Shaft (1971)

Buy Tickets Online or at the door – All seats only $8.85 + HST = $10!

Part of a new series hosted by the Cinema Society of Kingston: New Hollywood Cinema, hosted by Daniel Simpson.

While the Black Power movement was reshaping America, trailblazing director Gordon Parks made this groundbreaking blockbuster, which helped launch the blaxploitation era and introduced a new kind of badder-than-bad action hero in John Shaft (Richard Roundtree, in a career-defining role), a streetwise New York City private eye who is as tough with criminals as he is tender with his lovers. 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 uptown vs. downtown turf war. A vivid time capsule of gritty seventies Manhattan that has inspired sequels and multimedia reboots galore, the original Shaft is studded with indelible elements—from Roundtree’s sleek leather fashions to the iconic funk and soul score by Isaac Hayes. (Janus Films)

About the New Hollywood Cinema Series

New Hollywood Cinema is a series dedicated to highlighting artistic triumphs from American film in the late sixties and seventies. In the wake of a collapsing studio system and disintegrating Hollywood Production Code a new generation of filmmakers took the reins of Hollywood movies and transformed the shape of American cinema. Combining Hollywood traditions with modern sensibilities, the New Hollywood made the arthouse mainstream, creating a legacy of artistry in American moviemaking which has never been matched.

About the Series Host, Daniel Simpson

Daniel Simpson is a recent PhD graduate in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies at Queen’s University, having written his dissertation on the New Hollywood cinema of Mike Nichols and Arthur Penn. In addition to his work as an instructor, Daniel also creates original video essays on film and film culture, published on Youtube under the name “Eyebrow Cinema.”