In American cinema, Blaxploitation is the film subgenre of action movie derived from the exploitation film genre that began in the late 1960s and flourished throughout the early to mid-1970s, consequent to the combined cultural momentum of the Black civil rights movement and the Black power movement, political and sociological circumstances that facilitated Black artists reclaiming their power of the representation of the Black ethnic identity in the arts. The term blaxploitation is a portmanteau of the words Black and exploitation, coined by Junius Griffin, president of the Beverly Hills–Hollywood branch of the NAACP in 1972. In criticizing the Hollywood portrayal or mockery of the multiracial society of the US, Griffin said that the blaxploitation genre was "proliferating offenses" to and against the Black community, by perpetuating racist stereotypes of inherent criminality.
After the cultural misrepresentation of Black people in the race films of the 1940s, the 1950s, and the 1960s, the Blaxploitation movie genre presented Black characters and Black communities as the protagonists and the places of the story, rather than as background or secondary characters in the story, such as the Magical Negro or as the victims of criminals. To counter the racist misrepresentations of Blackness in the American movie business, UCLA financially assisted Black students to attend film school. The cultural emergence of the Blaxploitation subgenre was facilitated by the Hollywood movie studios adopting a permissive system of film ratings in 1968.
Initially, blaxploitation films were Black cinema produced for the entertainment of Black people in the cities of the US, but the entertainment appeal of the Black characters and human stories extended into the mainstream cinema of corporate Hollywood according to David Denby, writing in 1972. Recognizing the profitability of the financially inexpensive blaxploitation films, the corporate movie studios then produced blaxploitation movies specifically for the cultural sensibilities of mainstream viewers. The movie-business magazine Variety reported the films Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971) and Shaft (1971) as the mainstream blaxploitation films that followed the assimilation of blaxploitation into mainstream cinema, by way of the film Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970). Blaxploitation films were the first to feature soundtracks of funk and soul music.
Description General themes
Blaxploitation films set in the Northeast or West Coast mainly take place in poor urban neighborhoods. Derogatory terms for white characters, such as "cracker" and "honky", are commonly used. Blaxploitation films set in the South often deal with slavery and miscegenation. The genre's films are often bold in their statements and use violence, sex, drug trafficking and other shocking qualities to provoke the audience. The films usually portray black protagonists overcoming "The Man" or emblems of the white majority that oppresses the black community.
Blaxploitation includes several subtypes, including crime (Foxy Brown), action/martial arts (Three the Hard Way), Westerns (Boss Nigger), horror (Abby, Blacula), prison (Penitentiary), comedy (Uptown Saturday Night), nostalgia (Five on the Black Hand Side), coming-of-age (Cooley High/Cornbread, Earl and Me), and musical (Sparkle).
Following the example set by Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, many blaxploitation films feature funk and soul jazz soundtracks with heavy bass, funky beats and wah-wah guitars. These soundtracks are notable for complexity that was not common to the radio-friendly funk tracks of the 1970s. They also often feature a rich orchestration which included flutes and violins.
Blaxploitation was one of the first film categories to have female leads portray brave, heroic, active protagonists. Actresses such as Pam Grier in Coffy and Gloria Hendry in Black Belt Jones opened the door for black women to become action stars, inspiring later films such as Kill Bill and Set It Off.
Following the popularity of these films in the 1970s, movies within other genres began to feature black characters with stereotypical blaxploitation characteristics, such as the Harlem underworld characters in the James Bond film Live and Let Die (1973), Jim Kelly's character in Enter the Dragon (1973) and Fred Williamson's character in The Inglorious Bastards (1978).
Black Power
Afeni Shakur claimed that every aspect of culture (including cinema) in the 1960s and 1970s was influenced by the Black Power movement. Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song was one of the first films to incorporate black power ideology and permit black actors to be the stars of their own narratives, rather than being relegated to the stereotypical roles available to them (such as the "mammy" figure and other low-status characters). Films such as Shaft brought the black experience to film in a new way, allowing black political and social issues that had been ignored in cinema to be explored. Shaft and its protagonist, John Shaft, brought African-American culture to the mainstream world. Sweetback and Shaft were both influenced by the black power movement, containing Marxist themes, solidarity and social consciousness alongside the genre-typical images of sex and violence.
Knowing that film could bring about social and cultural change, the Black Power movement seized the genre to highlight black socioeconomic struggles in the 1970s; many such films contained black heroes who were able to overcome the institutional oppression of African-American culture and history. Later films such as Super Fly softened the rhetoric of black power, encouraging resistance within the capitalist system rather than a radical transformation of society. Super Fly still embraced the black nationalist movement in its argument that black and white authority cannot coexist easily.
