Blaxploitation Analysis

Unlike with films of the LA Rebellion, Blaxploitation offered a portrayal of Black life that was entirely hyperbolic and often fictionalized to pull in Black audiences from poorer areas, who could not afford a television. With the insurgence of television in White American households, the movie theater was deemed a thing of the past. Families stopped going to films on a weekly basis because they had the much smaller and more convenient box at home. This prompted Hollywood to take on a more interesting approach to producing movies. With the introduction of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song in 1971, an independently produced film about a male prostitute trying to get away from the white police force who accused him of a crime he didn’t commit.

The films that followed included Shaft, Superfly (1972), Blacula (1972), Foxy Brown (1974), and many others. These films included soulful R&B soundtracks, likeable caricatures and were cheap enough to make that the studios made a killing off more than twenty films a year. While the Black middle class were ripping apart the stereotypical views of the films, the “Black urban audiences flocked to the cinema to cheer on proud African-American heroes…” (Field 121). Hollywood had found it’s niche, at least for the next five years, and the Blaxploitation boom began. The films made money, and brought out urban audiences, but with what cost, considering the films “merely presents a blackface version of white films” (Martin 45). Many critics argued that the Black heroes of the film asserting power over White people rewrote the script of Black men in Hollywood, who were once only portrayed as over-sexualized jesters who White audiences laughed at. Others stated that Hollywood was simply writing and producing films to create the highest level of appeal, rather than directly trying to denounce Black men and

No films with Black actors, in prominent roles, would have existed if it were not for the role of Ousmane Sembene in the realm of Third World cinema, Charles Burnett and his peers from the UCLA Rebellion, and the Blaxploitation boom of the early 1970s. While the subject matter of all of these films differ, there is no greater demonstration of Black-oreinted cinema during the counter-culture age. The UCLA Rebellion’s films marked a change in art house independent features, and was a response to the growing impact of Blaxploitation action and comedy films. With the emergence of this Afro-American subsection of filmmakers creating works that transcended the Hollywood system, artistic and independent cinema began to change form. Films like Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing (1989) and Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman (1996) took from the movement by showcasing the realistic nature of African-Americans without stereotyping their own race. With the LA Rebellion taking a reaction to the production of Blaxploitation films, Hollywood still created more of them, pulling in poorer Black audiences with their incredibly violent and hypersexual material and characters that vividly represented false ideas of Black life. These Blaxploitation films, while not contributing positively to the dialogue of race in media, created jobs for filmmakers and actors of