Hello, my name's Justin the Cluor, and I'm here today with Will Sloan.

And you're listening to The Important Cinema Club.

And today, we're going to talk about Gordon Parks.

Who is Gordon Parks, you may ask?

Well, he's a complicated man.

No one understands him but his woman.

He is a photographer, musician, novelist, poet, essayist, and last but not least, director,

most famous for directing Shaft, which every-

Shut your mouth. Oh my God. Is it going to be more of this throughout the entire episode?

Well, I'm going to run out of lyrics really soon.

So Gordon Park is a director that I was aware of, but I had never really explored his

filmography.

I had seen Shaft ages ago.

But when I picked him for this podcast, I was like, well, Shaft is seminal movie.

Everybody knows what it is.

So what else has this

director done and how has he impacted the landscape of cinema? Obviously, not very much other than

Shaft. But I think what we found out, and I was a little bit aware of this because some of his work

was in an art gallery of Ontario exhibit from last year. Do you remember this,

the outsiders exhibit? No. It was this, it was from a year ago, and it was all these photographers

and artists who sort of documented American upheaval in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. So Diane Arbus was in

there and Nan Golden and a few others. And his work was in there. And I think what I really learned this week is, I guess, what I should have known before,

...