Blaxploitation Cinema Part 1 Blaxploitation (blax sploi tation) adjective 1. A commercially-minded film of the seventies for black audiences Black flicks aka ‘blaxploitation’ was a short-lived, but influential pop cultural style of the 1970’s. Blaxploitation movies’ emergence was due to the social-political consciousness of the black community. Which ignited another battle between groups of the black community; protesting stereotypes on film reminiscent of the old days. It also resulted in many Hollywood studios making millions of dollars in profit too, as some were on the brink of bankruptcy. “Blaxploitation cinema really offered something that hadn’t existed before. They got into areas that other movies didn’t, but crime novels did” “Downtown LA with all its cinemas was like a black Hollywood, all those cinemas all the way down the street, every one of them a blaxploitation film played” Quentin Tarantino Writer/Director
“If there were more than five blacks on a corner they considered it a riot, so they’d bring out the dogs and turn the water hoses on, all this stuff was still happening in the 70’s man, and if you fought back you’d go straight to jail. The only way we could get away with it was on the screen” “The fear was that black power had to come from the barrel of a gun” Curtis Mayfield Songwriter/Performer/Musician “It just meant they found a way to tap into a black audience and we exploit the dollars that they have by making movies for them, by them that are about them. It didn’t mean they were exploiting our sensibilities or anything else, it was just trying to make a dollar” Samuel L. Jackson Actor “In the mid-seventies, the early seventies, when white cinema, mainstream cinema was about defeat. It was the Nixon era, it was Watergate, people didn’t feel empowered. Feminism was making men have to re-think their relationship to romance and sexuality on screen. Black movies had heroes who won, people that could affect change, they were funny, they were people or characters who were bursting with charisma and ambition and laying claim to the screen for the first time. They were not affected by the kind of defeatist attitude that had taken its place in pop culture; they were about winning.” Elvis Mitchell Film Critic, New York Times