[rohrpost] So. 21.1. 20 Uhr: Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song +
How to Get the Man's Foot Outta Your Ass
pirate cinema berlin
sebastian at rolux.org
Fre Jan 19 15:01:26 CET 2007
Sunday, January 21, 8 pm
Pirate Cinema Berlin
Tucholskystr 6, 2nd Floor
Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song
Melvin van Peebles
1971, 97 min, 700 MB
How to Get the Man's Foot Outta Your Ass
Mario van Peebles
2003, 109 min, 697 MB
Free entry
Cheap drinks
Copies to go
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Es gibt eine ganze Menge gewiss grossartiger Filme, die Sie im Pirate Cinema nie
gezeigt bekommen werden, weil sie zu "Kultfilmen" geworden sind - also von einer
Folklore der Rezeption derart dicht einhüllt werden, dass kaum noch was zu sehen
ist. Im Falle von "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song" gehen wir allerdings davon
aus, dass das ein Film ist, der diesem Problem, auch heute noch, entgeht - Kult,
Kitsch und Folklore wäre hier ja eher "Blaxploitation", also ein ganzes, eigenes
Genre, das Melvin van Peebles' Film - zusammen mit "Shaft" und "Superfly" - zwar
begründet hat, dem er aber - das wäre zumindest die Idee für Sonntag - gar nicht
angehört. Danach - ab ca. 22 Uhr - gibt es "How to Get the Man's Foot Outta Your
Ass", also known as "Baadasssss!", Mario van Peebles' Hommage von 2003, zu sehen
- und einen der ziemlich seltenen Filme, die noch weiter aus dem Blaxploitation-
Genre herausfallen, Bill Gunns "Ganja & Hess", zeigen wir in der nächsten Woche.
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Blaxploitation
By Bob Bankard
phillyBurbs Special Sections
"We were tired of seeing the righteous black man. And all of the sudden we had
guys like us - or guys who did what we wanted 'em to do." - Samuel L. Jackson
"This film is dedicated to all the brothers and sisters who've had enough of the
Man."
So started the Blaxsploitation era, with an intertitle card at the beginning of
"Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song" in 1971. Directed by Mario Van Peebles, it
was financed partially by a $50,000 loan from Bill Cosby. The film was made for
urban black America, and salted with all the pent up anger that the racial
conflict had left behind. The hero was the son of a whore, and all the whores in
the whorehouse taught him how to do sex better than any man on earth.
We see him being trained during some straightfoward, semi-graphic kiddie porn.
So, he grows up to be some kind of erotic dancer. After killing two policemen
for beating up a black man, he goes on the run, having sex contests with Hell's
Angels. He keeps running away until he gets to Mexico, stopping to fight people
and to have sex along the way to revitalize himself.
And the crowd goes wild.
"The thing about Sweetback is he got away. That never happened in a movie
before. There's never been a movie where the police or someone has been running
after a black man and he escaped. Without the black power movement, that
wouldn't have been allowed." - Afeni Shakur, former Black Panther, mother of
Tupac Shakur
"I saw this film on opening night in Philadelphia, Pa. The audience consisted of
almost entirely young, black men (mostly) and women who were obviously active in
the civil rights movement, judging by the reactions of the men in the audience
when Sweetback gave "the man" his definition of justice - beating the living
crap out of them. His methods were quite original - especially with the pool
cue. His sexual prowness was the main hit of the film for the ladies in the
audience (I admit). The scene that really had me rooting for Sweetback was when
he "popped" the white biker chick (in a most original manner) and she
practically killed her biker boyfriend trying to join up with Sweetback in his
quest. He merely cast her off like a used oil rag, which she was. Hilarious.
There was a lot of anger among Black moviegoers at that time, which is why a lot
of the blaxploitation films were successful. Our voices were heard loud and
clear, especially in films, where our heroes were the victors against racist
society and even more racist law enforcement, no matter how grisly, gruesome or
violent the methods for dealing with them were." - 'Teeny,' Warwick PA., IMDB
Three months later, "Shaft" was released. The film was initially written for a
white cast, but after the huge success of "Sweet Sweetback," the film was
hastily re-written and re-cast as a black film. Issac Hayes came in to audition
for the lead role, but when the producers cast Richard Roundtree, Hayes was
given a chance to score the soundtrack, and history was made.
These two films, one a response to black anger, the other a standard
action/detective film set the stage for the four year explosion that was to be
called 'blaxsploitation.' At this early stage, there wasn't much to complain
about. "Sweetback" was an angry anomaly and "Shaft" was pretty much standard
except for the casting. What was to come, however, would make waves.
The films that followed carried neither the political message or the moral
center of the films that preceeded them. "Superfly" told the story of a wealthy
cocaine dealer who was searching for a last big score before he retired from the
business. He used drugs, he used women, he sold drugs for personal gain, and
"The Man" who wanted to stop him - well, the Police Commissioner was providing
him the drugs, and wanted to stop him from quitting.
I mean, what can you do when the police force you to sell drugs, right?
