Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras
A History of Blaxploitation Cinema
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A definitive account of Blaxploitation cinema—the freewheeling, often shameless, and wildly influential genre—from a distinctive voice in film history and criticism
In 1971, two films grabbed the movie business, shook it up, and launched a genre that would help define the decade. Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, an independently produced film about a male sex worker who beats up cops and gets away, and Gordon Parks’s Shaft, a studio-financed film with a killer soundtrack, were huge hits, making millions of dollars. Sweetback upended cultural expectations by having its Black rebel win in the end, and Shaft saved MGM from bankruptcy. Not for the last time did Hollywood discover that Black people went to movies too. The Blaxploitation era was born.
Written by film critic Odie Henderson, Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras is a spirited history of a genre and the movies that he grew up watching, which he loves without irony (but with plenty of self-awareness and humor). Blaxploitation was a major trend, but it was never simple. The films mixed self-empowerment with exploitation, base stereotypes with essential representation that spoke to the lives and fantasies of Black viewers. The time is right for a reappraisal, understanding these films in the context of the time, and exploring their lasting influence.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This exuberant debut from Boston Globe film critic Henderson provides commentary on and social context for 1970s Blaxploitation films. Highlighting milestones in the genre, Henderson suggests the vibrant characters in the 1970 comedy Cotton Comes to Harlem offered alternatives to the Black stereotypes that had populated major studio films and helped to make it a box office success. Accounts of how major movies were made are peppered throughout (the idea for 1971's Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song came to director Melvin Van Peebles as he masturbated while visiting the Mojave Desert to look for inspiration), but the focus is largely on plot summaries and critical analysis of such films as Blacula, Shaft, and Super Fly, the latter of which Henderson suggests is distinguished by its "shocking amorality." (Rooting for the cocaine dealer protagonist "is an act of capitalistic complicity; rooting against him is siding with the corrupt system that made his hustle necessary.") Though the detailed synopses sometimes drag, Henderson fares better when elucidating the era's cultural debates, as when he covers disagreements between the NAACP, who decried Blaxploitation films as glorifying harmful depictions of Black people, and the artists involved in the films, who insisted on portraying alternatives to the "preachy respectability" that had previously characterized Hollywood depictions of Black characters. The result is a thoughtful and loving ode to the genre.
