1107 The Learning Tree

[swo17]

The Learning Tree



With this tender and clear-eyed coming-of-age odyssey, the renowned photographer turned filmmaker Gordon Parks not only became the first Black American director to make a Hollywood studio film, he also served as writer, producer, and composer, resulting in a deeply personal artistic achievement. Based on Parks's own semi-autobiographical novel, The Learning Tree follows the journey of Newt Winger (Kyle Johnson), a teenage descendant of Exodusters growing up in rural Kansas in the 1920s, as he experiences the bittersweet flowering of first love, finds his relationship with a close friend tested, and navigates the injustices embedded within a racist legal and educational system. Exquisitely capturing the bucolic splendor of its heartland setting, this landmark film tempers nostalgia with an incisive understanding of the harsh realities, hard-won lessons, and often wrenching moral choices that shape the road to self-determination of the young Black man at its center.

SPECIAL FEATURES

• New 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• New documentary on the making of the film and its artistry, featuring curator Rhea L. Combs and filmmakers Ina Diane Archer, Ernest R. Dickerson, and Nelson George
• New conversation, moderated by film scholar Michael B. Gillespie, between artist Hank Willis Thomas and art historian Deborah Willis about the influence of director Gordon Parks
• The Moviemakers, a featurette that shows Parks on location for the film
• My Father: Gordon Parks (1969), a documentary made on the set of The Learning Tree, narrated by Gordon Parks Jr., and featuring interviews with Gordon Parks Sr. and members of the cast and crew
• Diary of a Harlem Family and The World of Piri Thomas, two 1968 films on which Parks played creative roles, with an introduction by Combs and George
• Trailer
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: A 1963 Life magazine photo-essay by Parks, and an excerpt from the director's 2005 book A Hungry Heart: A Memoir

[DeprongMori]

I’m disappointed that The Learning Tree does not include Parks’ excellent 1987 hour-long autobiographical film Moments Without Proper Names about his later life (which recently screened on the Channel), especially as The Learning Tree has many autobiographical elements from his childhood.

[knives]

Or even, if we can dream, a complete historical set with stuff like Leadbelly. Still, can’t be upset with what we do have.

[JSC]

I’m disappointed that The Learning Tree does not include Parks’ excellent 1987 hour-long autobiographical film Moments Without Proper Names

Moments without Proper Names was just put out on blu-ray by Kino.

https://www.kinolorber.com/product/mome ... es-blu-ray

[DeprongMori]

I’m disappointed that The Learning Tree does not include Parks’ excellent 1987 hour-long autobiographical film Moments Without Proper Names

Moments without Proper Names was just put out on blu-ray by Kino.

https://www.kinolorber.com/product/mome ... es-blu-ray

Thanks. I guess Criterion lost the bidding, as they likely had The Learning Tree in the works for a while and this is a very recent Kino release. Still, a shame.

[swo17]

I mean, this looks like a stacked release, and you can also buy the Kino, who will probably do just as good of a job with it. Other than it not being tacked on for no additional charge on the Criterion, I don't see the problem

[beamish14]

Or even, if we can dream, a complete historical set with stuff like Leadbelly. Still, can’t be upset with what we do have.

I'm still amazed that Leadbelly has aired recently on American television in HD. Seems like a potential Paramount Presents title, although maybe it's a touch too obscure.

I've heard the claim that this was the first studio film to be helmed by an African-American filmmaker, but Ossie Davis' Cotton Comes to Harlem, Melvin Van Peebles' Watermelon Man, and Bill Gunn's Stop were all in stages of production at roughly the same time.

[Gerald Christie]

Based on Gordon Parks' novel of the same name, "The Learning Tree" is significant for being the first major studio feature length film directed by an African American director. Parks in his autobiography, "Voice in the Mirror" mentions that John Cassavettes upon reading the original novel urged him to adapt the film for the big screen and helped him secure a deal with MGM. Parks went on to direct the film, write the script and compose the film score. The result is an amazingly technically competent piece of filmmaking and even more astonishing knowing it came from a first time director.
Nowadays, for better or for worse, Gordon Parks tends to be solely remembered for helping popularize the blacksploitation craze with "Shaft" and its sequel, but this film really reflects his skills as a director. Parks' direction is excellent, letting the characters tell the story, using his skills a photographer to great effect, capturing the emotion of the people, while also easily adapting to more active filming in terms of exterior shots and landscapes. His debut score is pleasant, but nothing remarkable, while the whole film as a package feels a bit more sweeping than the short running time might let on.
The final product is an uneven but good movie. What really brings the film down is the overtly simple screenplay that comes off as rather pedestrian and Kyle Johnson's somewhat lacking/limited acting skills.
This is one of those films that is significant and should be seen more for what it represents. Having said that, it's still a worthwhile, noble and earnest effort from a director that unfortunately never got his due.

[Altair]

I would say that, if anything, Gordon Parks nowadays is best remembered for his photography for the likes of Life, Vogue, and the FSA. A good number of his images were on display just this past summer at the Jewish Musuem in New York, part of a larger exhibit on mid-century magazine photography. Amongst photo historians and art historians more generally, it's his trailblazing career as an African-American photographer for mainstream magazines which is most focused on.

