The Film Resource Unit has acquired a historical black film portfolio. Ngaire Blankenberg looks at the portrayal of African-Americans in film
Melvin van Peeble’s 1971 film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song is dedicated to “all the Brothers and Sisters who have had enough of the Man”. Ninety minutes later the film closes with the words “WATCH OUT. A Baad Asssss Nigger is coming back to collect some dues …”
Just like that and Hallelujah. The revolution has begun.
It’s easy to see why Blaxploitation films have been credited with influencing generations of young black film-makers. And it’s easy to see why these films have been making a comeback, both in the United States – where they’re from – and in South Africa, whose brothers and sisters have definitely had enough of the man.
It’s probably for these reasons that the Film Resource Unit has decided to bring in its new African-American catalogue. It’s the enduring appeal of superfly heroes that rise up against the white man’s system – with a little bit of dis and a little bit of dat – that gives these films a flava that transcends continents. It’s about collecting dues – and for black film-makers speaking to a black audience, it’s time and time again.
Which begs the question – is there a black cinema that crosses borders, oceans and history? Is it possible that this black cinema exists, not as a construction of a white imagination, but rather as a black-made reflection of a “black” world, for its own sake – unapologetic, independent and, most importantly, for a blacks-only, global audience?
Perhaps the answer to these questions lies in two titles in the unit’s recently acquired collection.
While the company’s wares include the alternative Africa Dreaming series, of independent short films by African directors available to South African audiences, it is their new list of African-American titles that harbour the biggest ironies
Called “The Best of African-American cinema”, somewhat questionably, it’s a motley collection of the Xenon Entertainment group’s lesser known African-American films from the 1940s to date.
The catalogue includes a number of documentaries on the lives of African- American heroes – from gospel singer Mahalia Jackson to civil rights leader Malcolm X – as well as an impressive array of martial arts, Jackie Chan-type action movies.
While these may offer an alternative to Hollywood they are, arguably, directly responsible for the pervasive images of black manhood adopted by the movie mainstream, something the Africa Dreaming catalogue seeks to displace.
Xenon’s catalogue – with such suspect gems as the 1977 Black Voodoo and the 1979 Disco Godfather – presents a reiteration of some touchy Hollywood stereotypes: the black man as pusher, pimp, boxer and thug. The black woman as largely irrelevant, sexy, slapped and raped. So edgy is the content that each video cover comes stuffed with a little purple pamphlet instructing women how to recognise and put an end to abuse – a self- conscious mea culpa of the sexist, if not misogynistic, nature of many of these movies.
The style of the films is pure funk – raw machismo with a fuck you attitude that recalls the real man heroes, like John Travolta, of the films of yesterday. It’s what 1970s black film-making was all about: an entirely black voice addressing a palpable anger, anti-white establishment and notoriously low budget. It’s a genre that owes much of its mainstream revival to Quentin Tarantino – first in Pulp Fiction and more recently in Jackie Brown. It’s a scene that’s also credited as inspiration for a slew of other “black” movies, including the 1994 Small Time, also included in the Xenon catalogue.
In Norman Loftis’s Small Time, the ever-sexy Richard Barboza plays Vince, a young man unable to resist the socio-economic forces that shape his destiny. The message is hammered home time and again: “You gotta be cold in this world to survive”. It’s a war out there and a black man has “gotta do what a black man has gotta to do”.
But there’s a language in many of these films that goes beyond a sub-cultural lingo. It’s the language of violence and desperation, a reflection of a black urban American reality that, in between the occasional burst of glory, bluntly put, sucks. Apart from the stylin’ of the brothas, which is not to be underestimated, and slammin’ soundtracks, the films speak to an experience that is hardly unique to the United States. Perhaps it’s this experience, packaged in an aura of slick, that resonates across continents.
In the booklet that accompanies the Africa Dreaming series, readers are asked “How much of what you see is influenced by music videos, films and TV shows from America?”
Subsequently, we are told: “Through the sensational audio-video stimulus of Hollywood, South Africans are becoming consumers of American images and the products these images sell.”
There is a phrase I like, coined by theorist Arjun Appadurai, to describe much of what is happening in the so-called “global village”: he calls it “nostalgia without memory”.
On the other end of the spectrum the Xenon catalogue is a collection of nostalgia. The general crappiness of the movies is excused for the world that they recall – a world of political radicalness. Of black panthers and black consciousness, of a gangsta morality but a morality nevertheless, of a pointed rebellion, of funky hair and outfits, of fly tunes. Of baaad asssses that are pitted against “the Man”, and who win.
It’s style nostalgia as much as anything, and falls too into our hunger for pre-millennial retro-chic. These days, anything that was once cool is hip again.
The problem is, of course, that the memories all these young black South African men are seeking to recapture don’t belong to them. Not literally. But perhaps there is something to be said for collective memory, and the enduring cool dude who, at the end of the day, won’t let the system pin him down.
For films from the Xenon Entertainment group Catalogue are available call (011) 838-4280