a character that prompts vicarious thrills rather than political consciousness, as well as presenting physical recklessness as legitimate political resistance. Black male leads in blaxploitation films would be read as the contemporary version of the Black buck, whose virility is as carnally desired by women as it is threatening to men, justifying why he must be controlled or terminated. By emulating their male counterparts, Black female leads would reduce active resistance to patriarchy to nothing more than a brutal revenge fantasy.
A collective of aspiring Black filmmakers who attended UCLA, the Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers, had access to both education, resources, and correspondence with filmmakers and theorists throughout the African and Latino/a diaspora that was rarely available to the previous generation of Black independent filmmakers. They saw their counterparts, the Black filmmakers and actors in mainstream films, as confined by structures in both storytelling and industry practices that offered illusory empowerment. As film scholar Ed Guerrero remarked in Baadasssss Cinema, the era of blaxploitation films stood as nothing more than a cultural moment. The filmmakers and actors did not benefit from bringing the film industry out of a long economic slump. Even the most famous performers of this era were not able to find consistent work until nearly two decades later.
The filmmakers from the L.A. School took heed of how they felt Hollywood saw Blacks in the film industry as expendable, and they wanted their films to demonstrate a commitment to their community through their narratives, their filmmaking process and how they circulated their films. Much like the filmmakers of FEPACI, they wanted control over their own ideas and resources, which could only be possible working outside of the system. Their work displays the consequences of using impulsive force to settle matters, the gender and generational conflicts that exists in the Black community, the deterioration of economic opportunity, and the confining presence of excessive monitoring by systematic structures that represent government bureaucracy and law enforcement. In terms of form, these filmmakers, like Oscar Micheaux, relied on non-linear narratives to privilege Black characters, yet, unlike their predecessor(s), their training in film school enabled them to master their craft in spite of using substandard film equipment.
As you think of Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep while preparing your blog entries, consider the similarities and differences with other films we’ve seen in class this semester, in terms of form and content. What is emphasized in Burnett’s film that differs from those other films, in both his filmmaking style and the characters in the film? What commentary does Killer of Sheep offer about the state of the Black community that goes further than what is offered in either Sweetback or Murder in Harlem, or any film outside of class you can think of? How does Burnett’s essay, as well as his interview with bell hooks, inform us about his approach?
If there is something to learn from the presence of the L.A. School of Black Filmmakers in American cinema, it is that it isn’t so much about increasing the number of Black people in the film industry as it is about more control over telling one’s stories and offering a more diverse portrayal of African American life, whether it be realistically or fictionally. While the output of African American films through Hollywood may somewhat reflect the racial demographics of the country, something that this observation overlooks is that in the interest of making a profit off of a particular demographic, industry executives can be audacious enough to assume authority that they know more about a population they have no engagement with than to whom they are trying to market their products. Such approaches in both film and music present a detrimental scenario in which those populations comfortably place authority in the hands of gatekeepers in the culture industry because of the power they possess (as evident in a film being screened in the Union Theatre in December, Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes). Throughout the semester, it is important to understand how the film industry, or cultural production in general, becomes a battleground for not only how images are presented, but also cultural expression.

Ms. Grier over the years

As I watched Pam Grier in Bad Ass Cinema speaking about her roles in Blaxploitation films, and her later role as Jackie Brown, I remembered that recently (or in the past 3 years)she took on the role as sister to one the main characters in a HBO miniseries about lesbian life called the L-Word. The interesting connection is that that Grier (and mind you I haven't seen Foxy Brown or Jackie Brown outside of what we saw in class) was and still is taking roles that are somewhat independent of mainstream Hollywood ideals, or you might call them mildly edgy, but far from revolutionary. The L-word is as revolutionary to lesbians as Foxy Brown or Shaft seemed to have been for Van Peebles and others working for real change in cinema and representation. Blaxploitation films gave African American audiences the images that they deserved to see, and actors, the jobs that they deserved, but Hollywood with Blaxpoitation films like with HBO and queer life will eventually discard what they deem too edgy or thought provoking. I'm not sure if the show on HBO is still being produced, but there was a time in which queer people craved that imagery but sadly were disappointed with the product.