following, the film The Bronze Buckaroo (1939), the first black western full-length musical, the African-American cowboy acts as the lead hero, saving the damsel in distress and then slowly rides off into the sunset. Blaxploitation "An examination of Black action films produced both independently by African Americans and by major Hollywood studios during the Black film explosion of the 1960s and 1970s raises important questions about the African-American film experience of visuality and identity formation, and the ways in which the look and the gaze of the African American are inextricably linked to a culture of oppression". Experts claimed that films could link the fantasies of youth with the visual depiction on film because the lack of nationalistic culture in society. The African-American audience often had trouble separating their existence from the visual imagination shown by Hollywood's films. Adult audiences and mature adolescents from middle-class families could view films in the fictional context indented. They, coming from a comfortable home with fulfillment of their needs, regarded films as merely fiction. Contrasting poor African Americans who were susceptible to idolize Hollywood films. The low-income adolescents who did not have a comfortable lifestyle or positive role-models viewed fictional films as reality. Discussions of the "Blaxploitation" films include "assumptions about the relation of an African American spectatorship to Hollywood in general often rely on the notion that Black spectatorship is either degraded, infantile, or polluted by the outside forces to which it is subjugated". Blaxploitation films provided a counter narrative to the idea of white supremacy and the traditional portrayals of African Americans in the Hollywood cinema. The Blaxploitation narrative of "ghetto despair" illustrated African Americans' response to the Black Power era. In addition, Blaxploitation films provided and developed the concept of masculinity, which was lacking in Hollywood films. Hollywood films had wide- ranging view of males from "the placid, asexual Sidney Poitier model to the plantation Sambo or the comical Steppin Fetchit". Blaxploitation films depiction of the destructive inner- city lives of African Americans and the hyper-masculine male character both countered and enforced the growing urban African=American criminality of the 1960s. The release of the movie Shaft (1971) featured an African-American detective who used his Harlem street smarts to help him win a war wagged against a street mob. The director, Gordon Parks characterized an African American as the lead, authoritative role. He also employed many African Americans to help with the