The Blaxploitation Canon

Sun, 25 Aug 2024 14:00:00 +0000

For a few years in the early 1970s, a struggling Hollywood discovered that Black audiences would fill theatres for films with Black heroes, and a whole cycle was born almost overnight. Blaxploitation — a label coined at the time, and one many of its makers resented — produced fast, cheap, wildly influential pictures that put Black leads at the centre of the crime film, the horror film and the action film for the first time at scale. The wave was contradictory from the start: celebrated for its heroes and its extraordinary soul soundtracks, criticised by the NAACP and civil-rights leaders for trading in stereotype and violence. Both readings are true, which is what keeps the films worth arguing about half a century on. I set out the industrial story — how a nearly bankrupt studio system followed the money straight into a movement — in blaxploitation: genre cinema and the studio that followed the money. This is the canon that story produced, kept to the films that still play.

Crime-Films - vo.rs

The Blaxploitation Canon