For all kinds of terrible reasons, the movies don’t have that many great shots of black women. They just don’t. But there’s a shot of Aretha Franklin in “Amazing Grace” that might be the greatest image of a black woman that I’ve ever seen in an American movie. It’s just a medium close-up, straight on, of her at the podium of the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Watts, almost evenly framed between two microphones and a pair of Afros that complement hers. The camera doesn’t move. And neither does she, except to sing and even then: she’s moving you.

Half of what’s in the shot is some shade of white — her studded caftan, the wall behind her, the cluster of pearl-like berries dangling from her ears. Everything is white but Franklin, whose skin is brown (with some pastel eye shadow and glistening sweat) and whose voice is soothingly, staggeringly black. She’s up there to sing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” And the way she’s framed, all that brightness seems to fortify her glow.

That shot was composed in January 1972, for a movie that scarcely anybody had seen until last month. That’s when I saw it, and I was too overwrought and entertained to really know what its movie context would have been. So I went a second time and thought two things as I watched it. First: Why didn’t the people who made the film use that shot more? This thing has got dozens of Grade-A, laugh-out-loud, dry-your-eyes, stand-up-and-scream images. But none as divinely worthy of stained glass or the National Portrait Gallery.

Which leads me to the second thought: What if this movie, which begins a weeklong run Friday at Film Forum (it’s also showing in Los Angeles), had managed to make it to a movie theater in 1972, when Franklin was among the planet’s greatest current pop stars? Just about the only other black women you could find photographed with as much care would have been Diahann Carroll during her three seasons on “Julia” and Diana Ross playing Billie Holiday, as an open psychological wound, in “Lady Sings the Blues.”