[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 how Parks
helps us analyze the problems and the possibilities of Blaxsploitation.
Only two years
after he directed the deeply personal film The
Learning Tree (1969), Gordon Parks
was back behind the camera for a very, very different kind of ground-breaking
film: Shaft (1971). With this
hugely successful film and its sequel, Shaft’s Big Score!
(1972), which he also directed, Parks helped usher in one of the 1970s most
prolific and profitable film genres, Blaxploitation.
Richard Roundtree’s badass private detective John Shaft was quite literally one
of the
principal archetypes for most of the decade’s Blaxploitation heroes and
heroines, as well as inspiring iconic
action hero types and images that have endured long beyond the waning of
Blaxploitation as a genre—all of which means that his work directing the first
two Shaft films could be seen as among the most influential and enduring
cultural efforts of Parks’s long and impressive career.
Which, I can’t
lie, is a really frustrating sentence to write. How on earth could a
photographer who spent more than half a century documenting identities and
lives, communities and histories, from FSA portraits to Pittsburgh steel
workers, New York City fashion to the Jim Crow South, be best known as the
director of a film featuring lines like “Where the hell are you going, Shaft?”
“To get laid, where the hell are you going?” or (from Isaac Hayes’s mega-hit theme
song) “Who’s the black private dick/That’s a sex machine to all the
chicks?” Following on the potent effects and meanings of the Civil Rights
Movement and its era, a period that Parks’s photographic works could be said to
have
helped usher in and in which he participated
significantly in any case, 1970s Blaxploitation films can feel at best
extremely silly, and at worst exactly as exploitative
of serious issues of race and community (among many others) as the name
suggests. And Gordon Parks helped create them.
I’m not going to
pretend that I’ve got a clear pro-Blaxploitation perspective to reveal here,
but I will say this: that last sentence, the fact that Parks did contribute so
fully to the development of Blaxploitation as a genre, does in and of itself
comprise an argument for taking the genre more seriously. This was an artist,
after all, who consistently and crucially innovated, not only in his
photographic career but also and just as fully in his film contributions (among
other efforts). And here is another innovation, another cultural form that
Parks helped create and popularize, another representation of African American and
American lives and communities that he brought to wide and enduring audiences. That
this representation has its flaws and limitations, that it needs response and
analysis, that it leaves out certain stories and exaggerates or misrepresents
others, only means that it’s a cultural form like any other, as complex and human
as all the people on whom Parks’s portraits focused. And like those portraits,
the Shaft films comprise another successful, vital stage in the very American
career and life of Gordon Parks.
Last Parks
connection tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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