Review of Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971) by Scott R — 15 Feb 2018

This is, to say the least, a challenging film. Worth watching if just for it's historical importance, the movie is hard to swallow and is rarely gratifying. There is a serious lack of plotting and characterization, and the movie is practically pornographic at times-from the first scene on, it is hard to watch, as a 15-year-old boy is practically raped, and that rape serving like Peter Parker's spiderbite, turning a boy into a (super)man.

To a degree, the movie plays into the dual fantasy space of the American racial imagination: The hypersexualized black man, who is both threat and hero, criminal and paragon-is this hard to watch because I am a well-meaning white liberal in a very different political context, or was this a true catharsis for its intended oppressed audience? Is the camera indicative of a white gaze or a black one? The editing has a hazy, jazz-like quality, flashes of technical artistry bordering on the avant-garde-again, hard to watch, hard to look away, hard to dismiss, hard to accept, forcing the question of my own spectatorship.