Baadasssss Cinema (Isaac Julien, 2002)

[cahiers_du_2006]

I have never seen bell hooks before. I've only ever read her. Her contribution was that academics and nostalgic film buffs project a lot of revolutionary meaning onto Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971) after the fact, but that it was really just about money plain and simple. Someone once told me that what was brilliant and revolutionary about blaxploitation movies was the way they used stereotypes. That they were a put on. That Foxy Brown getting into a brawl in a lesbian bar is such a perfect image that ideologically deconstructing it would be useless. That some shitty, stereotypical images are just so great that to argue against them is a great constraint on oneself that should be avoided at all costs.

And what's with Tarantino? Can he calm the hell down? He gestures so frantically when he talks it's like he's flagging down a helicopter. Makes me nervous. Is it the coke?