Melvin Van Peebles, Influential Director, Actor and Writer, Dies at 89

“Dad knew that Black images matter,” Mario Van Peebles said in a statement from the Criterion Collection. “If a picture is worth a thousand words, what was a movie worth? We want to be the success we see, thus we need to see ourselves being free. True liberation did not mean imitating the colonizer’s mentality. It meant appreciating the power, beauty and interconnectivity of all people.”

In “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song,” which Van Peebles wrote and directed, dedicating the film to “all of the Black brothers and sisters who have had enough of the Man,” Van Peebles starred as the title character, an orphan raised in a California bordello, where he does menial tasks and grows up to appear in live sex shows there; one day he’s told to ride along with two crooked detectives , and they end up beating a Black militant.

Van Peebles, however, was critical of many Blaxploitation films for being devoid of political content. “Sweetback” drew a very mixed critical response. The New York Times wrote a devastating review upon its release, but in a 1995 reappraisal, Stephen Holden wrote, “This sulphurous nightmare of racial paranoia and revenge eclipses even ‘Reservoir Dogs’ in evoking a world of infinite seaminess, injustice and cruelty. Mr. Van Peebles’s film was not only the granddaddy of but also the most innovative and politically inflammatory.

For 1980’s “Reggae: A Musical Revelation,” Van Peebles contributed only the book, but two years later, the original comedy with music “Waltz of the Stork,” with book, music and lyrics by Van Peebles, produced and directed by Van Peebles and starring Van Peebles, ran for 156 performances. Van Peebles turned “Waltz of the Stork” into the 2008 film “Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha,” which screened at the Tribeca Film Festival.

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