Film Screening of “Shaft” (1971)

Join the museum and the Syracuse community for a free screening of the movie Shaft (1971), directed by Gordon Parks, at the Westcott Theater. Presented in conjunction with the current exhibition “Homeward to the Prairie I Come”: Gordon Parks Photographs from the Beach Museum of Art, this screening is free for all to enjoy.

Doors open at 7 p.m., screening starts at 8 p.m.

You must reserve a free ticket below to guarantee entry. Tickets will also be available at the door until sold out.

Reserve your ticket here!

Shaft, 1971
100 min.
Rating: R
Director: Gordon Parks:
Writers: Ernest Tidyman and John D. F. Black
Producer: Joel Freeman

At a crucial time for the civil rights and Black Power movements, Gordon Parks made his best-known film, the groundbreaking blockbuster, Shaft, a film that helped launch the genre known as blaxploitation film. The film introduced a new kind of action hero aimed at Black audiences that transformed the industry: John Shaft (Richard Roundtree), a streetwise New York City private eye who is “as tough with criminals as he is tender with his lovers.”

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer originally envisioned the film with an all-white cast, but quickly realized there was that Black audiences yearned to see heroes that looked like them. After Shaft is recruited to rescue the kidnapped daughter of a Harlem mob boss from Italian gangsters, he finds himself in the middle of a rapidly escalating turf war between uptown vs. downtown Manhattan. The film’s iconic 1970s visuals and sound—from Roundtree’s leather fashions to the funk and soul score by Isaac Hayes (which won him an Academy Award, two Grammy Award, and a Golden Globe Award)—have remained influential to this day.