Historical Text

Shaft is a 1971 award winning film directed by Gordon Parks.

Shaft is an action film that has elements of film noir*, it tells the story of a black private detective, John Shaft, who travels through Harlem and to the Italian mob in order to find the missing daughter of a black mobster. The movie is widely considered a prime example of the blaxploitation genre.

Narrative: At the police precinct, Shaft is interviewed by Victor Androzzi a long-suffering white cop. Androzzi believes something big is about to erupt in the underworld [Harlem] and gives Shaft twenty four hours to investigate, threatening to revoke his license if he doesn't comply.
Bumpy Jonas[black crime kingpin] surprises Shaft by calling to ask for his help in finding his daughter, Marcy, who has disappeared. Jonas claims that Ben Buford, the leader of a black militant organisation[Black Nationalists], is behind Marcy's kidnapping.


Shaft travels uptown to meet his old friend Ben at his hideout. Gunmen burst in, and although Shaft and Ben manage to escape, the other militants are massacred. Jonas is the obvious suspect, but he insists that he was using Shaft to enlist Ben and his army to rescue his daughter. Shaft convinces Ben to help with this mission, at a price. Jonas is convinced that the Mafia are behind Marcy's disappearance - as they want in on the Harlem drug trade that he controls.

Shaft traces the kidnappers to an Uptown hotel, then he and Ben's men plot their assault. One team work up from the kitchens, another down from the roof, until they have cornered the kidnappers. A fierce gun battle ensues and the Mafia guards are killed. Marcy is freed and her father pays the agreed price per head of $1000, funds which Ben will use to release political prisoners.

* Film Noir - Crime, usually murder, is an element of almost all film noirs; in addition to standard-issue greed, A crime investigation—by a private eye, a police detective (sometimes acting alone)

In the film, Shaft comes across as man who is on a 'one man mission'.
When talking to the captain of the local police Shaft tells him that he is always 'concerned about minority folks' - this highlights that the captain may not want to be directly involved with minority folks and would want Shaft to deal with them. As with groups such as the Black Nationalists and the Panthers around during this time, there would be political unrest frequently.

Black nationalist's emphasised the need for the cultural, political and economical separation from white society.
The Black Panthers were a progressive political organization who had a reputation for violence

Though there are not specific references to racism, some characters or issues may involve people being prejudice. i.e. when Shaft puts his arm out for a taxi, the driver immediately sees that he is black and stops for the white man ahead of Shaft. This shows that attitudes towards ethnic minorities may still be the same as there is still the 'fear of the black man'.
-At one point in the film, the police captain asks Shaft to 'think like a white man'.

This film also uses Binary Oppositions(Strauss)
- black vs. white
- Harlem mob vs. mafia
It can be described as hood against hood. As both the Harlem mob and the mafia where established crime organisations during this period..almost like competition, as the mafia wanted in the the drug trade which bumpy Jonas was controlling.

The film also re enforces the importance for money, as Shaft demands a large sum of money for getting back kidnapped daughter, and also bribes' potential sources' with money.

The first time a Blaxploitation film (exploiting the existence of a large black audience among the general popularity of black music and culture) went mainstream in the US, creating the first black ghetto super-sleuth. Although it featured sexism and reliance on stereotypical ideologies of black male sexuality, it was positive for the black community all over the world, since it was the first representation of a James Bond-like figure fighting inner-city oppression