Sweet Melvin

You're not an Afro-Am or VES concentrator. You couldn't make it into Sanders Theater during shopping period. Maybe you're not a Harvard undergraduate at all.

So you may never hear a lecture by Professor Spike Lee. But at least you can have the next best thing: for four dollars, you too can see the films for his course.

Although Lee's class is titled "Contemporary African American Cinema," the Film Archive has named its series "Black Cinema after Sweetback." The intimation is clear: modern Black film began in 1971 with Melvin Van Peebles's Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song.

Yes, that is the correct spelling. Sweetback, for short, is the mother of all blaxploitation movies. Everyone from Shaft to Superfly (and maybe even Ice-T) owes their style to Van Peebles' rendition of Sweetback.

The atmosphere is set in the opening credits. Sweetback is dedicated to "all the brothers and the sisters who have had enough of the man" and it stars "The Black Community."

The story is simple, but not simplistic. Sweetback (Van Peebles, the director) works as a performer in a brother. He makes his living displaying his sexual prowess for a racially mixed audience. The police "borrow" him from the brothel owner to serve as a generic black suspect.

But they don't know who they're dealing with. Instead of passively standing by as they rough up a Black activist, a previously withdrawn Sweetback beats the white cops to death--using the very handcuffs that restrain him.

And then he runs. The rest of Sweetback consists of a few more cop killings, a few more sexual encounters, and a lot of running. Sweetback seems to travel by foot all the way from Los Angeles to the Mexican border.

Despite the spare plot, Sweetback has a lot to say. Under a veneer of sex and violence, Van Peebles is telling the story of an alienated Black underclass.

While fleeing the police, Sweetback travels through Black society, and encounters a series of stereotyped experiences. He starts with sex, dodges activism, and receives no solace from religion or drugs. And invariably, the whites, from cops to bikers to hippies, are out to get him.

Van Peebles leaves Sweetback, metaphor for the "Black Community," no one to depend upon but himself--and the protagonist seems to prefer it that way. He is the original tough, self-reliant, badass Black.

And Van Peebles is the original Black director. His experience as the first independent Black film-maker in Hollywood can be seen as a rough analogy to the film.

Sweetback performs for a white audience, and they love it--until he challenges their authority. The story's the same for Van Peebles. Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song was a success, but the director's later work has been ignored. Hollywood exppropriated his style but not his message, when it created the blaxploitation genre. It took a new wave of independent filmmakers to bring the real Sweetback back to cinema.

Van Peebles' groundbreaking work lives on in the films of today's Black directors. John Singleton (Boyz-n-the Hood), Mario Van Peebles (son of Melvin and director of New Jack City) and Lee have all cited Van Peebles as an early influence.

The film series "Black Cinema After Sweetback" recognizes this influence both in its title and in its format. The series began with Sweetback and will be moving to the blaxploitation films of the 70s and to the Black film renaissance of the 80s. Highlights include House Party (directed by Harvard graduate Reginald Hudlin) and several films by Lee.