gordon parks Tagged Articles at Cinematical

As Kim mentioned earlier today, filmmaker/writer/photographer Gordon Parks died Tuesday. As a result, I thought it was only fitting to post a photo from Shaft, Parks' most popular film. I have only ever seen clips from Shaft, and ought to rent and watch the whole movie.

A few years ago, I attended an event in which Joe Bob Briggs showed clips from the movies listed in his book Profoundly Disturbing: Shocking Movies That Changed History. One of the movies was Shaft. Briggs noted that Parks had instructed Richard Roundtree (who plays the title character) never to look to the sides when he crossed a street in the film ... and kept the footage in which Roundtree was nearly hit by a cab. Briggs' essay on Shaft in the aforementioned book is worth reading and includes some good background on Parks, as well as commentary on the ways in which the movie affected the film industry, as well as the streets of New York.

Digging around the Web, I found a nice photo of Gordon Parks directing, although I decided to use a still from the movie here instead. I realize as I read his filmography that I watched his last film, a made-for-TV movie called Solomon Northrup's Odyssey, in a high-school history class. So I have seen one of his films after all, although I suspect it is somewhat different from Shaft. Maybe I should try seeing The Learning Tree first (although that movie is not currently available on DVD in the U.S.).

Gordon Parks, Hollywood's first major black filmmaker, died Tuesday at the age of 93. Parks, who was best known for directing Shaft and The Learning Tree, broke barriers in white Hollywood and spawned a series of black-oriented films after the success of Shaft. Before he directed The Learning Tree in 1969, Parks was known primarily as a writer and photographer. He wrote for twenty years for Life, until 1968, and as a photographer captured scenes of poverty here in the United States and abroad.There are some nice tributes to Parks around other film sites. Here are a few:

Polly Anderson of AP has a full obit.

Roger Ebert discusss Parks films, and ponders whether Parks turned to making commerical films like Shaft because the more lyrical The Learning Tree wasn't a box office hit.

Andy Grundberg has a nice write-up about Parks in the New York Times.