[Earlier this
year, I had the chance to visit an amazing photography exhibition at Boston’s
Musuem of Fine Arts: Gordon Parks: Back to Fort
Scott. In this series, I’ll use that exhibition as a starting point for
highlighting some of the many ways Parks’s career and life illuminate late 20th
century American history and culture. Add your thoughts, whether you’ve seen
the exhibition or not, in comments!]
On Parks’s autobiographical
novel and its even more ground-breaking film version.
If Gordon Parks were
just the hugely talented and influential photographer on whose career and works
I’ve focused in the last two posts, that would be more than enough to merit
this weeklong series and perhaps even a coveted spot in the under-construction American
Hall of Inspiration. But in truth Parks was far more multi-talented than
that, producing substantial and meaningful work in a number of artistic forms
and genres, and as a result he left a cultural legacy that extends well beyond the
worlds of photography and art. Over the next two posts I’ll highlight a few
examples and products of those manifold talents, beginning here with his work telling
the story of his own childhood as first a writer and then a filmmaker.
Parks told that
story first in his one published work of fiction (he published numerous autographies
and poetry
collections as well as photography collections and textbooks),
the autobiographical
novel The Learning Tree (1963). I would locate Parks’s
readable, compelling, and thought-provoking young adult novel alongside a work
like William
H. Armstrong’s Sounder (1969) in its ability to turn African American
history into the kind of story that can engage and entertain as well as educate
young readers. Parks’s book might not be quite as successful as Armstrong’s
(which remains one of the greatest American young adult novels), but on the
other hand it is both drawn from the author’s own life far more closely (which
has its own interest and appeal) and represents, in its portrayal of 1910s and
20s Kansas, a period of African American and American history more consistently
overlooked than the post-war sharecropping era of Armstrong’s book. Not bad at
all for the man’s one published work of fiction!
A few years
after publishing his novel, Parks took an even more radical and significant
artistic step: directing a feature film version of The Learning Tree
(1969), and in the process becoming the
first African American director of a Hollywood studio film (it was made for
Warner Bros./Seven Arts). That Parks also wrote the screenplay, produced the
film, and, just for good measure, composed
the musical score to boot makes this truly one of the most virtuoso
artistic performances in American film or cultural history. But all that behind
the scenes history shouldn’t overshadow a simpler but even more crucial way in
which the film made history: representing an African American childhood as the
central story of a Hollywood movie. That is, there had been plenty of other
novels like The Learning Tree; I don’t
think there had ever been a film remotely like it, just one more way that
Gordon Parks profoundly influenced and altered American culture and history.
Next Parks
connection tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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