Blaxploitation

• “She’s the ‘GODMOTHER’ of them all!”, exclaimed the poster, linking the African-American Coffy to Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone in The Godfather (released the previous year).
• But Coffy saw her for the first time as the main propulsive force in a Blaxploitation movie.
• A label more popular than scholarly, Blaxploitation captures the wave of low-budget, black-character-centred films that emerged from Hollywood in the first half of the 1970s.
• The film’s 50th anniversary allows us to reassess this vein of filmmaking and, more particularly, to think about the mixed politics of Grier’s own star image.

A liberated woman

• According to her lover, African-American politician Howard Brunswick, Coffy is a liberated woman.
• Nevertheless, a sense of constriction, as well as liberation, is still apparent in her screen persona.
• Only two years after Coffy’s release, feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey published her essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.
• Grier, in Coffy, is frequently exhibited in this way, her unclothed body a point of obsession for the camera.

Dreaming of something better

• More than once, as she enacts her spree of purifying violence, Coffy speaks of being in “a dream”.
• Coffy’s dream of one woman redressing systemic injustice prompts caution, if not scepticism.
• Though the film is touched by the Black Panther Party’s imperative of militant resistance, it utterly lacks the Panthers’ attention to communal struggle.