Treated with disdain by the judge at his trial, Charles is sent to prison. After Charles is arrested, the furious, racist cop attempts to castrate Charles, whose penis is then reattached in hospital. As Charles looks to her for an affirmation of what to do, the narrative then relocates to the past: Charles was a drug dealer being watched by two white detectives on stakeout waiting for him to complete a deal. They also see that Charles is sleeping with a white woman, the wife of one of the detectives. The police bring his girlfriend to the rooftop hoping she can coax him down. With no means of escape, he climbs upon a ledge, ready to jump to his death. Welcome Home Brother Charles begins with African American Charles Murray (Marlo Monte) being pursued by police across a rooftop. Out of respect to Fanaka’s rejection of the blaxploitation label, it will therefore be referred to by its original title, Welcome Home Brother Charles (for those wishing to view it, however, it is widely available as Soul Vengeance.) While a broader survey of Fanaka’s work would be a worthy addition to film scholarship, this article with confine its focus to his feature debut. Rebellion. This group was founded in the late 1960s by students with the mission of creating a new film movement that reflected the minority experience in America at the time that they believed could not be found in the blaxploitation features. Fanaka’s exasperation that his films were being packaged as blaxploitation for a new market is therefore understandable considering their mode of production, and their difference is starkly apparent on viewing. This included purchasing and distributing Welcome Home Brother Charles and Emma Mae, made by Fanaka when he was a student (the latter film his Masters thesis) at UCLA, partially financed with grants and made with the assistance of fellow members of the film school’s L.A. Older aficionados may be puzzled as to why they cannot remember these films screening at their neighbourhood grindhouse at the time of their original release: it is possible that they did, but under the respective titles of Welcome Home Brother Charles and Emma Mae. When the first of these films was released in 1975, Hollywood was washing its hands of the blaxploitation cycle, leaving low-budget independent hustlers to extract what they could from the cycle’s diminishing audience. Two earlier titles were also reissued – Soul Vengeance (1975) and Black Sister’s Revenge (1976). With their lurid DVD covers illustrated with the iconography of the cycle (afros, guns, prison bars, scantily clad women) these films certainly look and sound as if they were relics of the blaxploitation era. 1Īmong those released by this video distributor were the Penitentiary trilogy (1979, 1982, 1987) that were Fanaka’s most financially successful films and the work for which he is best known. Were picked up by a video distributor and distributed as blaxploitation films. He did not like that moniker because he said even though they’re made like blaxploitations – cheap and all of that – his goal was not to exploit anyone, and they were a more serious intent than most blaxploitation films. When African-American filmmaker Jamaa Fanaka passed away in 2012, director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive Jan-Christopher Horak stated that Fanaka was dismayed that his films
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