Filmmaking icon Melvin Van Peebles dies aged 89 – Ava DuVernay and Spike Lee lead tributes
A true movie legend.
The movie world has lost another icon – legendary filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles has died at the age of 89, it was announced on Wednesday. The Chicago native was born in 1932 to a tailor father and served several years in the Air Force before making the move to the movie-making world.
Van Peebles was an actor, writer, director and producer and was an icon of Black cinema. His groundbreaking work still feels as culturally relevant today as it did when it was first released in the '70s.
Some of his best known projects include Watermelon Man (1970) and Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971) and many from the entertainment world have spoken about his passing and the impact that he had on them and on cinema in general, including When They See Us director Ava DuVernay.
"The iconic artist, filmmaker, actor, playwright, novelist, composer and sage Melvin Van Peebles, who has gone home at the age of 89," she wrote alongside one of Van Peebles' quotes.
Director Spike Lee also shared a post on his Instagram, saying: "I am so saddened by the loss of my brother Melvin Van Pebbles who brought independent black cinema to the forefront with his groundbreaking film Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song (he personally signed this poster to me). Melvin was a big supporter of my film career. He even showed up to the set of Do The Right Thing. Damn, we have lost another giant!"
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Also sharing their thoughts on his loss was actor Saul Rubinek who said: "Melvin Van Peebles, an inspiration to a generation of filmmakers, passed. I had the honour of acting with Melvin in Jerry LaMothe’s movie Blackout. ln Melvin’s son Mario’s movie Baadasssss! about his dad as a filmmaker, I got to see how the father had inspired the son. I had the great good fortune of benefiting from Melvin’s kindness, humour, and vast reserves of talent. There will never be another like him."
It was his son, director Mario Van Peebles, who revealed his passing and issued a touching tribute to his legacy and the huge strides he made in making the silver screen a place where the Black community and their stories were better represented.
"Dad knew that Black images matter," he wrote. "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."
