Melvin Van Peebles and Other Highlights from the New York Film Festival newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/melvin-van-peebles-and-other-highlights-from-the-new-york-film-festival Richard Brody
25 de setembro de 2021
The New York Film Festival opens this weekend under a shadow of mourning, because of the death, on Tuesday, of the filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles, whose third feature, “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song,” will play in the festival’s Revivals section, in a new restoration. His first feature, from 1967, “The Story of a Three-Day Pass,” which was filmed in France, presents a scathing view of the experiences of a Black American soldier, with a freely imaginative aesthetic that unfolds that character’s inner conflicts. In “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song,” from 1971, filmed in Los Angeles and other California locations, Van Peebles—working as an independent filmmaker, writing and directing and even starring in the movie (he even financed and retained ownership of it)—deploys a similar stylistic audacity, and to even bolder political ends. It’s the story of an apolitical entertainer of sorts—a Black male sex worker and freelance stud, a performer in an erotic show—who, after enduring police brutality, becomes an accidental revolutionary. Van Peebles’s vision of the devastating police violence that Black Americans endure at home (indeed, even literally inside their homes), and of the resulting deformations of their ordinary lives into an extraordinary heroism of resistance (or merely of survival)—has an eruptive urgency. By way of fragmentation, distortion, and a sense of frantic haste, Van Peebles fuses together his sense of just anger in bearing witness to such realities, his painfilled aversion to filming such unbearable truths, and his relentless sense of purpose in nonetheless flinging them onto the screen. For all its horror, “Sweet Sweetback” has an exuberant, hedonistic excitement. With the titular character, Van Peebles rips to shreds the era’s cinematic conventions designed for white consumption. Far from the stereotypes of middle-class respectability that Hollywood then assigned to Black stars, Sweetback is brazenly sexual and happily sybaritic, without regard for how whites view him; he is admired in his own community for his sense of freedom. Little in his life suggests a political focus—until he encounters and makes common cause with a member of the Black Panther Party, at great personal cost. Sweetback’s political awakening, his violent resistance to his police persecutors, and his successful escape from them convey a spirit of outrage and revolt that no other filmmaker at the time dared to avow. A film of triumphant independence—which took in ten million dollars at the box-office soon after its release—“Sweet Sweetback” made Van Peebles a hero of the cinema and a hero of the times at large. As much as the movie is a template of independent-film artistry and a decisive forebear of Black independent filmmaking, it’s also a model of beating Hollywood at its own game—of art as a crucial form of power.
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