African American cinema  

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"Hollywood took my formula diminished the concept of Negritude to a flamboyant cartoon and reversed the political message turning it into a counter-revolutionary one and voila, out of the commercial success of Sweetback -- to make a long story short -- the blaxploitation movie was born."--Melvin Van Peebles cited in Classified X (1998)

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African American cinema is the corpus of films created by, about, or specifically for African Americans. Along with African American literature, it is one of the primary artistic outlets of African American culture, and has historically concerned itself with themes of racism, equality, poverty, and the struggle for cultural identity.

As a distinct cinematic genre, it dates to the early silent era, when so-called race films were produced to meet the demands of black theatergoers. Although most of these early films were produced by white studios, pioneering black filmmakers like Oscar Micheaux were able to achieve success outside the studio system, producing some of the first financially viable independent films.

After the Second World War and the onset of the American Civil Rights Movement, mainstream American cinema became more widely disseminated among African Americans, who in turn found greater acceptance in Hollywood. This would lead to the demise of the race film and the eventual rise of new genres, such as Blaxploitation. This introduced black actors and filmmakers to a wider audience, but remained formulaic and stereotype-driven.

It was not until the late 1980s that the "New Black Wave" of young directors like John Singleton and Spike Lee began using film to address serious social and racial issues. These films recognized a changing cultural landscape, crossed racial divides, questioned long-standing stereotypes, and in the process, achieved mainstream success. By the 1990s, black actors had done the same, culminating with the 74th Academy Awards, where both the Best Actor and Best Actress Oscars were awarded to African-American actors for the first time in Academy Award history. This, in addition to Sidney Poitier winning the Lifetime Achievement award, led some to dub the evening "The Bloscars" and "The Blackademy Awards".

Today, African American cinema retains a distinct position within the American film industry. Nevertheless, creative cross-pollination has brought it into closer contact with the mainstream, and "black films" regularly attract moviegoers of all races.

Blaxpoitation (1971–1979)

Blaxploitation films are a subset of exploitation films, a term derived from the film marketing term emphasizing the promotion of a brand-name star, a trending topic or titilliating subject matter — in short, a nearly surefire draw at the box office. Both exploitation and blaxploitation films, which are sometimes also called "grindhouse," "cult" or "trash" films are low-budget B-movies, designed to turn a profit.

The 1970s Black variant sought to tell Black stories with Black actors to Black audiences, but they were usually not produced by African Americans. As Junius Griffin, the president of the Hollywood branch of the NAACP wrote in a New York Times op-ed in 1972, "At present, Black movies are a 'rip off' enriching major white film producers and a very few black people."

Also considered exploitative because of the many stereotypes they relied on, blaxploitation films typically took place in stereotypically urban environments, African-American characters were frequently charged with overcoming "The Man," which is to say white oppressors, and violence and sex often featured prominently. Despite these tropes, Blaxploitation film was also recognized for portraying Black people as the heroes and subjects of their own stories, and for being the first genre of film to feature funk and soul music on their soundtracks.

Two films, both released in 1971, are said to have invented the genre: Melvin Van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, about a poor Black man fleeing the white police, and featuring a soundtrack by Earth, Wind & Fire was one. Director Gordon Parks' criminal action movie Shaft, featured a theme song that later won for the Academy Award for Best Original Song for the movie's theme song, which later appeared on multiple Top 100 lists, including AFI's 100 Years...100 Songs was the other.

Other notable films in the genre include Ivan Dixon's first feature film the 1972 thriller Trouble Man, which featured a soundtrack by Marvin Gaye; and Bill Gunn's 1973 experimental horror film Ganja & Hess, later remade by Spike Lee in 2014 as Da Sweet Blood of Jesus.

If Van Peebles and Parks' films made the genre's quintessential films, then Pam Grier was the genre's quintessential actress. Later described by director Quentin Tarantino as cinema's first female action star, Grier was "part of a small group of women who defined the genre" in films like 1970's satirical melodrama Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, 1973's horror film Scream Blacula Scream and 1973's Coffy, in which she played a vengeful nurse.

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Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "African American cinema" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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