FilmQuake by Ian Haydn Smith Ian Haydn;

Author:Ian Haydn Smith, Ian Haydn;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quarto Publishing Group UK
Published: 2021-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

BLACK CINEMA IN THE US

Richard Roundtree gave audiences a new kind of anti-hero in Gordon Parks’ Shaft (1971)

The ‘race films’ that achieved modest success between the two world wars had pretty much come to an end by the end of the 1940s. The final film by the leading light of that cinema, Oscar Micheaux’s The Betrayal, was released in 1948. For the next two decades, few US films featured Black actors in lead roles. Exceptions included Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959), an adaptation of Fannie Hurst’s 1933 novel that had already been filmed in 1934, and films that featured Sidney Poitier or Harry Belafonte. For over two decades, almost no features were made by Black film-makers. The end of the 1960s signalled a major shift. In 1968 William Greaves directed the avant-garde docu-drama-comedy Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, while acclaimed photographer Gordon Parks adapted his autobiographical novel The Learning Tree (1969). But it was Parks’ subsequent release that helped see in a new era in Black cinema.

Parks’ Shaft (1971), along with Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, kickstarted the Blaxploitation sub-genre, focussing on Black characters on either side of the law taking a stand against ‘the Man’ – a symbol of the oppressive white establishment. The films also shifted away from crime to encompass horror and martial arts, and opinions divide as to the value of the films as a representation of Black culture. At the same time, the odd independent film was being produced, most notably Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1978). But taken together, these films proved both inspiring to and influential over subsequent Black directors such as Spike Lee and John Singleton.

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