The mission of The Department of Afro-American Research Arts and Culture to identify the global significance of the creative contributions pioneered by an international diaspora of Blackness
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Thursday, August 6, 2009

Black Jesus (1968)








Starring:

  • Woody Strode
  • Jean Servais
  • Franco Citti
  • Pier Paolo Capponi
  • Stephen Forsyth

IMDB.com
It's funny that one of the alternate titles for this film is "Super Brother"! "Super Brother"?! I guess they must have been referring to the iconic super-athlete-turned-actor Woody Strode and trying to sell this brilliant, Pontecorvo-esque Battle-of-Algiers-Queimada-Burn-like 1968 anti-colonialist political Italian film to a blaxploitation/spaghetti-Western/action-film crowd! Zurlini's film is definitely hardcore, violent, and has some action, but it is anything but blaxploitation; even with all its flaws it's one of the fantastic achievements of the politically committed 'Marxist' cinema of the period, at the very least, on the level of Pontecorvo's much more widely seen "Burn," starring Marlon Brando. Snobs and perfectionists may disagree with that assessment but real film fans know that imperfect, flawed films are often far preferable in every way to films that play by the rules and criterion set-up by bozo mainstream critics....

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