Spike Lee (Born, Atlanta, Georgia, USA,1957) has been elected the angry voice of America by the mainstream white film industry and press. Polemic and self consciously radical in his commitment to an interaction of black nationalism with social realism within a style that has been deemed by lazy critics as a ‘MTV’ video production orientated one, Lee fixes his gaze on alternative black representations within a Brecthian and Jean-Luc Godard nuance and a folk-jazz, hip-hop, rap and youth urban culture aesthetics. Lee goes against the grain of the balanced filmmaker, stuck between action and emotion. Positioning himself midway between didacticism and dialects, Lee has challenged Hollywood with representations of black American life in the US, contributing to the treatment of race in the film industry as a living organism rather than a frozen entity and putting in the limelight films of other black directors, such as Jonh Singleton’s Boyz N The Hood (1991) and Mario Von Peeble’s New Jack City (1991).
Son of the respected jazz musician Bill Lee and of an art teacher, Jacqueline Lee, Shelton ‘Spike’ Jackson Lee studied mass communications at Altanta’s Morehouse College, where his father had been a classmate with Martin Luther King. The nickname ‘spiky’ was provided by his mother for his brusque character even in infancy. Spike Lee was introduced to film-making at the New York University, where he won the Student Academy Award prize for his project Joe’s Bed-Stuy Babershop: We Cut Heads (1983). His first student film was Answer (1980), a reverse of Griffith’s classic The Birth of a Nation (1915), which Lee claims was criticised by his teachers.
She Gotta Have It (1986) was Lee’s first feature film. A comedy, the film was about a young black female ensconced in a menage a quatre. It also highlighted the sexual stereotypes shared among black males. Directed, scripted and starred by Lee, the film was shot during 12 days with a low budget of US$ 175,000 dollars and won the best new director prize at Cannes. The exposure of black culture life disassociated from crime and drug-dealing within a new Afro-American semiotics of humour and style were seen as innovative. The treatment of gender identity conflicts within a race aesthetics combined with Lee’s hilarious performance as the bike messenger were some of the film’s high points. School Daze (1988) came out still in an atmosphere of hype with the director Spike Lee, seen by many as the new ‘black voice of America.’ Signalled by critics as artistically pallid and mushy, School Daze was somewhat of a disappointment in its wandering plot lines and overlong dance numbers. The difficulties of engaging a white audience were also felt in the film’s insider tone. However, the story of activism and interracial divisions in a black state college did well in the box office.
Notably, it was with the ground-breaking Do The Right Thing (1989) that Spike Lee was acclaimed internationally as a black independent film director. Do is arguably the most controversial and significant work of Lee to date. Inspired by the death of a young black man in the Italian-American community of Queens, in 1985, the film depicts the riots and racial tensions in New York. The story line centres on the pizza delivery boy Mookie, played by Spike, who works for the Italian-American Sal (Danny Aiello) in his pizzaria in the black neighbourhood of Brooklyn. The philosophies of the black leaders Malcolm X and Martin Luther King are used as competing forces which emerge in the conflicting voices of the younger generation, represented by the radicals Italian-American Vito (John Turturro) and the African-American Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), more identified with X, and also in the older generation, represented by Da Mayor (Ossie Davis).
Do is also Lee’s most musical film: music is used as a play of competing and merging voices. Lee posits Public Enemy’s music and rap style, which have been embraced by the mainstream, as politically oppositional and revealing of racial tension, identity and social position. Music serves in Do to challenge Hollywood’s conventional approach, which rests on the intentions of pleasing a passive viewer who is made to be unaware of the music’s manipulative potential. Lee also redefines Godard’s use of the ‘jump-cuts’ in Breathless (1959) by repeating several shots of blacks, Italians and Koreans as a form of emphasising the sameness of racial stereotyping. Adopting a Brecthian approach, Lee makes use of multiple distanced storylines to explore racism sentiments among America’s minorities. Do The Right Thing was nonetheless surrounded in controversy. The film was acclaimed by progressive mainstream critics as ‘screamingly funny’, ‘astonishing’ and ‘1989’s best film’, while others accused Lee of stimulating racial violence. In spite of the hype, the film did not receive an award in the Cannes Film Festival.
Mo’ Better Blues (1990) is a strictly inferior piece, artistically rigid and with a hollow plot that does little to captivate the viewer. Starring Denzel Washington in the part of the jazz musician Bleek Gilliam, the film adepts to deal with the problems of artistic expression, which are shown to be the result of forced junior years of studying the trumpet. Like School Daze, the film suffers this time from overlong jazz numbers. The impulse of playing an agenda that identifies a moral in an interracial romance is the motif of Jungle Fever (1991), Lee’s next ‘joint.’ Similary to Do, Jungle Fever is self-conscious and dependent on artifice and impact dialogues. Again, Lee uses in both films good black actors, such as Denzel Washington and Wesley Snipes, stars which today are more identified with Hollywood mainstream cinema and action movies. In Jungle, Wesley plays a middle-class black architect who has an affair with his white secretary, the Italian-American Annabella Sciorra. Lee’s portrait of the impossibility of a successful amorous union between an interracial couple was received with disapproval by many critics, culminating in attacks of racism of the director.
