Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song
The recurrent cycle Noir.e.s à la caméra allows us to discover works directed or produced by African or Afrodescendant filmmakers throughout the history of cinema.
In the 1940s, an African-American orphan is taken in by the owners of a brothel. He becomes "Sweet Sweetback".
Melvin Van Peebles
Melvin Van Peebles (born August 21, 1932) is an American actor, filmmaker, playwright, novelist and composer. He is most well-known for creating and starring in the film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. (Wikipedia)
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Melvin Van Peebles and the Uncanny Score for Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song
In 1971, Hollywood had hit a crossroads. Television was the medium of the moment, while public taste for musicals was at an all-time low, and America's film industry was on the verge of bankruptcy. That summer, MGM—the same studio that brought a warm and fuzzy romanticism to the race relations of the Antebellum South in 1939's Gone With the Wind—released a movie about a Black P.I. hired by a Harlem mobster, created on a shoestring budget of $500,000 and starring Richard Roundtree in the lead role, who up to that point had mostly played in commercials. Shaft turned over $13 million, turning around MGM's fortunes and inspiring the massive wave of Blaxploitation movies that would characterize the early '70s and change the face of American cinema. It remains one of the genre's figureheads, spinning out into a five-film franchise. The progression of Shaft reads something like a case study in the co-option of radical ideas by commercial interests, the films brought rapidly into the ideological mainstream at the same time as their production values skyrocketed...
