Gordon Parks

It is nearly impossible to adequately and properly celebrate the works of Gordon Parks. There are so many to celebrate. The breadth of his work covers journalistic, fashion, and fine art photography, feature filmmaking, documentary filmmaking, composing, writing, painting, poetry, and activism. In coordination with Bare Witness: Photographs by Gordon Parks, organized by the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, Block Cinema has put together a small selection of Gordon Parks’s films. It is smaller than we would like. Another reason it is difficult to adequately and properly celebrate Gordon Parks’s work is because a number of his films are no longer available. Many were made indepedently, and in the intervening years a number of 16mm and 35mm prints have decayed or been deaccessioned from university achives. We strongly encourage you to enjoy as much of Gordon Parks work as you can as soon as you can. His films are an important reminder that our culture does disappear and often the work that was the most pioneering, vital, and difficult to make is among the first to go.

Thursday, April 23, 8pm
The Learning Tree
(Gordon Parks, 1969, U.S., 107 minutes, 16mm)
Released the year after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Gordon Parks’s The Learning Tree, based on his autobiographical novel of the same name, confronts the stifling effects of segregation in rural Kansas in the 1920s. Newt (Kyle Johnson), an intelligent and sensitive black teen, responds courageously to family dysfunction and racism, while his friend Marcus lashes out. When Newt witnesses a murder and learns that the wrong man has been arrested, he must choose between loyalty and justice. In Parks’s most personal and emotionally nuanced film—he also produced it and composed the score–he captures a small town on the verge of the Depression and masterfully evokes the drama of a child’s sudden transition into adulthood.

Wednesday, April 29, 8pm
Visions
(Gordon Parks, 1996, U.S., 60 minutes, BetaSP)
Gordon Parks was a groundbreaking American photographer, composer, poet, activist, and film director. He is perhaps best remembered for his photo essays for Life magazine and as the director of the 1971 film Shaft. A number of his films, such as Diary of a Harlem Family and Supercops, may have already been lost. This is an important opportunity to see Parks’s own film about his imagery, words, and music. A crucial companion piece to Half Past Autumn.

Thursday, April 30, 8pm  FREE!
Half Past Autumn: The Life and Works of Gordon Parks
(Craig Laurence Rice, 2000, U.S., 91 minutes, video)
It is an impossible task to describe Gordon Parks in one documentary. Few people have such a broad variety of meaningful and influential work. Half Past Autumn lets Gordon Parks, in his eighties at the time, speak for himself, providing a taste of his energy and curiosity. It also, in the words of reviewer Steven Oxman, gives the viewer an appreciation of Parks’s “remarkably understated yet supremely sincere and engaging personality.”

Friday, May 8, 8pm
Shaft
(Gordon Parks, 1971, U.S., 100 minutes, 35mm)
Gordon Parks clashes classic detective noir with racial cliché in this action-packed blaxploitation crime thriller. Richard Roundtree stars as the now-iconic soul brother John Shaft, who is, as the legendary Isaac Hayes theme song goes, ”the black private dick who’s a sex machine to all the chicks.” The tough-talking Shaft decides to help out gangster Bumpy Jonas by rescuing his daughter from the Italian mafia, a mission that takes Shaft through the rough and tumble streets of 1970s Harlem and into the heart of the mob. Introduced by David Parks, Gordon Parks's son, who worked on the film.

Friday, May 29, 8pm
Solomon Northup’s Odyssey
(Gordon Parks, 1984, U.S., 115 minutes)
In 1841 in Saratoga Springs, New York, two white men persuaded Solomon Northup, a free-born African-American and father of three, to travel with them to Washington D.C. on the promise of work as a violinist for a traveling circus. Drugged and bound in a hotel Northrup was then sold to a cotton plantation in Louisiana. It would take several years for his wife to discover his plight and twelve years for his release. Based on Northrup’s autobiography, published the year of his rescue, Parks’s gripping drama plainly and earnestly portrays the tragedy of a man whose humanity exceeded the cruelty and bigotry of his captors and owners.