Devin Allen

(On Cable TV, July 2022) While Gordon Parks will forever be remembered for directing the blaxploitation classic Shaft, it actually takes more than an hour in A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks before the film even mentions Shaft, and even then, it’s as part of Parks’ directing career in general. No, this is a documentary that pays well-deserved homage to Gordon Parks’ photography, from his early days documenting criminals in New York City, to more ambitious assignments throughout his career. The most distinctive feature of director John Maggio’s film, fittingly enough, is spending a lot of time showcasing and sometimes analyzing (via the eyes of fellow photographers) what makes some of Parks’ individual photos so compelling. The lineup assembled to pay homage is impressive—sure, we can expect people like Spike Lee and Ava DuVernay to be interviewed, but Anderson Cooper is a surprise. (The connection ends up being parental—Gordon Parks photographed Gloria Vanderbilt and kept in touch afterwards.) While the film generally takes a chronological approach through its subject’s life, it also comes with a speedrun through recent American history in matters of racial equality, and how Parks’ example continues to inspire others. The best parenthetical of the film focuses on Devin Allen, a photographer who picked up the camera from being inspired by Parks’ example and later had a picture reprinted on the cover of Time magazine. It’s impossible to dissociate Parks’ work from activist intent—as the title of the film (reprised from his autobiography) states, anyone who wants to create change has a choice of weapons—and Parks picked up the camera. This does add a lot of depth and emotion to the biopic, linking his work to much larger social currents and progress. Parks was not always well served by American society (as proven by Hollywood’s refusal to consider him a director of anything but black-themed projects) but he did far more than his part in trying to improve it. Shaft is far from being all of it.