Melvin Van Peebles, the groundbreaking and innovative filmmaker, writer, and musician known as the Godfather of Black Cinema, has died at 89.
Van Peebles’ family issued a statement announcing he passed Tuesday evening at his home in Manhattan.
His son, Mario Van Peebles said, “Dad knew that Black images matter. If a picture is worth a thousand words, what was a movie worth?” Mario Van Peebles said in a statement Wednesday. “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.”
Van Peebles is perhaps best known for his influential 1971 film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, a feature film in which he wrote, produced, scored, directed and starred in. Van Peebles released the film independently as no studio would finance the film, so he funded it himself. The movie told the story a wrongfully accused ladies man on the run from racist cops.
“All the films about Black people up to now have been told through the eyes of the Anglo-Saxon majority in their rhythms and speech and pace,” Van Peebles told Newsweek in 1971, the year of the film’s release.
Source: Melvin Van Peebles, Godfather of Black Cinema Dies at 89
