Who's Bleeding Whom? Analyzing the Cultural Flows of Blaxploitation Cinema, Then and Now
2010; Issue: 80 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2562-2528
Autores Tópico(s)Gothic Literature and Media Analysis
ResumoAlthough the kitschy aesthetic excesses of blaxploitation have served as fertile terrain for parodic prodding since the 1970s--certainly, Shaft and Coffy seem downright sombre when compared to the exaggerative comedic exorbitance of films such as D'Urville Martin's Dolemite (1975) and Greydon Clark's Black Shampoo (1976), which seem to be unabashedly playing for laughs--the genre's tropes have warranted more self-serious cinematic evaluation in recent decades. This particular trend can be most readily attributed to the purchase Quentin Tarantino possesses over the present cinema of self-consciousness in America. While Tarantino's general interest in reviving cinematic sensationalism has afforded novel trajectories for a new generation of splatter-happy horror directors of the Eli Roth, Rob Zombie and Alexander Aja variety, it has also revitalized a more general interest in the aesthetics of exploitation. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] I will here analyze how discourses of the blaxploitation genre cinema have been transfigured across two specific historical moments: firstly, our current Post-Civil epoch and secondly, the tumultuous heyday of the American Civil Rights movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I will read the contemporary understanding of blaxploitation films as cult films, with their appreciation being motivated by a contemporary ironic fetish for all things kitsch and camp. Next, I will read the contemporary evaluation of blaxploitation into historical moment of the genre's inception in order to prove that despite its radical, self-actualized origins, blaxploitation took hold as a predominantly white phenomenon. To this end, I will focus primarily on Marvin Van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971). I will also show how the reactions to this film compare to the Hollywood-financed Shaft (also 1971), which was viewed by many as bearing the elements of schlock and kitsch that, in absentia, made Sweetback culturally significant. THE PRETENCE OF THE POLITICAL AND THE LEGACY OF KITSCH Blaxploitation in the new millennium Quentin Tarantino's 'mad scientist' exercises in genre splicing have referenced most things exploitative, from the Shaw Brothers' martial arts films to spaghetti Westerns, but his cannibalization of blaxploitation has proved most pronounced. Beginning with references to Get Christie Love! (1974) and The Mack (1973) in Reservoir Dogs (1992), and True Romance (1993), and crystallizing in Jackie Brown (1997), in which Elmore Leonard's novel Rum Punch is spun into a blaxploitation-tinted caper starring Pam Grier, Tarantino has worked to revive an interest in the genre beyond more typically parodic representations which tend to skew broader than Rudy Ray Moore's lapels. Apart from the spoofing of films like Undercover Brother (2002) or Black Dynamite (2009), this renewed interest in blaxploitation is embodied most earnestly in John Singleton's sequel/remake of Shaft (2000) and Mario Van Peebles' biopic BAADASSSSS! (2003). The release of both of these films seems to explicitly signal a blaxploitation revival impelled by the likes of Tarantino, while also bringing to the fore precisely how this revival has been culturally encoded. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The release of Singleton's Shaft starring Samuel L. Jackson, the twenty-first century's emblem of angry black machismo in the title role, occasioned a general reconsideration of the canon of blaxploitation cinema. In the April 30, 2000 edition of The New York Times, Elvis Mitchell used the impending release of the Singleton-helmed Shaft as motivation for re-evaluating Gordon Parks's 1971 original source text. Steeped heavily in the elements of quixotic rear-view romanticism that seem to typify the contemporary critical relationship to blaxploitation, Mitchell writes that: While Shaft doesn't hold up these days as an action film, its detractors are probably too young to be aware of the elation that charged movie houses in the 70's as cheering black audiences saw a dark-skinned hero--iconic and masculine in his up-to-the-minute proto-fade haircut and collection leathers--in total control of his destiny. …
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