Life Through a Lens

By Scott Smith in Arts & Entertainment on Mar 8, 2006 7:30PM

The underlying message of Sunday’s Oscar ceremony was inescapable: Hollywood Matters. If the cloying speeches about the evils of DVD didn’t get you, then the montages probably didn’t either. One in particular seemed particularly hackneyed: the salute to social issues. Yes, congratulations L.A. Sometimes you make movies that aren’t all about stuff blowin’ up real good (even though what’s onscreen is usually a couple years behind the curve of the zeitgeist). Here’s a cookie.

But then yesterday, Gordon Parks died. And we shut the hell up for a while (amazing, yes, but it does happen) because his death reminded us that movies and other art forms can change the way people look at themselves and the world.

The Tribune eulogizes the man best known for directing the first two installments of the Shaft film series. Though the films are often marginalized with the “blaxploitation” label, it was the one of the first times many in the black community saw a film that actually presented a character, not a stereotype.

Though the film was a revelation, it should hardly have been a surprise that it came from a man like Parks, who’d been chronicling the black American experience for twenty years before he made Shaft. His work not only documented life, but commented on it too. Some of his more famous works can be viewed here in excerpts from Half Past Autumn, a career retrospective. As a photographer, he was a part of the Chicago Renaissance movement that included such luminaries like Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Dizzy Gillespie.

You know, we learned about all those other folks in school. Maybe kids in the future will hear more about Gordon Parks’s influence. After all, he was a bad mutha…