Shaft
(Shaft)

When Gordon Parks turned Richard Roundtree into the incarnation of blaxploitation, he was already 59 years old. He was chosen to direct Shaft in order to offer black audiences a version of Peter Yates’ Bullitt or the French Connection by William Friedkin (he has the same screenwriter, Ernest Tidyman). Under its seemingly hardboiled fiction, the action above all consists of ambulations between 42nd Street and Harlem. Gordon Parks establishes a strong identity between the city and his hero, placing him in front of flashing cinema façades and poster-covered walls, or plunging him into the picturesque crowds in Times Square. He portends the neorealist work of Martin Scorsese, who shoots Mean Streettwo years later in his own community. Stéphane du Mesnildot