PIMP MY FILM - Sex, Drugs & Soul in the Blaxploitation Movement |
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Although to some extent a controversial term, and one rejected by some of the key exponents of the genre it describes, blaxploitation refers to a short-lived but significant movement in American cinema in the first half of the 1970s. The films attempted to break down the race divide in American film, with black actors playing the strong, confident, often flamboyant heroes of the piece, taking on the archetypes previously reserved for the James Bonds, Charles Bronsons and Clint Eastwoods of cinema. Some films went a step further, with Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974) bringing us not just a black hero, but a female black hero. The movement was kick-started by the success of Melvin Van-Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song in 1971, and other key examples include Shaft (1971), Superfly (1972) and Across 110th Street (1972). With the most significant examples all produced between 1971 and 1974, by the mid-seventies the movement had virtually blown itself out. While these films certainly broke new ground in bringing black actors to the fore, it would be somewhat misleading to say that they broke down stereotypes of black portrayals on screen. Pimps, hookers and dealers were central to all the films and while one section of the black community celebrated seeing these characters on film, seeing black actors on the big screen en-masse and receiving top billing on film posters for the first time; another section of the community objected to the seediness of these portrayals. The glamorisation of drug-taking, pushing and casual sex didn't go down well with all corners of the black community and groups such as the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) made such objections public. |
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A character like Priest (Ron O'Neal) from Superfly illustrates the dichotomy. On the one hand he is the hero of the piece: a strong, macho black man who stands up to white corruption. On the other hand, Priest earns his living by dealing drugs, and although throughout the film we know that he wants to get out of this way of life, his plan for how to achieve this is to... deal lots of drugs. We see Priest cheat on his girlfriend, sniff coke almost constantly, and threaten to make the wife of one of his men a prostitute. Hardly the conventional mould of a hero, but we also see Priest outwit the corrupt white police, getting one over on white oppression, and in the wake of the racial upheaval of the 1960s – the civil rights movement, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers – the appeal to a black audience is clear. The struggle to break away from a criminal way of life is a central theme to many of these films, as illustrated by Bobby Womack's lyrics to “Across 110th Street”: I was the third brother of five. Been down so long, getting up didn't cross my mind |
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110th Street itself is the boundary line dividing Harlem from Upper Manhattan in New York, representing something of a metaphorical barrier between the 'ghetto' and the outside world. Depictions of drug-use, sex and violence could appear more upfront in blaxploitation than in other contemporary American films of the period. This period of American cinema saw a trend for these elements to be handled more liberally and less apologetically than previously, but many blaxploitation films pushed things to greater extremes. This was especially the case with a film like Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, which was entirely independently funded and therefore had no editorial control from studio executives. This was one of the first mainstream films to feature unsimulated sex – director Melvin Van Peebles, who also played the lead role, caught gonorrhoea while filming and successfully applied for compensation from the Directors Guild for being 'hurt on the job', money that he was able to invest back into the film. The depiction of drug use in some of these films is morally ambivalent, unlike, for example, the contemporaneous French Connection films in which it was the reserve of the bad guys. The French Connection II (1975) features a lengthy sequence in which policeman Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman) is forced to go cold turkey over a period of days, after being hooked on heroin by a gang of drug smugglers, a sequence that shows the agony of drug withdrawal. It would be unfair to say that a morally ambivalent approach to drug use was the reserve of blaxploitation though, as films like Easy Rider (1969) show. In respect to violence, director Oscar Williams has raised the issue of blaxploitation films being judged by a different yardstick to other films: |
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Violence is violence. Why is it negative when a black character does it in a film, and why is it not negative when a white character does it in a film? Scarface (1983) was as violent as Shaft (1971). But Shaft is called blaxploitation, and Scarface is called a good film. 1 |
Blaxploitation came along at a point of metamorphosis in American cinema, when the studio system was struggling and low-budget independent films, strongly influenced by the European New Wave, were shaking things up. A new generation of young directors were shifting the power structure of Hollywood and the early works of Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorcese, George Lucas, William Friedkin and Peter Bogdanovich were all part of this. Produced on relatively low budgets, but appealing to a substantial audience, and with their business potential proven by the early success of Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song and Shaft, blaxploitation films provided an attractive, low-risk, investment for studios to distribute in this climate. For a while their influence was felt in other areas of cinema. The James Bond film Live and Let Die (1973) is partly set in Harlem and borrows various elements from blaxploitation, including a number of actors associated with the genre (Yaphet Kotto, Julius Harris, Gloria Hendry). It also includes a reference to the pimpmobile, a form of vehicle customisation that stemmed, at least partly, from blaxploitation (leading more recently to “Pimp My Ride” entering common vernacular). When Martin Scorcese was seeking funding for his career-defining Mean Streets (1973), he was offered $150,000 by the producer/director Roger Corman, but on the condition that the film was re-written for an all-black cast to cash in on the success of the blaxploitation films (he rejected the offer). 2 Superfly has the distinction of being one of the very few films to be outgrossed by its own soundtrack (composed by Curtis Mayfield). This isn't to say that the film itself didn't perform well – it grossed over $18 million on a $149,000 budget, making it one of the most successful of the blaxploitation era – but it does illustrate what a key element the music was. Melvin Van Peebles laid much of the blueprint for blaxploitation in Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, and this includes the approach to music, a defining element of the genre. Van Peebles brought in a fledgling soul band, Earth, Wind and Fire, to perform on the soundtrack. As the film was self-funded, he could not afford an extensive promotional campaign and so one of his solutions to publicise the film (along with his tagline “Rated X by an all-white jury”) was to release the soundtrack album in advance, with the critical momentum of this building up anticipation of the film's release. |
