Shaft · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

He comes up out of the ground. The first thing John Shaft does in his own movie is climb the subway stairs into Times Square, and Gordon Parks puts the camera down on the street with him — real crowds, real traffic, hard winter light — and lets Isaac Hayes's hi-hat and that Skip Pitts wah-wah carry the man into the frame before he's said a word. Watch how he crosses against the light, raps a knuckle on the hood of a cab that gets too close, keeps walking. Nobody owns this guy. That walk is the whole film, and it pays to slow it down, because Deleuze hands us an exact name for what it's doing.

He calls it the gest — a posture or an attitude that doesn't just belong to a body but exposes a whole social relation through that body. Not what a character feels inside, but what his bearing makes legible to everyone around him. Shaft's leather coat works almost as armor; the turtleneck is a uniform; and Parks, the Life photographer, keeps framing him centered, planted in doorways, shot from just below so the city sits under his eyeline. The gest here is sovereignty. A Black man in 1971 moving through Harlem, midtown, and the Village with the same unbothered command, answering to no one — the militants, the rackets, the Mafia, the white cops who need him more than they respect him. The walk says it before the plot does. Read the film through that single posture and everything else falls into place.

Now the larger claim, the one that makes this cheap genre picture matter to the history of the art. Deleuze's big story about cinema is that somewhere after the war the action-image went into crisis. For decades the movies had run on a clean circuit: a character perceives a situation and acts to change it; the action resolves the situation; the cut serves the chain. Then — Italian neorealism, the European art film — that circuit broke. Heroes stopped being able to act. They could only look, wander, endure. Deleuze calls this new figure the seer, and by 1971 the prestige cinema of Europe had largely handed itself over to him.

Shaft is the counter-proof, arriving exactly on schedule to refuse the crisis. His sensory-motor circuit is intact and gleaming. He perceives, he acts, the act lands. The climactic rescue is built the old classical way, cross-cutting his assault on the hotel with the imperiled hostage to wind suspense tight and then release it — pure action-image, the situation transformed by a decisive deed. And here is Parks's real invention: he loads that reassertion with racial meaning. The thing the crisis took away — a body that can act on the world and prevail — is restored, on a major studio's dime, to a Black hero the movies had never let hold the center. The intactness is the politics.

The shape of the case is what Deleuze calls the small form of the action-image. Not the epic where a vast situation presses down until a hero rises (that's the large form, the Western, the disaster). The detective works the other way around: a single act — take the job, lean on a witness, kick a door — discloses a situation that was hidden. Shaft is hired to find Bumpy Jonas's kidnapped daughter, and each move he makes peels back a war between Harlem's Black rackets and the downtown mob he never saw coming. This is the oldest hardboiled architecture, and the lineage is exact: the self-interested code of The Maltese Falcon's Sam Spade, the labyrinth-subordinated-to-cool of The Big Sleep, transposed straight onto Shaft. Tidyman, who'd win his Oscar for The French Connection, knew the form in his bones.

The city does heavy work too. New York isn't a backdrop; it's what Deleuze calls the encompasser — the milieu that surrounds the hero and calls the action out of him. Furrer's handheld, available-light crowd work gives it a reportorial grain that owes something to Bazin's old faith that the real location carries truth the soundstage can't fake. And notice the film's breathing: long deliberate stretches of talk, negotiation, atmosphere, then a sudden taut burst of violence, then back to the street. Deleuze names that pulse the respiration of the action film — the alternation between the wide milieu and the tightened line of the act. Hayes's score, mixed forward and nearly continuous, is what makes the breathing audible; it's less underscore than the air Shaft moves through.

What did it seed? Everything downstream. Cotton Comes to Harlem proved the appetite and Sweetback proved the autonomy, but Shaft commercialized the formula — Black hero, location grain, wall-to-wall funk woven into the cut the way Schifrin's jazz drove Bullitt — and a whole cycle followed it through the door. The wah-wah did as much as the screenplay.

So: watch the walk again. A man comes up out of the subway and takes the city as his own. Deleuze lets you see that it isn't swagger. It's an entire broken circuit being welded back together, and handed to someone it had always been kept from.