Blaxploitation Films

The Birth of Blacks in Film

Blaxploitation films exist as a part of the long history of African Americans in the film industry. The first half the 20th century witnessed the rise of hundreds of African American–only theaters where low-budget black musicals, westerns, comedies, and other films were available. While some African American actors appeared in nonblack-only films earlier in the century, their numbers were limited. Furthermore, their roles were extremely limited to stereotypical black characters, such as a maid or ignorant slaves as seen notably in Gone With the Wind (1939). In the meantime, between the 1920s and 1940s, Oscar Micheaux, the first African American to produce a feature-length film, paved the way for African American film production. By the end of the 1960s, Sidney Poitier had become the first black actor to win an Academy Award for Best Actor in the 1963 film Lilies of the Field, and In the Heat of the Night, produced four years later about a black detective (also played by Poitier) investigating a murder in a racist small town, had won five Oscars, including best picture.

It was during this period when many films came out with African American casts, featuring crime, drugs, prostitution, and other socially controversial topics. Many of these films reflected race-based resistance against whites and included white authority figures, such as police and politicians, who antagonized blacks. For example, one of the most successful blaxploitation films, Sweet Sweetback's Baaadassss Song (1971), about saving a Black Panther from some racist cops, written by, directed by, and starring Melvin Van Peebles, depicted sex, violence, and resistance to a white-dominated society. Another successful film, Shaft (1971), directed by Gordon Parks, featured a private detective in New York who worked to find a kidnapped daughter of a mobster. Other known blaxploitation films include Variety (1972), Slaughter (1972), Detroit 9000 (1973), Black Caesar (1973), and Willie Dynamite (1974).

Peebles's and Parks's films were so popular that they set the standard for other blaxploitation films. Most films in the same genre that followed depicted an aloof African American protagonist, white villains, sex, violence, action, and struggles of economically dispossessed African American urban residents. The more prevalent this plotline became, the more criticism the genre experienced. Critics argued that the movie industry was producing these films for blacks with black actors in a token manner, instead of offering them larger production budgets and socially uplifting content. When Superfly came out in 1973, many protested its portrayal of a cocaine dealer who was making a last large deal before his retirement.

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