african-american directors series: sweet sweetback's baadassss song (melvin van peebles, 1971)

This is the first film I have watched in "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2024-25", a "33-week-long community challenge" where "you must watch one previously unseen film that fits the criteria of the theme for the week." This is the 10th annual challenge, and my sixth time participating (previous years can be found at "2019-20", "2020-21", "2021-22", "2022-23", and 2023-24). Week 1 is called "The American History of X Week":

Hollywood has a fickle relationship with the letter X. These days it's a popular (if increasingly uninspired) choice for the rare franchise that makes it to a tenth installment: The Land Before Time, Friday the 13th, The Fast and Furious, and Saw have all adopted the roman numeral. But before this new millennium fad, X meant something very different.

In 1968, in response to the desire for a more faceted system of ratings—and, in its early days, to promote the kind of artistic freedom the Motion Picture Production Code had quashed—the MPAA replaced its "approved" and "not approved" seals with a quartet of letters: G, M, R, and X. The X-rating indicated, simply, that a film was appropriate for adults only.

Soon after, in 1969, Midnight Cowboy burst onto the scene. Worried about exposing youngsters to the film's frank homosexual content and depictions of drug use, United Artists chose to self-apply the X-rating, hoping the choice would not only protect American youth but drum up publicity, too. Because the MPAA had failed to trademark their new content advisory system, everyone from Walt Disney to Gerard Damiano (director of Deep Throat) could slap any rating they wished on their work. And the porn industry wished. Once the floodgates had opened, however, the X-rating didn't last long. By 1973, Hollywood studios had given up on the rating (the adult film industry's tongue-in-cheek co-opting having soured it), and the purveyors of explicit films had done the same, instead preferring to use "XXX" to denote the strength of the adult content in their movies. The X-rating languished in Hollywood until 1990 (although independent and international filmmakers didn't shy away), when the MPAA replaced it with the newly minted—and trademarked—NC-17.

To kick off The Letterboxd Season Challenge's tenth installment (LSC10, incidentally, not LSCX), we take a look back at the original era of X. This week's challenge is to watch a mainstream (non-porn) MPAA X-rated film from the rating's 22-year lifespan, conveniently compiled in this list from C Collins.

In 1971, Huey Newton wrote an extensive analysis of Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, beginning, "It is the first truly revolutionary Black film made and it is presented to us by a Black man." Newton found the film ripe for explication, and his lengthy piece provides insight into the film and the times. Watching Sweet Sweetback in 2024, we recognize it as a movie of its times, but it retains relevance today, for the situation for black men in America is only partly improved from 1971.

Speaking solely in terms of its impact on American cinema, Sweet Sweetback is trendsetting. Yes, it was "rated X by an all-white jury", and it comes by that rating honestly, with several seemingly unsimulated sex scenes. There is also extreme violence, but these scenes affect us differently depending on who is performing the violence. When white men beat black men, we feel anger ... when black men retaliate, we feel redemption.

As a kid, I remember hearing music on FM radio made by Van Peebles. It was like nothing I'd heard, a combination of jazzy underpinnings and poetic readings. Van Peebles told of lives outside of my white suburban situation, and it was memorable ... it opened up some odd new worlds. Van Peebles is present on the soundtrack to Sweet Sweetback, backed by Earth, Wind & Fire, who released their first two albums in 1971. What sounded like music from outer space on the radio makes perfect sense as the accompaniment to Sweetback's adventures.

Van Peebles worked on a very low budget, partly because no big studios would finance him, although that gave him the independence he needed. He uses an experimental touch at times ... the film has roots in the French New Wave. Things get repetitive near the end, but it doesn't ruin the movie. There is a clear auteur behind the film, as befits a movie where the same person is producer, director, writer, editor, star, and soundtrack contributor. No one else could have made Sweet Sweetback. Along with Shaft, also released in 1971, Sweetback also kicked off the blaxploitation genre.