Director, writer, composer, actor, and one-man creative revolutionary Melvin Van Peebles jolted American independent cinema to new life with his explosive stylistic energy and unfiltered expression of Black consciousness. Though he undeniably altered the course of film history with the anarchic SWEET SWEETBACK’S BAADASSSSS SONG, that pop-culture bombshell is just one piece of a remarkably varied career that also encompassed forays into European art cinema (THE STORY OF A THREE DAY PASS), mainstream Hollywood comedy (WATERMELON MAN), and Broadway musicals (DON’T PLAY US CHEAP). Each facet of Van Peebles’s renegade genius is on display in this tribute to a transformative artist whose caustic social observation, radical formal innovation, and uncompromising vision established a new cinematic model for Black creative independence.
Directed by Melvin Van Peebles • 1967 • United States
Starring Harry Baird, Nicole Berger, Hal Brav
Melvin Van Peebles’s edgy, angsty, romantic first feature could never have been made in America. Unable to break into segregated Hollywood, Van Peebles decamped to France, taught himself the langu...
Directed by Melvin Van Peebles • 1971 • United States
Starring Melvin Van Peebles, Simon Chuckster, Hubert Scales
A landmark of Black and American independent cinema that would send shock waves through the culture, SWEET SWEETBACK’S BAADASSSSS SONG was Melvin Van Peebles’s second feature film, a...
Directed by Melvin Van Peebles • 1972 • United States
Starring Joe Keyes Jr., Rhetta Hughes, Avon Long
Melvin Van Peebles’s film version of his own Tony Award–nominated Broadway musical is a bold blend of theater and nervy, New Wave–inflected cinematic invention. A cast of Black stage and screen...
Directed by Melvin Van Peebles • 1957 • United States
The second short film Melvin Van Peebles made in San Francisco before decamping for Europe is a striking portrait of a group of day laborers competing to secure a job.
Directed by Melvin Van Peebles • 1961 • France
Made in 1961 in Paris, LES CINQ CENT BALLES is about a boy who tries to retrieve a five-hundred-franc note from a gutter.
This August 14, 1968, episode of the television program “Black Journal” features an interview with director Melvin Van Peebles, who was promoting the U.S. release of his first feature film, THE STORY OF A THREE DAY PASS.
This excerpted interview with director Melvin Van Peebles, conducted by his son filmmaker Mario Van Peebles, was recorded in 2004 for the Directors Guild of America’s Visual History Program.
In this segment from the television show “Detroit Tubeworks,” director Melvin Van Peebles promotes his film SWEET SWEETBACK’S BAADASSSSS SONG on the occasion of its Detroit opening weekend, in 1971.
In this interview, recorded in 2021, filmmaker Mario Van Peebles shares with film critic Elvis Mitchell anecdotes about his father, director Melvin Van Peebles.
