Sweet sweetback's baadasssss song (E)

Starring the Black Community and directed, scripted, edited and produced by Melvin Van Peebles, “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” is one of the most influential of American underground/independent films. Influenced by the radical turn in the civil rights movement, and the resulting rise of the Black Panthers, “Sweet Sweetback …” makes no apologies for its revolutionary ardour. The police in this film are racist and corrupt, white people are murderous and the black population of the United States are still economic and cultural “slaves” to the “Man”. The film’s controversial and subversive power comes from suggesting that the very criminality and sexual licentiousness that racists have associated with the “African”, may be the very qualities the black population can use against their oppressors. Sweetback is a hustler, raised in a brothel. Picked up by the police one night, he snaps when the police begin brutalising a young revolutionary. For the rest of the film, Sweetback is running; running away from a racist America that will not tolerate an “uppity nigger”. Sly, fast and often cruelly funny, the film was made on a miniscule budget and is now unmistakably a result of the counter-cultural ferment of the late sixties. Van Peebles’s work is a pioneering work of Afro-American cinema, and though often considered a precursor to blaxploitation, it is a defiantly angry and passionate work. Features an acid funk music score by Earth, Wind and Fire. The video includes the movie’s original trailer as well as an interview with Van Peebles filmed in the late nineties.