First Hollywood epic about an African-American, the grandiose and symbolical Malcolm X (1992) did not live up to the polemic expectations of many whites and blacks. Deemed too tame and mythical, lacking in attempts of problematising Malcolm’s personality, the ore than three hour long film was a mainstream success among both white and black young audiences and the subject of many press criticisms. An adaptation of the classic Malcolm X autobiography written by Alex Haley, the film’s quality lies primarily in the conventional treatment if the epic genre. The outstanding performance of Denzel Washington as Malcolm and the glamourized construction of the main character as a mythical hero, rather than a complex political leader capable of mistakes, are examples of the film’s faithful commitment to its genre. Among critics, the film aroused neither favourable passions or strong attacks. This post-civil rights product, the result of an ultra-urban and neo-nationalist middle-class black American intelligentsia, raised both a priori discussions over its controversial potential and debates after its launch which seemed more interested in the complementation of its funding by African-American stars, such as Oprah Winfrey and Bill Cosby, than in Lee’s artistic and cinematic expression.
Still supported on the idea of the search for an African-American self-identity, Lee this time placed the issue within the personal sphere with the semi-autobiographical Crooklyn (1994).Although insisting that the story did not involve the Lees growing up in Brooklyn, Spike and his sister Joie and brother Cinque wrote the script based on their growing up experiences in the ‘70s. A systematic account of an African-American childhood, the film has been judged as ‘a haunting’ piece by critics, a delicate visual portrait of struggling childhood identities. A high oblique angle of the three kids when they are making their way to their mother’s funeral at the end of the film is one of these delicate moments that seems to come from the filmmaker’s memory.
In Clockers (1995) and Get on the Bus (1996), Lee experiments with changing film stock for different locales. Centring on drug addiction, street gang fights, pop music (Seal and Chaka Khan) and on the charisma of Harvey Keitel, the former follows on the old social-consciousness model of Do The Right Thing, but did not steer the passionate criticisms of Do. Nonetheless, critics where divided: some saw it as an overwhelming film, others found it unsatisfying. Get on the Bus has been identified as Lee’s most heart felt film. Delicate, instinctive and spiritual, the film uses the well-know metaphor of the journey to another town as a means of investigating character personality and development, and of calling for humanity and black activism unity. Unlike other earlier films, Get on The Bus places black women and black gay homosexuality at the centre of the narrative. This is perhaps the filmmaker’s attempt of self-criticism for centring black male chauvinism in his cinematic language (i.e. Do, Mo’ Better Blues, Clockers). One of the main characters on the bus, a prejudice chauvinistic black male that is heading with the others to a post-civil rights march in Washington, is finally beaten up by a gay activist who makes references to Lansgton Hughes and James Baldwin while giving the blows.
It is no surprise then that Girl 6 (19996) that came soon afterwards should have focused on the black female, although the mode is much more a post-feminist one and cannot be identified with any form of sister activism of the Civil Rights Movement. With a Prince soundtrack, the story is about a young female (Theresa Randle) who turns to telephone sex after many frustrated attempts of starting an acting career and ends up enjoying her job. The film’s strength lies more in the curiosity of the theme and the absurdity of the dialogues than in artistic expression per se. Following up on this revitalised ‘progressive’ approach, Lee turned his attention to documentary and to history of the Civil Rights Movement in 4 Little Girls (1997) with the help of the cinematographer Ellen Kuras. Weaving archival footage, still photography, swing-and-tilt lenses and interviews, the story investigates the emotional impact of the 1963 church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four young African-American girls and fueled further political activism. Lee’s most recent film, a discussion of killings in New York in 1977 called Summer of Sam (1999), has not attracted much publicity and is maybe one of many recent signs of the director’s present artistic instability and indefinition of his future potential.
Filmography (as Director)
Answer (1980)
Sara (1981)
Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads (1983)
She’s Gotta Have It (1986)
School Daze (1988)
Do The Right Thing (1989)
Mo’ Better Blues (1990)
Jungle Fever (1991)
Malcolm X (1992)
Crooklyn (1994)
Clockers (1995)
Girl 6 (1996)
Get on the Bus (1996)
4 Little Girls (1997)
He Got Game (1998)
Summer of Sam (1999)
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