A landmark of Black and American independent cinema that would send shock waves through the culture, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song was Melvin Van Peebles’s second feature film, after he walked away from a contract with Columbia in order to make his next film on his own terms. Acting as producer, director, writer, composer, editor, and star, Van Peebles created the prototype for what Hollywood would eventually co-opt and make into the blaxploitation hero: a taciturn, perpetually blank-faced performer in a sex show, who, when he’s pushed too far by a pair of racist cops looking to frame him for a crime he didn’t commit, goes on the run through a lawless underground of bikers, revolutionaries, sex workers, and hippies in a kill-or-be-killed quest for liberation from white oppression. Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song’s incendiary politics are matched by Van Peebles’s revolutionary style, in which jagged jump cuts, kaleidoscopic superimpositions, and psychedelic sound design come together in a sustained howl of rage and defiance.
Details by Film
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song
Streaming Options
Baadasssss!
Release Information:
Technical Specifications
Supplements
- Introduction from by director Melvin Van Peebles from 1997
- Audio commentary from 1997 by director Melvin Van Peebles
- New conversation between Melvin Van Peebles and film critic Elvis Mitchell
- Interview from 1971 with Melvin Van Peebles on Detroit Tubeworks
- Episode of Black Journal from 1971 featuring Melvin Van Peebles and critics Clayton Riley, Francis Ward, and A. Peter Bailey
- New conversation between scholars Gerald R. Butters Jr., Novotony Lawrence, and Amy Abugo Ongiri
- Trailer
- Excerpts from a 2004 interview with Melvin Van Peebles for the Directors Guild of America Visual History Program
- Baadasssss!, a 2003 fictional feature film based on director Melvin Van Peebles’s diaries from the making of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, directed by and starring his son Mario Van Peebles
- Audio commentary from 2003 featuring director and star Mario Van Peebles with his father Melvin Van Peebles for Baadasssss!
- The Story Behind "Baadasssss!": The Birth of Black Cinema, a 2004 featurette on the making of Baadasssss!
- Melvin Van Peebles: The Real Deal, a 2002 interview with the director on the making of Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song