[yoloswegmaster]

New extra has been added:

• The Moviemakers, a featurette that shows Parks on location for the film

[swo17]

This has surely been overshadowed by the Riggs and Van Peebles sets, both for coming in at the tail end of the year and for not being touted as a survey of its director's work, but pair it with Kino's Moments Without Proper Names, which also has a couple of extras that would fit nicely here, and you have more than half of his non-Shaft filmography, plus a thick booklet and other extras that give a good sense of Parks' work in writing and photography, even if it's way too little and only enough to whet the appetite. Still, Parks is a fascinating artist that deserves to be in the same conversation as the other two directors, and is perhaps the one I identify most with out of the three.

I am curious if anyone has recommendations of where to go next, particularly with regard to his photography

[brundlefly]

HBO Max has a new documentary called A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks. Haven't seen that or the Parks discs, yet, but the Times review says it was mostly focused on his photography and on situating him within an ongoing cultural narrative.

[knives]

Leadbelly is a truly great film if you want to explore more of that side of his career. In terms of photography, I remember he has a book of photos that are connected with The Learning Tree which might be a good access point.

[JSC]

His first autobiography A Choice of Weapons is definitely worth reading. Also, there's a large
retrospective book Half Past Autumn which includes photography as well as some of his
paintings, etc. The latter is how I first became acquainted with his work.

[DeprongMori]

I had just finished reading Parks’ autobiography A Choice of Weapons this week, which I had picked up a while back shortly after having watched his Moments Without Proper Names. Both are excellent. Right after finishing the book, I discovered that there was a well-regarded new documentary about Parks’s professional life and his influence by the same title. The book covers his childhood through his apprenticeship as a photographer.

Coincidentally, I stumbled across an old mass-market paperback of his novel The Learning Tree in a used book shop just yesterday. Not sure whether it is still in print. Someone asked earlier how much of the novel/film is directly autobiographical. The one key incident he describes in both The Learning Tree and A Choice of Weapons is where he and his friends witness a white sheriff fatally shooting a Black man of Parks’ acquaintance who was fleeing a riverside craps game the sheriff had broken up, and the children swimming under the river for the corpse for an offered reward. His encounter with the underwater corpse traumatized him for years. The rest of the novel seems mostly informed by just the milieu of his rural childhood.

[swo17]

Yeah, you can pick up that copy of the novel on Amazon for peanuts. I just did.

HBO Max has a new documentary called A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks. Haven't seen that or the Parks discs, yet, but the Times review says it was mostly focused on his photography and on situating him within an ongoing cultural narrative.

there's a large retrospective book Half Past Autumn which includes photography as well as some of his paintings, etc. The latter is how I first became acquainted with his work.

It looks like there's also a 2000 HBO documentary associated with Half Past Autumn (it has the same cover image as the book). Has anyone seen it? The book is OOP and pricey

[therewillbeblus]

I'm not sure if I'm reading the film's intended approach correctly (I haven't dug through any supplements nor have I read up on any of them), but I thought this was an effective recalibrated melodrama, playing to the beat of a familiar narrative skeleton and tonal markers that were utilized in the 50s. That genre concocted a deceptively shallow sense of aesthetic artifice to exhibit the juxtaposition between the faux-security of external apparatuses and the raw authentic experience of social systems' conflict spawning unbearable alienation on an individual level. Although the melodrama typically centered around white communities, Parks remodels the formula to meet black life as he sees it, with some interesting twists: instead of meditating primarily around how a fragmented society eliminated safe spaces for expression of emotion that in turn led to dreadful consequences, Gordon Parks focuses on cruel tangible realities of black lives in the dominant white communities- which, in the time period the film takes place, is all of them. The drama often starts and stops with acerbic action. Deaths are brutal and shocking, and the abrasive methods used within the organized fixture reminded me of Peyton Place's stark disruption of norms of cinema within a normative framework, both opting for a stirring effect over form-reflexive irony.

This refurbishing of the Hollywood Melodrama must have stuck out like a sore thumb in 1969, and yet it's perfectly timed to propagate a progressive audience with post-Code violence and a harsh realistic finale that evades justice. One scene I particularly loved was the white judge's didactic finger-wagging at the white courtroom audience, which would have made me roll my eyes in another film, but Parks is so keenly perceptive to the constructs he's manipulating, knowing full well that white audiences need this message coming from a white old man to land, and that black audiences will appreciate the gag as a utopian piece of wish fulfillment advocacy from public officials, yet one that still carries immense power in its truth for the context of what our main principal had to do to execute 'justice.' It's interesting -and not artificially or ironically conveyed whatsoever- that Newt is the only character who acts judicially on a wholly moral plane defying cultural allegiance- which, if a Fuck You, is a rather gentle and humbly-portrayed one. It's also a sad example of the thankless and lonesome process of acting in step with one's virtues against the friction of a domineering and oppressive milieu, and Parks graciously and unsurprisingly doesn't allow his empowering affirmation bestowed in accordance with the rules of melodrama to dilute that experience of its sincere force.