Current graduate student Benjamin Wiggins published his article "You Talkin' Revolution, Sweetback': On Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song and Revolutionary Filmmaking" in Black Camera. This essay analyzes the production, text, and reception of Melvin Van Peebles's Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song to consider the potential of revolutionary cinema.
Abstract:
This essay analyzes the production, text, and reception of Melvin Van Peebles's Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song to consider the potential of revolutionary cinema. It details the one-man band approach Van Peebles employed to make this radical picture outside the studio system and the unique conditions of production he cultivated to gain the autonomy of an auteur. Through an analysis of Sweetback's cinematic space that draws on the work of Stephen Heath and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari as well as an analysis of the film's dialogue that considers it in relation to the loquaciousness of Poitier and the silence of Eastwood, this essay argues that Van Peebles constructs a new ground on which blackness is signified. By exorcising what Roland Barthes refers to as semiotic "anchors," Sweetback forces spectators to confront the terror of uncertain signs, destabilizing Hollywood's typical representation of blackness. While Van Peebles's position as auteur allowed him to present an unreconciled, multifarious blackness with which blacks possessed mutable subjectivities and the agency to change over time, the film failed to fulfill the hopes of black power leaders. Instead, it birthed blaxploitation. Sweetback was revolutionary in its production, signification, and distribution, but Hollywood was able to poach from it because its traditional exhibition did little to educate its audience on how to interpret its complex signification. To see how this oversight could have been addressed, this article turns to discussions of viewership and education in Huey Newton, Theodor Adorno, and the theorist-filmmakers of the Third Cinema. Finally, it discusses the prospects for a revolutionary cinema that addresses the shortcomings of Sweetback and other revolutionary films such as The Hour of the Furnaces as the space of the cinema dies and social media reigns.
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