Stereotypes The genre's role in exploring and shaping race relations in the United States has been controversial. Some held that the blaxploitation trend was a token of black empowerment, but others accused the movies of perpetuating common white stereotypes about black people. As a result, many called for the end of the genre. The NAACP, Southern Christian Leadership Conference and National Urban League joined to form the Coalition Against Blaxploitation. Their influence in the late 1970s contributed to the genre's demise. Literary critic Addison Gayle wrote in 1974: "The best example of this kind of nihilism / irresponsibility are the Black films; here is freedom pushed to its most ridiculous limits; here are writers and actors who claim that freedom for the artist entails exploitation of the very people to whom they owe their artistic existence."Gayle, Addison, Black World, December 1974/
Films such as Super Fly and The Mack received intense criticism not only for the stereotype of the protagonist (generalizing pimps as representative of all African-American men, in this case) but for portraying all black communities as hotbeds for drugs and crime.
Blaxploitation films like Shaft, Car Wash, and Super Fly feature hypermasculine women, effeminate men, and 'jester-like' comic relief homosexual caricatures. These depictions have been criticized for reinforcing stereotypical notions of black homosexuality, though some films like Car Wash have been noted in allowing queer characters to respond to pejorative accusations levied against them.
Blaxploitation films such as Mandingo (1975) provided mainstream Hollywood producers, in this case Dino De Laurentiis, a cinematic way to depict plantation slavery with all of its brutal, historical and racial contradictions and controversies, including sex, miscegenation, and rebellion. The story world also depicts the plantation as one of the main origins of boxing as a sport in the U.S.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a new wave of acclaimed black film makers, particularly Spike Lee (Do the Right Thing), John Singleton (Boyz n the Hood, and Allen and Albert Hughes (Menace II Society) focused on black urban life in their movies. These directors made use of blaxploitation elements while incorporating implicit criticism of the genre's glorification of stereotypical "criminal" behavior.
Alongside accusations of exploiting stereotypes, the NAACP also criticized the blaxploitation genre of exploiting the black community and culture of America, by creating films for a profit that those communities would never see, despite being the vastly misrepresented main focus of many blaxploitation film plots. Many film professionals still believe that there is no truly equal "Black Hollywood" as evidenced by the "Oscars So White" scandal in 2015 that caused uproar when no black actors were nominated for "Best Actor" at the Academy Awards.
Slavesploitation
Slavesploitation, a subgenre of blaxploitation in literature and film, flourished briefly in the late 1960s and 1970s. As its name suggests, the genre is characterized by sensationalistic depictions of slavery.
Abrams, arguing that Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (2012) finds its historical roots in the slavesploitation genre, observes that slavesploitation films are characterized by "crassly exploitative representations of oppressed slave protagonists".
One early antecedent of the genre is Slaves (1969), which Gaines notes was "not 'slavesploitation' in the vein of later films", but which nonetheless featured graphic depictions of beatings and sexual violence against slaves. Novotny argues that Blacula (1972), although it does not depict slavery directly, is historically linked to the slavesploitation subgenre.
By far, the best-known and best-studied exemplar of slavesploitation is Mandingo, a 1957 novel which was adapted into a 1961 play and a 1975 film. Indeed, Mandingo was so well known that a contemporary reviewer of Die the Long Day, a 1972 novel by Orlando Patterson, called it an example of the "Mandingo genre". See also The film, panned on its release, has been subject to widely divergent critical assessments. Robin Wood, for instance, argued in 1998 that it is the "greatest film about race ever made in Hollywood, certainly prior to Spike Lee and in some respects still".
Legacy Influence Blaxploitation films have had an enormous and complicated influence on American cinema. Filmmaker and exploitation film fan Quentin Tarantino, for example, has made numerous references to the blaxploitation genre in his films. An early blaxploitation tribute can be seen in the character of "Lite", played by Sy Richardson, in Repo Man (1984). Richardson later wrote Posse (1993), which is a kind of blaxploitation Western.
Some of the later, blaxploitation-influenced movies such as Jackie Brown (1997), Undercover Brother (2002), Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002), Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003), and Django Unchained (2012) feature pop culture nods to the genre. The parody Undercover Brother, for example, stars Eddie Griffin as an afro-topped agent for a clandestine organization satirically known as the "B.R.O.T.H.E.R.H.O.O.D.". Likewise, Austin Powers in Goldmember co-stars Beyoncé Knowles as the Tamara Dobson/Pam Grier-inspired heroine, Foxxy Cleopatra. In the 1977 parody film The Kentucky Fried Movie, a mock trailer for Cleopatra Schwartz depicts another Grier-like action star married to a rabbi. In a scene in Reservoir Dogs, the protagonists discuss Get Christie Love!, a mid-1970s blaxploitation television series. In the catalytic scene of True Romance, the characters watch the movie The Mack.