Hacker Cinema
Shaft
1971 · Film · 100 min
Directed by Gordon Parks
Cool Black private eye John Shaft is hired by a crime lord to find and retrieve his kidnapped daughter.
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3 comments on Hacker News
> Kodak designed and standardized its color film to represent Caucasian skin tones.
That may be an urban legend. There was a popular reference card that had a light-skinned woman, but that wasn't the problem. This is closer to the old Technicolor vs. Eastmancolor debate.
Here's the trailer for Disney's "Song of the South" (1946) [1] That's three-strip Technicolor. Good dynamic range, with each of three colors on its own strip of black and while film. Here's the trailer from "Shaft" (1971) [2]. That's single-strip Eastmancolor. Dynamic range is not as good, as you can see in the street scenes where lighting wasn't controlled. Eastmancolor took over in the 1950s because the cameras are much smaller and production is easier and cheaper.
NTSC Color TV really did have something to standardize skin tones. NTSC color TV transmits an intensity value and two vector components which determine the color. The color vector components are rather low bandwidth (only about 10 full range color changes across the width of the tube), and so some NTSC receivers had a gimmick which, when the vector is near the "skin tone line" for a standard skin tone, pulled it to a fixed value.[3] The effect was that all faces had roughly the same skin tone in UV color space, but intensity could vary.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxwqH47Ne70
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFlsufZj9Fg
[3] https://bramstout.nl/en/webbooks/vectorscopes/#yiq-and-the-skin-tone-line
>Radio stations played a great variety of really good new music.
Please. The lack of variety in the public sphere is exactly what led to the "underground" music scenes. In the 70's the new unheard music was punk and the like.
When I left for college in '79 it was an absolutely jaw-dropping, exciting experience to find an entire music store filled with this "alternative" music that no one played (outside of college stations, which played anything. Even then, some of the college stations still played Top 40. What was the point of that?)
>Most Americans had never heard of espresso.
True, although if you were paying attention to the movie, "Shaft" ordered espresso. I noticed this but still didn't understand what it was supposed to be.
>Doomsayers were worried about something they called the "greenhouse effect".
To be fair, early in the 70's it seemed to some researchers that the historical trend was downward and we were headed into a new ice age. This was widely reported. Later on more work was done to get better global temperature proxies and it was decided that the trend was upwards.
To have a black James Bond, we need to have a better representation of what is black.
Blaxploitation (yet I would love to have this movie in Afrostream) was positive in a sens that it gives positive heroes who are black and it's very important to me that Black people think they could be what they want to be.
By the way, I dreamed to be Shaft when I was younger.
But let's face it, We don't have a lot of movies like that anymore, or they are not internationally distributed.
That's the question we want to solve with Afrostream.
And, again, African Culture does not exist.