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Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song
Celebrating Black History Month! Special Intro by Assistant Professor Skinner Myers!
A landmark of Black and American independent cinema that would send shock waves through the culture, Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song was Melvin Van Peebles's second feature film, after he walked away from a contract with Columbia in order to make his next film on his own terms. Acting as producer, director, writer, composer, editor, and star, Van Peebles created the prototype for what Hollywood would eventually co-opt and make into the blaxploitation hero: a taciturn, perpetually blank-faced performer in a sex show, who, when he's pushed too far by a pair of racist cops looking to frame him for a crime he didn't commit, goes on the run through a lawless underground of bikers, revolutionaries, sex workers, and hippies in a kill-or-be-killed quest for liberation from white oppression. Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song's incendiary politics are matched by Van Peebles's revolutionary style, in which jagged jump cuts, kaleidoscopic superimpositions, and psychedelic sound design come together in a sustained howl of rage and defiance.
Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song
Fri February 24, 7:30 PM, Muenzinger Auditorium
United States of America, 1971, in English, 97 min • official site
Screenplay: Melvin Van Peebles, Director: Melvin Van Peebles, Cast: Simon Chuckster, Melvin Van Peebles, Hubert Scales, Mario Van Peebles, John Dullaghan
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