Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song

Banned & Censored Cinema

Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song

Melvin Van Peebles, USA, 1971, 97 min.

"A film by Melvin Van Peebles starring the Black Community."

Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song is the story of a young hustler (Van Peebles) whose aimless pleasure-seeking turns to radicalism after witnessing the beating of a Black revolutionary by two white cops. Seized with anger, Sweetback takes brutal revenge on the cops, forcing him into a desperate life on the run.

"All the films about black people up to now," director Melvin Van Peebles told Newsweek in 1971, "have been told through the eyes of the Anglo-Saxon majority--in their rhythms and speech and pace. In my film, the black audience finally gets a chance to see some of their own fantasies acted out...rising out of the mud and kicking ass." (from the videotape jacket)

Sweetback and Gordon Park's Shaft are credited with inspiring the 1970s Blaxploitation movement of "commercial-minded films for black audiences." The term "Blaxploitation" was coined by the NAACP, who initially criticized the film for portraying African Americans negatively.

Director Van Peebles is Sweetback.

Van Peebles refused to bow to the all-white Film Rating Board and Sweetback was given an automatic X. Nevertheless, his Black militant film became one of the highest grossing independent movies in U.S. history--making $10,000,000 at the box office.

Black Panther Party leadership made Sweetback required viewing for its members.

As Sweetback was cornered by the "pigs," Van Peebles (sitting in the audience) recalls hearing an old black woman mutter: "Let him die, let him die." She didn't want Sweetback delivered into the hands of the white police. When he escaped -- with the proclamation, "a BaadAsssss nigger is coming back to collect some dues!" -- Van Peebles remembers a stunned silence and then the audience erupting. "Nobody could believe he had survived." --Uju Asika
"Black to the Future"

REQUIRED READINGS & WEBSITES

• Ed Guerrero, "Ch. 3: The Rise and Fall of Blaxploitation", Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), course reader

• Anthony Loeb, "Melvin Van Peebles (Interview)", Filmmakers in Conversation (Chicago: Columbia College, 1982), course reader

• Melvin Van Peebles, "Blood Money or Money and Bloods", Black Genius: African American Solutions to African American Problems, Walter Mosley, Manthia Diawara, and Clyde Taylor, eds. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1999), course reader

• Jack Valenti, "The MPAA Ratings System: How It Works", The Motion Picture Association of America webite, online http://www.mpaa.org/movieratings/about/index.htm

• Justin Wyatt, "The Stigma of X: Adult Cinema and the Institution of the MPAA Ratings System", Controlling Hollywood: Censorship and Regulation in the Studio Era (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999), course reader