Week #4—The Birth of Blaxploitation and the Emerging Presence of Blacks in Hollywood

Similar to the beginnings of an early African-American cinema in the 1910s and 1920s, the emergence of an African cinema in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s grew out of a population’s desire to tell their own stories. Early African filmmakers who were able learn how to use cinematic technology, particularly from Francophone West Africa, looked to traditions of oral storytelling from their respective countries as a source for the kinds of projects they wanted to make. Filmmakers also were compelled to comment on the current transitions within many African countries, in which they were obtaining liberation from European colonial rule. Both of these sources inform the three kinds of film genres associated with African cinema. One genre is the semi-documentary film, in which colonialism is depicted in a way that focuses on how residents of colonized countries overcome colonial rule. Another genre is the didactic/fictional film, in which the colonial relationship between European and African countries is depicted in a Manichean manner, primarily good vs. evil, or, more directly, over-resourced European nations and under-resourced African nations. The African nations, or characters, are depicted as returning to their indigenous roots as a way to solve their problems. The research film is another genre out of African cinema that is more focused on identifying the root causes to problems throughout African countries, and developing solutions that can confront these adversities. Research films are more so determined by depicting changes that could have a tremendous impact on how African countries could be depicted.

Ousmane Sembene’s "Black Girl (La Noire de…)", released in 1966, would be classified as a didactic-fictional film because he directly confronts the topic of colonial relations between Senegal and France. Through the relationship between a Senegalese domestic, Diouana, and the French couple that hires her, Sembene points to the distinct contrast between the vicarious fascination that Western popular culture prompts, and the position in which African citizens are truly shown. This contrast is further illustrated through how France is depicted in the magazines shown in Diouana’s flashbacks to Senegal, and the glimpse out of the window in the apartment where she works. Instead of the urban environment she imagines, Diouana is surrounded by white walls and captured in tight spaces. Sembene also incorporates traditions of griot storytelling, in that he uses the film to reflect contemporary issues and situations that residents of Senegal face, which largely explains why his characters represent more or less social types so that he can make effective social commentaries on colonial relations and interactions within Senegalese society itself along the lines of class and religion.

African filmmakers joined with organizations such as FEPACI as far back as the late ‘60s so that they would be able to participate, and ultimately control, the infrastructure of film production, distribution, and exhibition within continental Africa. Many of these filmmakers could not get their films shown in their native countries because organizations from outside of the continent controlled the block-booking system, which determined what kinds of films would be shown in theaters. SECMA and COMACICO felt that works by African filmmakers would detract from the profits they earned from showing movies from Europe and the United States. Resources for distribution (CIDC), production (CIPROFILM), and exhibition (film festivals such as FESPACO in Burkina Faso and Festival Panafricain de la Culture in Algiers) would be gained over the next day, until adjustments had to be made to challenge government censorship and identify other sources of funding.

The control over resources for production, distribution, and exhibition, in addition to representation, continued to be a struggle for African-American filmmakers well into the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Melvin Van Peebles’s "Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song" (1971) was an effort to take initiative on all of those fronts, as he wrote, produced, scored, directed, and starred in the film with no studio funding or distribution. His film was designed to embody the rhetoric of the Black Power and Black Arts movements, in which the artistic production and sociopolitical activity reflected a movement towards self-determination and self-identity without the concerns of dominant White American society. The film addressed the notion of domestic colonialism, largely reflected through Sweetback’s role as a sex laborer who runs for his life after he beats two detectives unconsciously to save the life of a local revolutionary. Van Peebles also sought to disrupt the desexualized representations of Black men onscreen at that moment (i.e. Sidney Poitier), which explains the aggressive sexual content throughout. Some of the more sensationalist conventions from "Sweetback" would be appropriated by Hollywood studios that saw the money that Van Peebles’ film had made, and they wanted to replicate similar box office returns, given that mainstream movies at this time were losing money. It is important to think this week how about how an independently made film would give way to a new genre of studio-sponsored action films that starred Black characters, which would become know as blaxploitation.