Influential director Melvin Van Peebles died on Tuesday night at home in Manhattan. The 89-year-old director was best known for his independent films Watermelon Man (1970) and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971).
He was also the father of Mario Van Peebles, with whom he wrote and directed the movie Panther in 1995. The elder Van Peebles told NPR that year he considered that film a history lesson for kids too young to remember the Panthers’ community activism.
In statement, his family said that Van Peebles, father of the actor-director Mario Van Peebles, died Tuesday evening at his home in Manhattan.
“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.”
Sometimes called the “godfather of modern Black cinema,” the multitalented Van Peebles wrote numerous books and plays, and recorded several albums — playing multiple instruments and delivering rap-style lyrics. He later became a successful options trader on the stock market.
Melvin Van Peebles inspired a generation of young filmmakers to be active. His early movies were shot on tiny budgets — and shot through with provocative, politically charged humor. He played the main role in Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, but gave himself barely any lines. He was playing with stereotypes, he told NPR in 2008, and standing them on their heads. And he defended his decision to cast his then-young son in a role that required a sex scene with an adult woman. “Business is business,” he told NPR’s Michel Martin. “What the heck? Didn’t seem to harm or hurt him a bit.”
Van Peebles was born in Chicago in 1932. He helped pave the way for the renegade genre known as blaxpolitation, with movies that were bitingly funny, sexually swaggering and occasionally violent, that put Black protagonists front and center. His heroes were hustlers and revolutionaries; Sweetback was considered so outrageous, it was originally rated X. It was also a huge financial success.
The Criterion Collection’s statement read in part, “In an unparalleled career distinguished by relentless innovation, boundless curiosity and spiritual empathy, Melvin Van Peebles made an indelible mark on the international cultural landscape through his films, novels, plays and music.”
