Blaxploitation Film Analysis

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Blaxploitation Cinema is defined as “ commerical-minded films” targeted for black audiences in the seventies. These films are usually features black heroes, action elements and themes related to crime or ghetto.
In the seventies, when the common theme in main stream Hollywood was about defeat, Blaxaploitation films gained popularity because it showed success and winning. Blaxploitation films gives people a sense of empowerment, and the genre challenges many traditional representations of Black people on screen. However, Gurraro argues that Blaxploitaion films are not looking to make real changes for Black people’s condition. The core of Blaxploitaion films is about money, which makes a lot of things in the films problematic. The Black characters …show more content…
A. Rebellion School sought to challenge Blaxploitaion films, saying that there is another way to make Black films. Masilela claims that they found Black Exploitation films problematic as the classic Hollywood movies and demanded an anti-Hollywood approach to film-making, and Bush Mama is one of the films that attempt to resist western ideologies in the dominant film industry and to develop a distinct film aesthetic devoted to portray authentic Black experience. Unlike Blaxploitaion films, Bush Mama employs elements of third cinema, such as experimental narrative and . Masilela points out Bush Mama utilizes real footage of the film crew being harassed by the police. The narrative become a hybrid of fiction and documentary. The film explores the Black lives under the structural and institutional oppression. There is a theme of struggle. Dorothy, a pregnant Black woman, depends on welfare for a living, but the welfare office informs her that she has to abort her baby to get the welfare money. TC, her Vietnam veteran boyfriend, was framed in to prison. To Gerima, in order to combat cultural imperialism, we have to deconstruct the ideologies Hollywood films installed in our minds. Shot in black and white, Bush Mama’s grainy images is the result of low budget. However, the poor resolution distinguished the films from the polished Hollywood aesthetics. According to Taylor, it is undesirable to produce third cinema with a homogeneous aesthetic. He argues against the notion of post enlightenment aesthetics, seeing it as the tool of cultural colonialism. He attempts to locate Black cinema within and against the Western crisis of knowledge. The poor image quality also gives a newsreel authenticity to the fictional narrative. The film’s aesthetic is rather dynamic. The camera is constantly shifting, cutting from reality to the surreal. The combination of ambient sounds of the city and handheld shots blurs the distinctions between documentary and fiction. Characters talk to
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