[Wednesday would have been Charles Bronson’s 100th birthday. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Bronson and other action film stars and characters. Share your own thoughts on these and all other action figures and films for a popcorn-popping crowd-sourced weekend blockbuster!]
On how Parks
helps us analyze the problems and the possibilities of Blaxsploitation.
Only two years
after he directed the deeply personal yet strikingly groundbreaking film The Learning Tree
(1969), Gordon
Parks was back behind the camera for a very, very different kind of groundbreaking
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.
Next action
figure tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Thoughts on these figures and films, or others you’d add to the mix?
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