[This month we celebrate the 150th anniversary of Arbor Day, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of tree-tastic stories. Leading up to a special weekend post on the holiday’s histories!]
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 focused in these
two prior posts, that would be more than enough to merit much fuller
collective memory of Parks 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. I’ll focus here on one of the most singular
and impressive texts and moments in that legacy, 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 tree tale
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other tree texts you’d throw in?
No comments:
Post a Comment