John Singleton is dead. He has at least had the honor of being nominated for the Oscar

John Singleton is dead

He has at least had the honor of being nominated for the Oscar

John Singleton was the first African-American to be nominated for the Oscar for Best Director. He died Monday, April 29 in Los Angeles, at the age of 51, after several days of hospitalization and coma.

Born in 1968, John Singleton grew up with Blaxploitation films (Shaft, Harlem's Red Nights, Foxy Brown) where heroes, played by black actors, displayed their cool attitude and played fists and weapons on music. Signed James Brown, Marvin Gaye, Herbie Hancock ... These films dared to speak about the difficult living conditions of the black population but also of drugs, prostitution, rival gangs ... The Black Power had won Hollywood (which exploited to the envy a "niche" which proved very profitable). For the first time, young black Americans could identify with heroes who resembled them. In 1986, Spike Lee turns Nola Darling into the head of her, an explosive comedy with a very raw hero, on a hip-hop background, paving the way for a battalion of young talents: John Singleton, Mario Van Peebles, Matty Rich ...

With Boyz'n the hood (1991), John Singleton goes on for the first time: his first feature film (with rapper Ice Cube in his first role) is also the first African-American film to be nominated for the Oscars of the Best. director (in 1992). In describing the murky daily life of the Los Angeles savages in the hot South Central district, the director inaugurated a new genre, the suburban film, and took the opportunity to stigmatize America's fundamental inequality in the Reagan and Bush years. "I'm young, I'm black, my influences are varied - from Marvin Gaye to Kurosawa - I can give a soul to my films, bring passion to the screen, that's what makes me different, it's what makes my success ... ", he said to Télérama a few years later.

John Singleton remained since that herald of black culture, despite the difficulties to win in a Hollywood environment not always willing. "We have come a long way, the talents are more numerous and come from diverse backgrounds, he told us again. Many actors are firmly established. But there are still injustices, glaring inequalities - in terms of stamps in particular. Writing a black film in a studio is always a source of tension. These are two cultures not easily reconcilable. In the late 1990s, he will have to fight with producer Scott Rudin to resurrect John Shaft, the hero of the Blaxploitation of the 1970s, whose role of independent detective and macho will be endorsed by Samuel L. Jackson rather than by Don Cheadle, as he wished. It will still celebrate the retro charm of the B series of the 1970s with the singular Four Brothers (2005) which staged the mourning of mixed siblings (two whites and two blacks).

After a 2 Fast 2 Furious without much interest, he will chain the command films. Since the year 2010, he developed projects on television: in line with the series The Wire, he produced Snowfall which follows the daily drug traffickers in Los Angeles in the 1980s, on a soundtrack that mixes soul, funk or rock. He also makes episodes of Empire, The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story or Billions.

On Instagram, Spike Lee paid tribute to him, recalling that they met when Singleton was still a film student at the University of Southern California, and that they stayed next, "encouraging one of the other in an industry where nothing was done to succeed".