Using musicians from the black music scene, rather than established film composers, to score the films became a defining feature of blaxploitation. In many cases the scores became more iconic than the films, and although perhaps slightly contentious, it would be fair to say that the music has survived the test of time much better than the films themselves have. A literal who's-who of black music of the early seventies composed these scores, with, besides Earth, Wind & Fire and Curtis Mayfield, soundtracks by Isaac Hayes (Shaft), Marvin Gaye (Trouble Man), Bobby Womack (Across 110th Street), Herbie Hancock (The Spook Who Sat by the Door), Roy Ayers (Coffy) and James Brown (Black Caesar). In one of these cases, this led to blaxploitation's single academy award (Best Original Song for Isaac Hayes for Shaft, also nominated for Best Original Score). In many ways, this approach to the soundtrack was revolutionary, and it was certainly at least partly responsible for the way that soundtrack albums, and the use of contemporary pop songs, have become such an integral element of the marketing of modern mainstream cinema. Like many aspects of blaxploitation though there are two sides to the coin. Blaxploitation produced some genuinely exceptional music, but was it exceptional film music? Getting a musical icon to score your film is one thing, but with no prior experience of film scoring, such musicians aren't necessarily going to be as sensitive to the dramatic implications of the music as an experienced film composer. It's interesting to make a comparison with a genuine masterpiece of funk-influenced film composition from the same era, Lalo Schifrin's score for Dirty Harry (1971). Being an experienced film composer, Schifrin's score has a sophistication and subtlety on a dramatic level that is lacking from many of the blaxploitation soundtracks. Director Larry Cohen's experiences of working with James Brown on Black Caesar, recounted in interview with author Andrew Rausch, highlight some of the problems of working with musicians lacking film scoring experience. |
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Unfortunately, if the scene was five minutes long, James wrote nine minutes' worth of music. If it was a one-minute scene, he wrote two or three minutes. So I called up Bobbitt [Charles Bobbitt, Brown's manager] and I said, “This is what he did: if the scene was two minutes he gave me five minutes' worth of music.” Bobbitt says, “Well, then you have more than you need.” I said, “It doesn't work that way, Charles. The music is supposed to fit the scene.” So finally I had to go and get a music editor, and I sat there myself and cut and edited all the music cues down so they fit the sequences.3 When song-form music has been used most successfully in films it has often been pre-existing tracks in the hands of a director with a genuine understanding of the dramatic effect that music can have (Scorcese and Tarantino being two key examples). Genre-based original film music is often a balancing act with authenticity at one end of the scale and narrative sophistication at the other. Prioritising authenticity by hiring a composer known for their work in that particular genre, but without prior film composing experience, can have obvious drawbacks, but equally so can hiring a composer with mountains of film experience but without having the music of that genre in their blood. Anything the key blaxploitation soundtracks lacked in narrative sophistication, they certainly more than made up for it with sheer attitude and authenticity. On this basis many of these soundtracks can be regarded as classics. Black composers are to this day unfortunately under-represented in film composition. In the three-quarters of a century since the first Academy Award for original score in 1934, the award has only been won on one occasion by a black person – Herbie Hancock in 1986 for Round Midnight. Only a handful more have been nominated (Duke Ellington, Quincy Jones, Isaac Hayes and Jonas Gwangwa). Hancock is primarily known as a jazz musician (Round Midnight was a jazz score) and has composed relatively few film scores. Quincy Jones, a pioneer for black musicians in many areas of music – being the first African-American executive of a major record label and producer of the highest selling album of all time are just two of his achievements – composed a number of significant film scores in the 1960s and early 1970s, receiving an Oscar nomination in 1967 for In Cold Blood. He even composed the score for the very British 1969 Michael Caine classic The Italian Job, including the song “Self Preservation Society”. Jones has said that hearing this sung at present day football matches gives him 'goosebumps'.4 For an African-American musician with a prior background primarily in jazz to compose a cockney anthem steeped in Britishness shows quite a degree of diversification, but the path trodden by Jones has not been widely followed by black composers (Herbie Hancock also had a part in swinging sixties British culture, with his 1966 score for Antonioni's Blow Up). Jones largely turned away from film composition after around 1972 and in the decades since then few black composers have composed extensively for film within American cinema (Terence Blanchard is one of the few names that comes to mind). The blaxploitation movement is significant therefore in the examples of black film composition that it presents. The vast majority of scores for these films were by black musicians, and on the whole these demonstrate a different approach to the film soundtrack that has had a significant influence on later generations. |
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Blaxploitation was a genre that came and went at a particular point in American history, the product of both a specific political climate on a national level, in respect to racial equality, and the political climate of the film industry in America in the early seventies, with a shift of power from the major studios to smaller organisations and the individual. The movement certainly had an influence on later generations, although when African-American film-making emerged again in the 1980s it was in a different guise (Spike Lee and others). In many ways, the music of blaxploitation is one of the most significant elements of the genre, and the ramifications of the approach to the soundtrack shown in these films can certainly be felt in today's film industry. The genre, quite simply, produced some great music. In recent years, Quentin Tarantino has drawn new attention to blaxploitation, making his enthusiasm for the films well known and drawing attention to some lesser known examples. His own film Jackie Brown (1997) is strongly blaxploitation-influenced, with Pam Grier, the most significant female actress of the genre, in the title role. The film opens with Bobby Womack's title song from Across 110th Street. Whatever blaxploitation did for the American film industry though, the industry largely did not return the favour. Few of the significant actors of the genre found prominent work in film after the mid-seventies and few of the directors produced significant work after this time. Many of the key figures felt tainted by the term. As director Oscar Williams said, “If you were to talk about a film that was made by Charles Bronson – Death Wish (1974) – and we called it “whitesploitation,” you'd laugh”.5 |
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