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Half Past Autumn
The Life and Works of Gordon
Parks
review by Cynthia Fuchs, 1 December 2000
Hollering
"I
was born dead," says Gordon Parks. The family doctor, he continues,
"pronounced me dead, wrapped me
up in a sheet, and put me aside." Thankfully, a
younger doctor -- named Dr. Gordon -- took action, dunking the tiny inert body in a tub of ice water.
"And I began to holler," says Parks, "and
I've been hollering ever
since."
Parks'
hollering is, of course, far from the usual. Elegant and intelligent,
poignant and political --
Parks' art encompasses a remarkable range of subjects and forms. His photographs, films, poems, essays,
novels, and musical compositions have made him an
internationally renowned and respected figure. So,
when he tells this story -- about his near-death at birth -- at the beginning of Half Past Autumn: The
Life and Works of Gordon Parks, HBO's reverent documentary, it's a striking reminder that his life --
so often celebrated and admired -- has been filled with traumas and
difficulties. As he puts it,
"Violence marred a good part of my youth and became my
enemy. Fortunately, the common sense which my parents
pounded into me would help select the most powerful weapons to use against it: photography, writing,
music, and films became those weapons."
The
documentary, narrated by Alfre Woodard and
co-produced by Denzel Washington and St. Clair Bourne,
considers the many ways that Parks has put these weapons to potent, life-changing use, highlighting
moments in his professional and personal life. It's no small feat, to put
together all these pieces -- his
photos for magazines as different as Vogue and Life, his films (including Leadbelly and Shaft),
his ballet about Martin Luther King Jr., his three marriages, his books, his
friendships with Malcolm X
and Kathleen Cleaver, Gloria Vanderbilt and Ingrid
Bergman, his twenty-plus-years relationship with Flavio da
Silva, a young Brazilian boy he met while doing a piece on "Poverty in Latin America" for Life,
as
well as the death of his eldest son, Gordon Jr. (who
made the film Superfly) in a plane crash at the age of forty-one.
The resulting ninety-minute film is heartfelt and historically significant,
by turns moving and
melodramatic in its efforts to organize Parks' accomplishments, which are literally too numerous even
to list, and which, the film proposes, emerge from the man's astonishing
ambition and passion, and perhaps
more profoundly, as the documentary has it, his rage against the injustice and pain that shaped his
experience.
Half
Past Autumn
follows a general chronology,
beginning with that extraordinary story of his birth in November of 1912, and including his travels as a
famous, well-funded photographer and author, musical composing (with brief
comments from his musical
supervisor Mario Sprouse and cellist Kermit Moore),
and his interactions -- as a photojournalist -- with
figures as diverse as Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini, Malcolm X, and the Black Panthers
(Eldridge Cleaver asked him to be Public Relations
Officer, but Parks told him no, thank you, "We don't
think the same way"). The last of Sarah and Jackson Parks' fifteen children, he grew up on the family farm
in Fort Scott, Kansas. As he recalls, his parents encouraged him to be
"strong" in the face of
prejudice. The film illustrates this by inserting a scene from *The Learning Tree*, in which a white woman
teacher discourages the young black protagonist
(played by Kyle Johnson): "Very few Negro students go
to college; they just aren't college material." Parks
is then shown accepting his forty-first honorary doctorate,
this one from Princeton University. Imagining what it might be like to send that degree to the teacher who
told him he wasn't "college material," he
observes, "I
didn't finish high school, but I realized I had come quite a distance."
The
film goes on to map that distance, beginning with his early days
"shooting fashions" for a department store in St. Paul,
Minnesota, and on to his
ground-breaking work for the DC-based Farm Service
Administration, headed by Roy Stryker, who advised Parks in 1942, "You just can't photograph a bigot and
write 'bigot' beneath the picture, because bigots have a way of looking like
everyone else... You have to get
at the root of bigotry." According to Parks, he
responded by shooting
Ella Watson, whom he met while she was
cleaning the FSA building. Instructing her to
hold a mop and a broom, Parks set her in front of the
U.S. flag -- "dripping from the ceiling to the
floor"
-- and so created his stunning photo, "American
Gothic." Eventually, of course, Parks moved to
New York,
and began his longtime gig with *Life* magazine,
with a "Crime Across America" series, for
which he
wrote essays as well as shooting photographs (he
reads
his own words, expressing his distress at seeing
"a
man whose penis had been cut off and stuffed in his mouth,"
or photographing a man about to die in the gas
chamber, just "six feet from the chair." As
Parks
observes in his accompanying essay, "He had
murdered
dispassionately, and judgment was served
dispassionately."
As
Half Past Autumn shows again and again, Parks himself was never
dispassionate: his art reflects his
ongoing commitment to social justice. Even if, as Nelson George offers in one segment, "Gordon has been
'cool' at various moments in his life, in terms of the black intelligentsia, but
I don't think that he's
viewed as a cutting edge figure in the black community today," Parks rejects the responsibility to some
mythical "community": "I don't have time for
that. I've fought my own
battles, I've been bloodied, so I
think I have a right to do what I want to do." There
have been high personal prices to pay for his exercise of this "right," as the documentary discloses -- some
obvious distance from his children and grandchildren,
and three divorces, but in interviews, his family appears to forgive and
admire him; certainly they
appreciate his art, his politics, and his persistent urge to holler.
While
Parks is clearly glad for his demanding and
enormously rewarding assignments, he was also ready when Life sent him to head up their Paris Bureau (as
he notes, to receive this plum position after just one year on staff was unheard
of). In Europe, Parks' sense
of mission developed and deepened, as his subjects became more diverse and he was exposed to different
cultures. Part of this shift was also personal -- his
marriage to his first wife Sally broke up and he met new people, who embodied unfamiliar values and
outlooks, including Gloria Vanderbilt, with whom he
became great friends. Here, the film offers one instance of a device it uses repeatedly and
effectively. In representing Parks' life choices, his
occasional failings or regrets, his joys and triumphs, the documentary doesn't pass its own judgment, but
instead, juxtaposes perspectives of people who know
him. When Vanderbilt enthuses about her relationship with Gordon: "It was like a spiritual communication," the scene cuts to Parks, who remembers the situation
slightly differently: "There would have been the possibility" of
marriage with Gloria, he says, "but
there was a great distance, I felt, between our families. I couldn't reconcile that. We never even
talked about racial problems in our relationship. It wouldn't have affected
her, but somehow or another, it
got to me."
With
this observation and others -- in particular
concerning his Life magazine assignments, on segregation in Alabama in 1956, the Nation of Islam in
the 60s, and the assassination of Dr. King --
Parks reveals his keen sensitivity to practical and political realities, like racism and classism, despite
and because of his own increasing celebrity and
wealth. He remembers his roots, and struggles with his public roles. He is not afraid to say what he means,
or express his rage. As he wrote in 1968, "Dr. King spent the last years of
his life preaching love to men
of all colors. And for all this, a man, white like you, blasted a bullet through his neck. And in doing
so the madman has just about eliminated the last symbol of peace between
us." And still, Parks chooses,
as he phrases it, in a 1966 book titled A Choice of
Weapons, to fight back with his art. "I've lived in so many different skins,
it is impossible for one skin
to claim me, and I have felt like a wayfarer on an alien planet at times, balking, running, wondering
what brought me to this particular place, and why. But once I was here, the
dreams started moving in, and I
went about devouring them as they devoured me." Half
Past Autumn gives you a glimpse into Parks' dreams, troubles, and devouring
spirit.
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