He was considered the “godfather of modern black cinema”. Now the director, playwright and musician has died. He was 89 years old.
New York – The US director, playwright and musician Melvin van Peebles, also known as the “Godfather of modern black cinema”, is dead.
He died on Tuesday evening in New York at the age of 89, according to a message distributed on Wednesday (local time) on behalf of Van Peeble’s family. In it, the director was honored as the “giant of American cinema”. His films, novels, plays and music have had a lasting impact on the international cultural landscape, wrote the distributors Criterion Collection and Janus Films on social media.
The Chicago-born filmmaker (“Watermelon Man”, 1970) heralded the era of “blaxploitation” films, which had their heyday in the USA in the 1970s and were shot with black actors for a predominantly black audience. The term is made up of the English words black for black and exploitation for exploitation.
Often it was a question of low-budget productions in which the perspective and topics of the black population were in the foreground. Van Peebles said in a 1972 New York Times Magazine interview that he wanted to counter the misrepresentation of blacks used by white people “to confuse, empty and colonize our minds.”
Van Peebles is best known for the film “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” (1971), which will be celebrated at this year’s New York Film Festival (September 24th to October 10th) with a screening for the 50th anniversary. “Dad knew that black pictures are important,” Van Peeble’s son Mario was quoted as saying about his father’s death. True liberation did not mean imitating the colonizer’s attitudes, but rather appreciating the power, beauty and interconnectedness of all people, as the actor and director said.
Van Peeble’s work is still authoritative, it said in the statement on the death of the director, who was also active as a writer and musician and wrote Broadway musicals. Filmmakers are still influenced by the “blaxploitation” genre, including US director Quentin Tarantino with films such as the Oscar-winning “Django Unchained” (2012) or “Jackie Brown” (1997). dpa
