Variety credited Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song and the less radical, Hollywood-financed film Shaft (both released in 1971) with the invention of the blaxploitation genre Cotton Comes to Harlem was released before either of those pictures. Hollywood realized the potential profit of expanding the audiences of blaxploitation films. The genre's inception coincides with the rethinking of race relations in the 1970s.Ä«laxploitation films were originally aimed at an urban African-American audience but the genre's audience appeal soon broadened across racial and ethnic lines. The genre does rank among the first after the race films in the 1940s and 1960s in which black characters and communities are the protagonists and subjects of film and television, rather than sidekicks, antagonists or victims of brutality. He claimed the genre was "proliferating offenses" to the black community in its perpetuation of stereotypical characters often involved in crime. The term, a portmanteau of the words "black" and "exploitation", was coined in August 1972 by Junius Griffin, the president of the Beverly Hills-Hollywood NAACP branch. Poster of Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971)Ä«laxploitation is an ethnic subgenre of the exploitation film that emerged in the United States during the early 1970s. Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |