Blaxploitation

Roughly two hundred films in five years, with Black leads, made largely for Black urban audiences, keeping several studios solvent along the way.

Melvin Van Peebles financed Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971) independently and proved the audience existed. MGM's Shaft, the same year, proved a studio could monetise it. Crime films dominated, but the cycle also produced horror (Blacula), westerns (The Legend of Nigger Charley) and martial arts crossovers.

The argument about the name

Junius Griffin, then head of the Beverly Hills NAACP, coined "blaxploitation" in 1972 as an attack. His charge was that white-owned studios were extracting money from Black audiences while recycling pimps and pushers. That criticism has force.

So does the reply. These films employed Black actors, directors, composers and crews at a scale the industry would not match again for twenty years, and gave Pam Grier and Gordon Parks careers.

Why it ended

Not because the audience left. Jaws and Star Wars arrived, the studios learned what a crossover blockbuster earned, and a targeted audience started to look small.

Where to start

Coffy for Pam Grier. Super Fly for Curtis Mayfield, whose score spends its runtime arguing with the film it is in.