ABSTRACT
The Learning Tree is not an independent film. In fact, it was important to its makers – from Gordon Parks, its writer-director, to Warner Bros.-Seven Arts, the Hollywood studio that funded and distributed it – that The Learning Tree be seen as an American-film-industry-dependent work, one crafted and positioned to reach a broad, popular audience: a Hollywood movie. Judging from reviews when it came out in 1969 The Learning Tree was mostly received that way. At the same time, both the makers and audiences of The Learning Tree also understood it to be different from all previous Hollywood movies: Gordon Parks was Black, the first African American to direct a Hollywood film. This fact complicated and nuanced the provenance of The Learning Tree, making it also important that the movie be understood simultaneously as W7’s and as Gordon Parks’, as Hollywood and not. This essay interprets The Learning Tree in the light of its complex genesis, providing a clear sense of how freighted and elusive the idea of independent film – and of “independence” or “autonomy” more generally – becomes when it intersects US regimes of race in American cinema culture in the late 1960s and beyond.
