Sounds on Screen: Blaxploitation

Marking roughly 50 years since the coining of the phrase "blaxploitation" by NAACP leader Junius Griffin, NTS explores the endlessly inventive Black sonics that were inexplicably linked with this often controversial but undeniably adventurous moment in film history. Featuring music from Roy Ayers, Isaac Hayes, Sun Ra and more. Created with the help of Criterion Collection's Curatorial Director Ashley Clark: Beginning in the early 1970s, a new wave of Black-focused cinema, with one foot in exploitation thrills and the other in avant-garde provocation, sent shockwaves through American film audiences. It soon became known as "Blaxploitation", a term reportedly minted by Junius Griffin, then president of the Beverly Hills chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Griffin's term certainly wasn't coined with flattering intent, but if "Blaxploitation" was deployed to criticize sensationalized images of African Americans, there was far more to this boom than simple stereotypes. It cemented a new generation of stars for the Black-is-beautiful era (Pam Grier, Richard Roundtree), afforded them meaty roles as characters with vibrant, anti-establishment emotional, physical and sexual agency, and created vital opportunities for daring Black filmmakers to experiment behind the camera. Major films of the era included Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, Shaft, Superfly and Foxy Brown, but there was room, too, for unclassifiable, mind-expanding efforts that defied genre by incorporating elements of Afrofuturism, surrealism, psychedelia, and Black mysticism. What's more, these disparate films were inextricably linked by the constant presence on their soundtracks and scores of boundless Black musical sonic invention, from the brassiest funk and sweetest soul, to the skronkiest, most far-out jazz imaginable. Taken together, these films offer a fuller picture of a time when Black artists both in front of and behind the camera, and on the soundtracks, were breaking political and aesthetic boundaries to reclaim their image.