You’d be hard pressed to name two films that more forcibly rearranged American aesthetics than 1971’s SHAFT and 1972’s SUPER FLY. A double-barreled, maddeningly Black treatise on the anatomy of ‘cool,’ made all the more remarkable by the fact that the two directors responsible were father and son—respectively, renowned Civil Rights Era photographer and deeply underrated filmmaker Gordon Parks and Gordon Parks, Jr., a musician who eventually, thankfully meandered into his father’s footsteps.

Smuggled within the bowels of that great Trojan horse of radical, independent genre cinema known as Blaxploitation, the younger Parks’ 1974 followup to SUPER FLY is an erudite, rebelliously stylish patchwork Western that refashions the genre’s tropes and mythologies to the precise measurements of its Black protagonists. Two reunited ex-lovers turned fugitives—the supremely elegant Vonetta McGee’s (SHAFT IN AFRICA, TO SLEEP WITH ANGER) unabashedly womanist bounty hunter Thomasine and wanted horse whisperer J.P. Bushrod, played by McGee’s then real-life partner, the iconically smooth polyglot Max Julien (THE MACK), who also penned the script—criss-cross through 1910s Texas robbing banks and redistributing loot to the poor, all the while dreaming of a quiet future together. But, the thing about Bonnie and Clyde is, they were white. In Parks, Jr.’s wild West, lynchings are road signs, and Black women are doubly unsafe even when enforcing the law. The couple’s only insulation is their love, defiant and uncommonly tender, and the growing community of allies for whom they quickly become folk heroes—Black resistance cum multiethnic solidarity. As the film’s wanted-poster tagline sings, “Thomasine & Bushrod: known to have many friends among Indians, Mexicans, poor whites, and other colored people.”

Gordon Parks, Jr. only made one more film, four in total, before his untimely passing in 1979. You really oughta see this one.

The vitals:
MONDAY, 3/6
7:00 - doors
8:00 - local short film
Following - THOMASINE & BUSHROD presented by Graham Cumberbatch
(take a look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdAGgeicuH8&ab_channel=BlackFilmHistory)

Sliding scale $5-10 tix available for presale, any remaining sold at door (all proceeds go to studio's screening fees and future programming all for you!).

21+

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