I was, like, "Dayum. I minored in African American studies in kollidge. I read a lot of histories of the civil rights struggle, read up on the black power movement, have been reading about the Weather Underground, yadda. And yet for all my reading of the Black Arts Movement and its relationship to the Black Power Movement, I'd never encountered mentioned of Mario Van Peebles."
What gives with that. for those of you who were around was it really as all that as Mario Van Peebles makes it sound in Baadasssss?
So, I went to the indie movie house here and picked up the Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song to check it out. Well, it was interesting in that it was definitely crappy in a way -- poor production quality (to be expected) and some really nutty experimental stuff that just gets in the way of the movie (repeating over and over again a chorus). But then there's other things about it that were fascinating -- like Van Peebles willingness to take on what he refers to as different genderS in an interview. Yes, he refers to them as different genderS -- plural. Now, knowing about the history of the kinds of sex shows he explores in Sweetback, there's no need to be surprised about that since it was a big draw for Harlem and whites who'd go slumming in the 1910s and 1920s in order to explore their various sexual interests and proclivities. (See Gay New York and Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America both of which address the way whites would go slumming at Harlem sex shows.)
Even so, it made me pause because so much of that was shoved underground, as if we had to give ourselves amnesia and refuse to recognize faerie queen cross dressers, women who dress like men and fuck other women with strap ons. Not to mention the scene with the three gay men -- queens with blue eye shadow -- all of whom keep licking their ice cream while evading the cop's questions and refusing to give up Sweet to the bacon. I've only seen two of the famous porn releases of the 70s, the hey day of porn, but I don't imagine that they explore sexuality like that -- and this film was certainly a precursor that supposedly launched the blacksploitation era.
Van Peebles also doesn't shy away from what would be referred to as the pathologies of life in the ghetto, even though it's also a film about "getting back at the man".
The film is intensely political and apolitically individualist at the same time -- I guess an 'of course' should accompany that.
Worth a looksee if you have access to the films.
shag