Blaxploitation films set in the South often deal with slavery and miscegenation. Pejorative terms for white characters, such as ' cracker' and ' honky,' are commonly used. Vincent Canby of The New York Times, 1976 īlaxploitation films set in the Northeast or West Coast mainly take place in poor urban neighborhoods. Blaxploitation films were also the first to feature soundtracks of funk and soul music. Variety credited Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song and the less radical, Hollywood-financed film Shaft (both released in 1971) with the invention of the blaxploitation genre, however, Cotton Comes to Harlem was released before either of those pictures. Hollywood realized the potential profit of expanding the audiences of blaxploitation films across those racial lines. The genre's inception coincides with the rethinking of race relations in the 1970s.īlaxploitation films were originally aimed at an urban African-American audience, but the genre's audience appeal soon broadened across racial and ethnic lines.

However, the genre does rank among the first after the race films in the 1940s and 1960s in which black characters and communities are the heroes and subjects of film and television, rather than sidekicks, villains, or victims of brutality.

He so named it because he claimed the genre was 'proliferating offenses' to the black community in its perpetuation of stereotypical characters often involved in criminal activity. The term, a portmanteau of the words 'black' and 'exploitation', was coined in August 1972 by Junius Griffin, then president of the Beverly Hills-Hollywood NAACP branch. Poster of Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971)īlaxploitation is an ethnic subgenre of the exploitation film that emerged in the United States during the early 1970s.

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