It was a crappy excuse to rationalize the use of a pusher as a hero, and the
film went full steam ahead to show him as a man with power, money, and all the
women he could handle per day. As Todd Boyd, the USC professor who runs the
commentary track on the film says - earnestly - "Hey it's tough being a drug
dealer. You gotta keep your money straight. He doesn't want to use his friend's
wife as a prostitute, but hey - the man owes him money!"
I almost cried at that ethical dilemma, personally. I really felt bad for
Superfly.
One of the most interesting aspects of the film, in fact, is that the Curtis
Mayfield soundtrack continually trys to remind the audience that all of the
opulence and amorality portrayed so lovingly in the film is a bad thing.
"Superfly" woke up the black intelligencia, who recognized that the newly
blossoming film genre was creating an even more violent portrait of James Oliver
Killens' "lying, stealing, childish, sex-obsessed, teeth-showing, dice-shooting
black male" and was now selling it as a fashionable lifestyle instead of as an
insult. The NAACP, the NCLC and the Urban League banded together to condemn the
genre - they termed the films Black Exploitation.
The problem was, urban blacks liked the genre, wanted to emulate the heroes and
live their lifestyle. As Samuel Jackson said, Poitier was out - Superfly was in.
"'Oh my God; we shouldn't show this to white America - that this is who we are
in our community. They'll think we're all like this'. And that was the problem
of storytelling. Because everyone would generalize. One black man on TV, or on
the news, and all black people were like that. So that was a part of a lot of
the dialogue - 'Oh my God, can't we do other films?' Yeah - but nobody'd come to
see 'em." - Pam Grier
"Who was getting exploited? The actors were getting paid; they had a job, they
were going to work. The audience wasn't being exploited - they were getting to
see things on their screen they had longed for for years. So I really don't
understand where this terminology fits." - Fred Williamson
The main problem with the films then falling under that genre description (apart
from their negative stereotyping) was their sheer bulk and lack of quality. All
of them were made inexpensively, and generally recouped more than they cost to
make; over the course of four years, nearly 200 films were cranked out, the vast
majority of which were formulaic and of dubious worth. "Blacula," "Dr. Black and
Mr. Hyde" and "Blackenstein" co-opted the old Hollywood horror icons into
fast-buck black features. "Super Soul Brother" featured a wino given a super
serum, after which he goes back and whups on all the other winos who beat on him
in the past. "Black Caesar" was a re-working of old Edward G. Robinson films,
and "The Black Godfather" was, well, I'll bet you can guess.
In essence, the whole one-dimentional genre had burned itself out like a
brushfire on a median strip.
When the money stopped pouring in, "The Man" stopped financing the films. The
films stopped getting made, and everything ground down to a dead stop again.
[http://www.phillyburbs.com/Blackcinema/blaxsploitation.shtml]
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Who's Your Daddy?
A loyal son imagines the making of his father's influential pre-blaxploitation
psychodrama
by J. Hoberman
May 24th, 2004 11:30 AM
Unique in the history of cinema, Mario Van Peebles's Baadasssss! is a fictional
account of the labors his father, Melvin Van Peebles, undertook to make another
movie--Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, the 1971 independent that blazed a
path for a half-dozen years of blaxploitation. Like Melvin, Mario stars. He
plays his father, a cigar-smoking, chopper-riding, bandanna-wearing
megalomaniac, as well as his father playing the role of Sweetback. And like
Sweetback, Baadasssss! is a psychodrama of self-actualization--the Horatio Alger
version of Van Peebles's militant nationalist tract.
Sweetback was unlike any movie ever produced in America. The elder Van Peebles's
obstructions (as Lars von Trier might put it; see Tracking Shots), included a
lack of money, a shortage of film stock, loss of the director's eyesight, and
the arrest of cast and crew--and that's before Van Peebles had to solve the
problems of distribution and exhibition. There had never been a movie in which a
black man killed a white cop and lived, nor a movie so steeped in images of
underclass degradation. In a Times think piece, Clayton Riley called Sweetback a
"terrifying vision [that] Black people alone will really understand." That claim
will not be made for Baadasssss! The movie's tone is good-naturedly didactic,
locating Sweetback in the history of Hollywood (and American) racial imagery.
It's also accurate enough as history to provide a potent reminder that black
independent cinema did not end with Oscar Micheaux or begin with Spike Lee.
Appropriately self-reflexive, Mario alternates between plunging into the
dynamic, slapdash Sweetback style and seeking distance in direct-address faux
documentary. (He even inscribes himself as a little boy with a majestic 'fro,
hanging around the Sweetback set, as indeed he did.) No less than Mario's Posse
and Panther, hectic examples of media mythmaking both, Baadasssss! vibrates with
crazy energy and cartoon-like perfs. It's packed with Hollywood wiseguys,
self-promoting hotties, craven agents, hippie stoners, porn purveyors, ghetto
hotheads, and miscellaneous white weirdos.
Baadasssss! doesn't glamorize the elder Van Peebles and frequently alludes to
his failures as a father--but however mean, strict, and self-absorbed Mario's
Melvin appears, this movie is the ultimate filial gift. The son bears witness to
his father's struggle and turns it into heroic legend.
[http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0421,hoberman,53735,20.html]
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Sonntag, 28. Januar, 20:00 Uhr: Ganja & Hess (Bill Gunn, 1973, 110 min, 1.36 GB)
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