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Catalogue introduction
Here in the climate of Australia's white Anglo culture, Blaxploitation still exists as a fuzzy term which conjures up vague caricatures of African-Americans dressed wildly, driving Cadiallacs and shooting up people to the sound of wah-wah guitars. In a sense, that's exactly what Blaxploitation is. The point is whether you can comprehend the purpose and power of such imagery.Blaxploitation films are action-based, flaunt outrageous racial stereotypes (black, white, Hispanic & Italian), drive a cut-throat morality, promote sexual and violent titillation, and joyously thrust their vulgarity in your face. Quite precisely, they are 'funky' . But let's be clear on what 'funky' means. It's major vernacular line is to be found in turn-of-the century references to food - recipes based on bringing together a wide range of elements to create an overwhelming mix of flavours and fragrances, wherein the richness of the food in enjoyed for its headiness and its flagrant absence of purity and subtlety.
Afro-American slang pushed this notion in the 60s, when streams of black consciousness where surfacing to shape an outward and defiant 'blackness' in opposition to white Eurocentric ideals of form, substance and lineage. 'Funky' by the late 60s meant loud, colourful, sassy, bold, excessive, extreme, impure, vulgar. And proudly so. Black music and black fashion became the prime conveyers of this sensibility, and directly instigated and influenced most major traits we now associate with 70s style. (Most 70s fashion is actually retro-40s style exaggerated in mimicry of Black culture's penchant for loudness and brashness.)
Blaxploitation was originally a term of derision and scorn - championed mostly by elitist (white) film critics in the 70s for whom the explosive dynamism and outrageous tone of films aimed directly at urban Afro-American audiences was somehow politically incorrect. The term was intended as a witty pun (how unfunky) to suggest - erroneously - that blacks were being exploited by these films, as if they were a mindless mass who needed to become attuned to do-good house-Negro white bread dross like A RAISIN IN THE SUN and GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER.
A scant survey of working black directors through the 70s finds many of them joyously delivering Blaxploitation flicks to an appreciative yet ultimately segregated audience - the size of which only irritated purist critics further. Furthermore, independent Afro-American cinema has thrived since the early 1930s as a 'race market' along side the more-readily acknowledged fields of blues, jazz, soul & funk music - a realm created through the formation of regional urban independent record labels mostly owned and run by blacks. Both in spite of and because of their outwardly offensive iconography and mythology, the key Blaxploitation films carry on this rigorously independent tradition and stand as powerful examples of how options have always been explored outside the Hollywood system.
History has done little to illuminate the cinematic lineage and cultural importance of Blaxploitation - despite the incisive commentaries that have been delivered on the period and the genre by Spike Lee, Ice-T, Public Enemy, Iceberg Slim and many others. 'Hip' journalists - who ten years ago thought it was 'cool' to listen to Bob Marley but would never seriously watch something like CLEOPATRA JONES AND THE CASINO OF GOLD - now make jokes about SHAFT as if they are now in the know. But the root of Blaxploitation is no laughing matter.
In James Toback's FINGERS we find one of many gnarled roots caused by the Blaxploitation effect. Neurotic Italo-Catholic Harvey Keitel finds himself with none other than Jim Brown. In tight polyester hipsters and short-sleeved shirt, pimp Brown seduces two of his hot white hookers, who in this mysterious scene are melting in his arms. The action is prolonged, tense, pornographic. Keitel watches nervously. At any moment, Brown is as likely to bring them to orgasm as blow their brains out. Jim Brown is not simply 'the Other': he is a big black monster of unpredictability. His colour gives no clue: he could be jolly-black, burly-black, angry-black, deadly-black. In his most primal cinematic moment, Brown gives nothing away except the potential for danger.
Virtually all Blaxploitation films have this kind of moment. Violence erupts not as catharsis or conclusion, but indiscriminately at the explosive nexus between individual humiliation and social oppression. Blaxploitation programmatically attempts to move beyond this problem zone - but it is a reality to which it must return. This often-bleak mix of avoidance and acceptance is the power that Blaxploitation wields: the power of unpredictability. Nothing is more dangerous than the enemy you do not know. Like the unnerving Jim Brown, the films keep themselves in genre-check, only to erupt in an orgy of sex, violence and perverse humour. When a trio of foxy ladies slice up the genitals of a white Mafia dude in DOLEMITE, it starts off funny. But they keep going at it with extreme relish. Then Rudy Ray Moore all but spits on him as he bleeds to death. It ain't funny. The staging and the performances are cheap - the very kind of cheapness that liberal audiences use to distance themselves from the fetid network of frustration and injustice which forms the root structure underneath Blaxploitation cinema.
Concerned cultural strategists wish for the even distribution of self-empowerment - but usually under terms of protocol and propriety. Blaxploitation cinema is one of the rare examples of a culture being engaged in abject, irresponsible, contradictory and aggressive image-making. Every outrageously clothed pimp is an impression of the iconic implausibility of black self-improvement. Every gun blast is an echo of the sound of a car door being locked as a black man nears a white in his sedan. Even 'respected' African-American directors like Spike Lee, Charles Burnett and Carl Franklin acknowledge this in their interloping of confounding amoral threads within their humanist constructions. Ultimately, Blaxploitation is less written and controlled; more spoken and unleashed. It is vernacular, vocal, loud-mouthed, out-spoken. As the dictionary puts it in italics: vulgar.
Complete contents of this page © Philip Brophy