Upon first seeing the phrase blaxploitation used in connection to “Foxy Brown” I was a little confused as to how black people were being exploited in the film.  Although Foxy, a black woman, endures a lot of hardships throughout the film and makes some questionable decisions, her storyline is ultimately triumphant.  She is wronged by an amoral group of drug dealers and pimps and overcomes rape and torture to avenge her boyfriend’s death and her own misfortunes.  After watching “Baad Asssss Cinema” in class I soon understood that black people were not necessarily being exploited in the plot of the film, but rather as a film device.

As we learned in the documentary, there was a sudden jolt in the 1970’s of movies that starred black people in the heroic roles.  This was a move by the movie studios to get more black people buying tickets to see their films.  After they succeeded in getting more black people to see their movies, the studios discovered that black people had also begun watching more of their regular, white-centered films and stopped making films centered around black people because it was no longer necessary.

Why do you think the studios were so quick to drop black character-centered films?  After the brief stint of blaxploitation mostly in the early to mid-70’s films reverted to being dominated by black characters.  Although I understand that the movie studios saw that they could get black audiences to see their films whether or not they had black heroes I do not understand why the black character-centered films were dropped so quickly by studios.  The actors of these films discuss in the documentary that they saw the movement towards black hero-centered films as a result of the civil rights movement of the previous decades can it really be called a success because of how quickly they stopped making these films?  I believe that althoug this blaxploitation movement came right after the “end” of the civil rights movement, the fact that these films were dropped so quickly by the studios shows that black actors and audience members were just continually used by the movie studios to make a profit.