Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song with Black Chariot

Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song with Black Chariot

Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song

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 LA 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.

Black Chariot

Robert Goodwin wrote, produced, and directed this lost gem of American independent cinema. Opening during a tense meeting between members of an underground Black Power group that leads to a stunning foot chase, Goodwin’s film weaves past and present to tell the story of the social awakening of a character only referred to as “the drifter” (Bernie Casey). Shot on both 35mm and video and boasting a fierce, early performance from L.A. Rebellion icon Barbara O. Jones, Black Chariot is a fascinatingly iconoclastic revelation. Though world-premiered at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in 1971, Black Chariot has remained under-screened for decades—until now.

Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song

DIRECTOR: Melvin Van Peebles. WRITTEN BY: Melvin Van Peebles. CAST: Melvin Van Peebles, Bruce Adams, Michael Augustus, John Allen. 1971. 97 min. USA. Color. English. DCP.

Black Chariot

DIRECTOR: Robert L. Goodwin. WRITTEN BY: Robert L. Goodwin. CAST: Bernie Casey, Barbara O. Jones, Richard Elkins, Pauline Myers. 1971. 90 min. USA. Color. English. DCP. Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of the family of Robert L. Goodwin Sr. Preservation of Black Chariot made possible by a generous grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation. Additional funding by the Earl W. and Amanda Stafford Center for African American Media Arts (CAAMA).

Academy Museum film programming generously funded by the Richard Roth Foundation.

Make It Dinner and a Movie

Fanny's Restaurant & Café

All guests who present a ticket for a film screening, Tuesday through Saturday (and the first Sunday of every month), receive 10% off all food and non-alcoholic beverages at Fanny's. Discount only applicable on the same day as the screening and cannot be redeemed for another screening or date. Dinner reservations can be made on OpenTable or Resy.