Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences In Film

4. Welcome to Crooklyn: Spike Lee and the Rearticulation of the Black Urbanscape

Welcome to Crooklyn: Spike Lee and the Rearticulation of the Black Urbanscape or a brief period spanning the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, the visualization of an African American cinematic urbanscape was inextricably linked to blaxploitation and other black-focused films. This city space, which I have referred to as a black ghetto chronotope, was characterized by precise spatial and temporal coordinates: African American neighborhoods in New York and Los Angeles in the 1970s. Films such as Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song and Superfly shared a temporal immediacy and documentary-like realism produced by cinematic devices such as location shooting, handheld camera, and sync-sound. References to the fashions, urban patois, and politics (such as black nationalism) contemporaneous with African American urban experience during the period enriched the films' mimetic qualities. Furthermore , the films' musical scores expanded their overall aura of urban chic by extending blaxploitation's reach from theaters to radio when sound tracks were marketed as separate, although related, entities. Used in this way, music contributed to the films' cultural capital and reified their urban narratives in a reciprocal relationship in which their sound became part of the city's sound track and vice versa. While ghetto settings were not an exclusive characteristic of blaxploitation-a point I made in my discussion of Haile Gerima's Bush Mama-films from the genre authored 117 Copyrighted Material 118 Chapter 4 and disseminated what were some of the most recognizable constructions of the black city in the early 1970s, examples of which include Superfly's New York and Sweetback's Los Angeles. Due to their overwhelming popularity, the films defined the contours of the represented "Black City" for millions of theatergoers. Yet, because of the central role played by the ghetto in blaxploitation, it is no surprise that as the genre began to disappear from the cinematic screen, so too did the black city, if for no other reason than blaxploitation was almost the sole articulator of its spaces in commercial cinema. Urban spaces may have materialized in other black-oriented films like Michael Schultz's Cooley High (1975) and Car Wash (1976), as well as in Berry Gordy's Mahogany (1975), but it appeared in increasingly diluted forms, diminishing the city's importance in the narrative. For instance, in Mahogany, Chicago's South Side is solely a backdrop for the first part of the film, its impoverished inner-city streets becoming nothing more than the literal "local color" for a fashion shoot. 1 Ironically, part of the responsibility for blaxploitation's disappearance can be found in its successes. One of the main reasons for the film industry's initial interest in the production of blaxploitation vehicles like Shaft, Superfly, and later spin-offs was their profit potential. They promised to attract what had long been identified as a large proportion of the filmgoing audience-the African American box office. Facing financial ruin, the result ofa number ofintersecting causes, such as anti-monopoly legislation, television, and suburbanization, the industry looked to what would eventually be called blaxploitation and its promise of significant box office returns for minimal financial output. Blaxploitation films, in effect, helped pull Hollywood out of a financial slump. However, when the financial crisis had abated somewhat, the industry shifted back into the production of other genres-importantly, ones with more of a "crossover" appeal-and decreased the scale of its investments in black-focused product.2 The turn away from blaxploitation was further influenced by the environment of critical contestation engendered by the films. As early as the appearance of Sweetback in 1970, blaxploitation's glorification of sex, violence, and criminality came under critical scrutiny from different segments of the African American community, indicating the continuing concern with defining a black film aesthetics that had begun with the first protests against D. W. Griffith's Birth ofa Nation. Initially these critiques were limited to the pages of various print media. The Copyrighted Material Welcome to Crooklyn: Spike Lee and the Block Urbanscape 119 release of Superfly in 1972, however, sparked the formation of a number of groups such as Jesse Jackson's People United to Save Humanity (Operation PUSH), an organization determined to change the nature of African American cinematic representations. PUSH's focus echoed those of Walter White's and the NAACP's from decades before in its concern over the lack of African American representation both on the screen and in film...