American actor, composer, filmmaker, Melvin died at the age of 86 at his home in Manhattan on Tuesday night. The news of his demise was announced by his family.
“Dad knew that Black images matter. If a picture is worth a thousand words, what was a movie worth? 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,” Melvin’s son Mario Van Peebles said in a statement. Mario van Peebles is an American film director and actor.
Melvin was popularly known as the “godfather of modern Black cinema”. He also wrote numerous books and plays and was also a novelist, theatre impresario, songwriter, musician and painter.
He had contributed champion a new wave of modern Black cinema in the 1970s — especially with his films ‘Watermelon Man’ and ‘Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song’. This song was featured in one of the most influential films of the time. Melvin was a novelist, theatre promoter, songwriter, musician, and painter, among other things.
It set the tone for a genre that would produce dozens of films over the next few years, and prompted a debate over whether Blacks were being recognized or exploited, with its hard-living, tough-talking depiction of life in the ghetto, underscored by a message of empowerment as told from a Black perspective.
Peebles’ death occurred just days before the 50th anniversary of “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” at the New York Film Festival. Melvin Van Peebles: Essential Films, a box set from the Criterion Collection, will be released next week. A Broadway revival of his play “Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death,” with Mario Van Peebles as creative producer, is also slated for next year.
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