A shift happened when actor Sidney Poitier made his directorial debut in 1972 with Buck and the Preacher, starring Harry Belafonte and Poitier himself. Films starring Pam Grier such as Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974) inverted the gender balance while hewing to the same tropes. Black men asserted power through a pointed, brittle masculinity. Often, women in these movies played sex workers or part-time lovers-sexually liberated characters relegated to the background. Hollywood studios churned out blaxploitation films, many of them formulaic cops-and-robbers flicks, after Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) made more than $15 million at the box office on a budget of $150,000. During the seventies, Black cinema began to flourish and grew many branches. This tension between respectable, dutiful motherhood and female sexuality, complicated by race and class dynamics, animates the film Claudine, which opened in theaters in April 1974. “I can’t be sleeping around, ’cause I got these children,” she says. “Girl, don’t you know a woman has to have her vitamin F,” one of the bus riders says, and the others laugh. We learn that the woman’s name is Claudine, that she is tired after another sleepless night of headaches, that she worries after her children and takes little time for herself. They share the kind of banter children hear only when they eavesdrop: knowing, barely coded, tongue-in-cheek euphemisms about sex and women’s desire. We follow the woman to the bus, where she joins four other women seated in the back. Gladys and her backing vocalists-her band, the Pips-are still singing. One by one they part, until she is alone, running for the bus. She holds a battered shopping bag and the arms of the children at her flanks as she kisses them goodbye. The woman in the middle of the procession wears a paisley tea-length work skirt and blouse, her hair pulled back into a neat chignon. The block is shabby, yet joyously appointed. A line of seven pedestrians turns a corner, filling the sidewalk they pass briskly under the canopy of the Crystal Café and Lounge. While the screen is still dark, Gladys Knight’s voice drifts in, in a strong, sincere belt: “How can I / Work out this sweet relation?” A chorus of male voices answers: “Let us deal with love.” A tableau of highways, north- and southbound traffic beneath New York City’s Triborough Bridge against the dense morning fog.
0 kommentar(er)
