By Geoff Carter
In The New Wave 2.0 series, The Pen in Hand Blog will be considering the work of today’s best and most influential filmmakers, artists whose singular visual styles and visionary senses have stretched the boundaries of cinema. Drawing upon Francois Truffaut’s definition of an auteur, these pieces will be looking at writer/directors whose films have transcended the art of filmmaking and taken it into the realm of genius. Spike Lee, whose career has spanned over thirty years, will be the first of the auteurs analyzed in this series.
Georges Biard, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Spike Lee: Doing the Right Thing
Spike Lee has been a force in cinema since She’s Gotta Have It, his first feature. Released in 1986, the film explored one independent African American woman’s relationships with three very different men. Its fresh approach to the depiction of a single woman’s choices and the complex webs of relationships between the four main characters was both refreshing and insightful. As a first feature, this film heralded the entrance of not only a new talent and a strikingly original voice into the world of independent film, but a filmmaker who was intent on chronicling the triumphs and struggles of the Black experience.
As such, many of Lee’s films are based on actual racial incidents. 1989’s Do the Right Thing was inspired by two real-life incidents: the racially motivated killing of Michael Griffith outside a pizzeria in Howard Beach and the police shooting of Eleanor Bumpurs by in 1984. Malcolm X and Summer of Sam are dramatizations of real-life people and incidents although—especially in Summer of Sam—Lee stretches some of his characters into regions that push the characters’ subjective realities to cinematic extremes.
To capture the harrowing mood of New York City during that terrifying summer when the Son of Sam killer roamed the streets, Lee depicted the city’s collective fear and paranoia by focusing on select characters, not from a Black neighborhood, but from an Italian American neighborhood in the Bronx. One of the characters, Ritchie (Adrien Brody), has embraced the punk-rock lifestyle, while his best friend Vinny (John Leguizamo), indulges in extra-marital liaisons and kinky sex. When the neighborhood decides to go vigilante, they focus on Ritchie with his spiked hairdo and funky clothes. While not explicitly describing the Black experience, Lee does detail how fear causes one group to suspect and attack another—a perfect metaphor for racism.
Lee also captures African-American realities—straight reality—in his incredibly well-done documentaries. Probably his best-known is Four Little Girls, a documentary that examines the KKK bombing of the 16th St. Baptist Church in Birmingham that resulted in the deaths of four young girls. Lee interviewed family and friends of the girls, as well as archival footage of the incident, Martin Luther King’s involvement, and the subsequent demonstrations. Police reactions to these peaceful protests, including the use of police dogs and firehoses shocked the nation. Lee succeeded in intertwining the personal and the historical in this film which ended with the conviction of the killer.
In When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts which detailed the pain and suffering of the people of New Orleans after the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina, Lee interviewed hundreds of experts and New Orleans residents including Wendell Pierce, Mayor Ray Nagin, and Governor Kathleen Blanco. Interspersing news footage of death houses, bodies in the street, the desperate refugees housed in the Louisiana Superdome with stories from survivors trying find loved ones, escape, or simply survive—let alone think of rebuilding, the four-hour long documentary is a testament to the strength and determination of the residents, mostly minorities and the marginalized, as well as an expose of the corruption and ineptitude which added to the natural disaster.
A few of his films, including Crooklyn, (part of his “Chronicles of Brooklyn” series) have strong semi-autobiographical influences. In this touching film about a family growing up poor—but solid—in Brooklyn, Lee, who co-wrote the film with his siblings Joie and Cinque, depicts Carolyn (Alfre Woodard) a no-nonsense mother and Woody (Delroy Lindo) a somewhat indulgent musician father, as the bulwark of a strong and loving family. Some of the scenes—including the play in the street and all five siblings huddled around a ten-inch television—are priceless. Lee’s connection to his hometown was evident in this and the other films in “Chronicles of Brooklyn” series, including She’s Gotta Have It, Do the Right, Crooklyn, Clockers, and He Got Game.
Other movies in his impressive oeuvre, like BlacKKKlansman and Get on the Bus focus on real-life social issues and historical events through an African American perspective. This, in fact, is at the core of Lee’s vision. Even his later films, like The Miracle of St. Anna and Inside Man, that he directed but did not write, Lee incorporates the marginalized sensibility of the African American experience into his work. The pillars of that sensibility, including family, jazz, basketball, dance, and activism are sooner or later all addressed in Lee’s movies.
Perhaps the strangest—and disturbing—of Lee’s efforts is Bamboozled, a satire in which Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans), an African American TV producer, decides that inserting a modern-day minstrel show (complete with Black actors putting on blackface) into a national television lineup is a great idea. When the series succeeds beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, Delacroix, his team, and the actors are appalled but too locked into the show’s success to back out and ultimately culminates in a violent fallout. The black comedy and biting satire make Bamboozled a tough watch, but the incredibly deft and layered metaphor of the blackface—a mask being applied over a mask—is priceless.
Lee’s directorial style and trademark filming techniques are part of parcel of his vision. The soliloquy sequence in Do the Right Thing, in which a representative from four different ethnic groups respectively faces the camera to unleash unbridled racist rants directly into the audience’s face, is both shocking and—the viewer realizes—inevitable. The sheer genius of simply placing the subjectivity of each group front and center in all its ugliness is beyond brilliant.
Lee also uses his camerawork, particularly the double-dolly shot, to portray inner sensibilities of his characters. In Jungle Fever, when Paulie and Angie are taking an evening walk, they appear to be floating. Because the camera is on one dolly facing the actors while they are being wheeled synchronously with the camera, it appears as if they are moving without walking—or any other visible means of support. They are transcending their reality. It’s a technique we see again and again in this master’s works.
This blog has only scratched the surface of Spike Lee’s genius. His vision, his technique, and—mostly—his courage, have created a collection of films that have educated, enlightened, and entertained the viewing public for decades. And his career continues to thrive; only last year, Spike Lee directed the film version of David Byrne’s American Utopia. The result is much more than a concert film; yet another genre has been conquered by the master.