On the heels of last semester’s course on horror films, scholars Stanford Carpenter and Eric Wesselmann are back with a new honors seminar and set of public screenings at the Normal Theater. The series features four blaxploitation films and a documentary about the era—and it kicks off next week with Melvin Van Peebles’ “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song.”
The seminal 1971 independent film kicked off nearly a decade of prolific filmmaking for Black actors, directors and producers collectively called "blaxploitation films."
But naming a course on blaxploitation turned out to be tricky.
“Looking at it through today’s sensibility, my first thought was, wow, if somebody maybe didn’t know what blaxploitation films were—if this was a new term to them—how would they respond to it?” said Carpenter, a Chicago-based cultural anthropologist with expertise in media, comics, visual art and pop culture.
“If you’re coming to it not being familiar with the word, which is the case with most students, I could see where a lot of questions could come up,” he said.
Carpenter and Wesselmann borrowed a line from two films in the series, “Sweet Sweetback” and “Shaft,” for the title of their course: “Can You Dig It: Exploring Race, Representation and Culture in Blaxploitation Films.”
“In my lifetime, I’ve experienced my identity being referred to as negro, Black, Afro-American and African American,” said Carpenter. “In some ways, it’s kind of fitting that you would have trouble with a term from the ‘70s. Some of the terms for African American identity have not weathered well.”
Carpenter pointed to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), for example, as maintaining its outdated name for the historical significance it holds. In an era of sensitivity training and trigger warnings, Wesselmann said most students have the capacity to wrestle with historical contexts around terms, ideas and media deemed problematic today.
“That’s part of why people are in college,” said Wesselmann, a professor of psychology at Illinois State University. “Most people’s reaction to this term [blaxploitation], even among scholars and critics who were writing at the time, very much responded to the word ‘exploitation.’”
Is blaxploitation 'exploitative'?
A truncated nickname for Black exploitation films, blaxploitation refers to a barrage of 1970s movies by Black filmmakers for Black audiences. In mainstream studios through the ‘60s, Black characters on film were largely an extension of minstrelsy, depicting demeaning caricatures of African Americans and often in servitude to white people. Blaxploitation films, by contrast, center Black antiheroes fighting back against "the Man."
The genre is a sub-category of exploitation films, so named as a collection of B movies aimed at getting a rise (and a big payout) from the viewing public.
“There’s a long history of this term ‘exploitation' [in cinema], which really just means, how do you get attention from an audience,” Wesselmann said. “Then there’s exploitation films, which is all about sensation and not really about message.”
By that definition, the film largely considered as kicking off the blaxploitation genre, “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song,” is not a purely exploitation film—as former Chicago Sun Times film critic Robert Ebert repeatedly said.
The central character, a sex worker named Sweetback who’s on the run after killing two white police officers, is overtly political; most of the blaxploitation films that would follow—like “Shaft,” or “Coffy,” which come second and third in the “Can You Dig It” film series—are less serious examples of the genre and more covertly transgressive.
Teeing up a new kind of action hero
A major triumph of the era is the unapologetic agency of Black characters in general—and women in particular.
“They had agency over their body,” said Carpenter. “They also had agency as it related to violence. Whenever we start getting into heroic narratives, what’s really important is which characters have agency over violence."
With Pam Greer as the quintessential revenge-seeking heroine of the blaxploitation era, scholars have surmised that cinema would not have arrived at Princess Leia and Ellen Ripley without "Coffy" and "Cleopatra Jones" (starring Tamara Dobson and screening fourth in the series).
“One Marvel character that is entirely based on Pam Grier is Misty Knight,” said Carpenter. “If you look at what happens when you take a Black, female character and give her agency, give her power, give her control, she actually stands out in the Marvel Universe—which in some ways also makes her a critique of women in the MCU. The irony is, Pam Grier has been typecast as a Black woman with agency.”
Black films for Black people
A common criticism of blaxploitation films is their presentation of damaging, monolithic stereotypes of Black people as oversexualized criminals seeking vigilante justice.
“The inverse to that is something else that was present for a Black audience,” said Carpenter. “They were seeing somebody who wasn’t passively accepting violence from the police.”
Author and filmmaker David Walker’s documentary, "Macked, Hammered, Slaughtered and Shafted" (which will be screened as the final event of “Can You Dig It” on Feb. 22), posits the genre simply needed more time to evolve and would have eventually explored different stories and characters—but was quashed by mainstream box office smashes more appealing to white audiences like “Jaws” and “Star Wars."
Yet, blaxploitation’s impact is felt today in ways big and small—influencing artists and filmmakers like Spike Lee, Snoop Dogg, Quentin Tarantino and Mario Van Peebles (Melvin’s son), to name a few.
“One of the beautiful things about stories is you can come to the story, bring your position and see different things in it,” said Carpenter. “And that’s also one of the downsides if you’re trying to control the message. I look at ‘Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song’ and we see a Black man who’s on the run from the police. But the police are functioning in the same way as the bounty hunters did during slavery. If you’re keying into that character, you’re realizing that this is his literal journey to freedom.”
"Can You Dig It: Exploring Race, Representation and Culture in Blaxploitation Films" begins with "Sweet Sweetback's Baadassss Song," screening Thursday, Jan. 25 at the Normal Theater, 209 W. North St., Normal. Tickets are $7 available online and at the door.
