Theme: Blaxploitation Cinema

Blaxploitation refers to a genre of American films that emerged in the early 1970s featuring Black actors. This was a period when the Civil Rights movement had started to kick in in the US and the African-American population were achieving a relative degree of social equality. It was an era when cinema started to celebrate the rise of the African-American as their own social entity and the first time the screen had seen Black actors in lead roles.

The first Blaxploitation film was Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971). The Blaxploitation film was popularised by Shaft (1971), which celebrated the Black man as an incredibly virile and cool hero, and produced a great many imitators. The majority of Blaxploitation films were Action Films, some Martial Arts. The genre produced stars out of names like Pam Grier, Richard Roundtree and Fred Williamson.

It was not long after this that the Blaxploitation fad begun to turn to genre material beginning with Blacula (1972). This led to a small spate of films revisiting horror classics but recast with Black actors – Blackenstein (1973), Dr Black and Mr Hyde (1976) and other treatments like Abby (1974), a Black version of The Exorcist (1973). When these died up, we began to see some imaginative treatments of other themes like vampires and voodoo.

The Blaxploitation fad died away by the late 1970s although gained a renewed popularity with Quentin Tarantino’s enthusiasm for the genre in the late 1990s, a period that saw several homages and parodies, particularly when it comes to the over-the-top fashions and hairstyles that the genre popularised.