The Film Forum is Just Talking About Blaxploitation, Baby!

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Previews

Published on Monday, 12 August 2024 14:25

Written by Brad Balfour

Coffy

The Blaxploitation movement of the 1970s changed cinema forever and now NYC’s Film Forum (209 W. Houston Street) looks back at the works of Ossie Davis, Gordon Parks, Gordon Parks Jr., Gilbert Moses and Van Peebles in their film series “Blaxploitation, Baby!”.

Running August 16 to the 22, this series features beloved actors including Pam Grier, Richard Roundtree, Ron O’Neal, Tamara Dobson, Jim Brown, Vonetta McGee, Fred Williamson, and Isaac Hayes. “Blaxploitation, Baby!” is dedicated to author and pioneering film historian Donald Bogle, collaborator on Film Forum’s first Blaxploitation festival (and the world’s first) in 1995.

“Melvin Van Peebles' SWEET SWEETBACK'S BAADASSSSS SONG set the stage for a new type of Black American cinema and a new Black hero: tough, assertive, rebellious — in an open declaration of war on pushers, turncoats, and especially The Man. Eagerly embraced by a young Black audience, but reviled by the older generation, the post-SWEETBACK Black action pictures made a fast buck for their often white producers, but in their wake brought a gritty social realism to Hollywood's Pop landscape; offered work to Black writers, directors and producers; and explosively touched on a previously-ignored need for empowered heroes and heroines.” – Donald Bogle

Films being screened are:

Cotton Comes to Harlem

• Super Fly
• Sheba, Baby
• Foxy Brown
• Coffy
• Truck Turner
• Shaft
• Blacula
• Friday Foster
• Black Caesar
• Thomasine & Bushrod
• SWEET SWEETBACK'S BAADASSSSS SONG
• Trick Baby
• Willie Dynamite
• Slaughter

To learn more, go to: https://filmforum.org/series/blaxploitation-baby

Blaxploitation, Baby!
August 16 - 22, 2024

Film Forum
209 West Houston Street
New York, NY 10014

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