Back Blaxploitation ALS سينما استغلال السود Arabic Blaxploitation Catalan Blaxploitation Danish Blaxploitation German Blaxploitation Spanish Blaxploitation Basque سینمای تجارتی سیاهان Persian Blaxploitaatio Finnish Blaxploitation French
 Poster of the Blaxploitation film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971) | |
| Years active | 1970s |
|---|---|
| Location | United States |
| Major figures | |
| Influences | |
| Influenced | |
In US cinema, Blaxploitation is the film subgenre of action movie derived from the exploitation film genre in the early 1970s, consequent to the combined cultural momentum of the Black civil rights movement, the black power movement, and the Black Panther Party, 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 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.[1]
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.[2] To counter the racist misrepresentations of Blackness in the American movie business, the 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.[3]
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.[4] 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 as the mainstream blaxploitation films that followed the assimilation of blaxploitation into mainstream cinema, by way of the film Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970).[5] Blaxploitation films were the first to feature soundtracks of funk and soul music.[6]
- ^ Anderson, Tre’vell (June 8, 2018). "A Look Back at the Blaxploitation Era through 2018 Eyes". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on June 8, 2018. Retrieved May 22, 2022.
- ^ Lyne, Bill (April 1, 2000). "No Accident: From Black Power to Black Box Office". African American Review. 34 (1): 39–59. doi:10.2307/2901183. JSTOR 2901183.
- ^ "Say It Loud! The Black Cinema Revolution". Harvard Film Archive. October 21, 2016. Retrieved January 31, 2024.
- ^ Denby, David (August 1972). "Getting Whitey". The Atlantic Monthly: 86–88.
- ^ James, Darius (1995). That's Blaxploitation!: Roots of the Baadasssss 'Tude (Rated X by an All-Whyte Jury). St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-13192-5.
- ^ Ebert, Roger (June 11, 2004). "Review of Baadasssss!". Chicago Sun-Times. Archived from the original on February 17, 2007. Retrieved January 4, 2007.