SPIKE LEE

RICH UNIQUENESS OF BLACK CULTURE DOCUMENTED FOR FEATURE FILM GLORY

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

Director Spike Lee started introducing black culture to mainstream cinema by nudging stereotyping and racial profiling out of the collective consciousness of American cities. 

Black actors had been previously used in Hollywood films to relate to a white audience, but Lee had a personal vision to make films that related to the cultural nuances of black neighborhoods rather than creating film art to fulfil the need to make money from white consumers.

Lee has become one of the great film directors of a generation by blending dramatizations of historical material with threads of documentary techniques and popular culture references and, in addition, his distinct point of view of blacks in America that is not always pleasant but more often than not honest and forthright.

Lee grew up in Brooklyn, New York and subsequently built his film career on exploring topics of culture, racism and poverty facing black Americans in urban settings, particularly the distinct Italian American and African American neighbourhoods of New York City.

A series of films beginning with She’s Gotta Have It (1987) and Do the Right Thing (1989) explored issues within black urban cultures. She’s Gotta Have It was so successful at the box office, earning $7 million at the time, that the young director with fresh ideas about Americana formed his own production company, 40 Acres and A Mule Filmworks.

40 Acres and A Mule is a phrase adapted from a business sign in the iconic film, Gone with the Wind (1937), a film about the end of slavery and the life in the Deep South during the American Civil War. President Abraham Lincoln allotted each formerly enslaved black family a plot of land, as big as 40 acres, and mules as part of agrarian reform in the South.

Do the Right Thing was a seminal piece on urban culture depicting the clash between Italian Americans and African Americans for control of New York neighbourhoods. Lee introduces the Italian American culture as much as the African American culture while underscoring throughout the movie the nonsense that leads to urban violence, and the consequential negative impact of violence on historical neighbourhoods.

Lee directs independent film projects, documentaries and major motion pictures for studios, as well as music videos, such as Tracy Chapman, Born to Fight (Crossroads 1990) and television commercials for global American corporations.

Spike Lee films are often highlighted by trademark techniques, such as when the director pauses the film’s narrative for introspective scenes created with multi-media technology to depict pivotal transcendental moments. 

Lee also casts himself in supporting roles, having so far accumulated 19 acting credits. Lee also casts strong female leads and supporting characters in his films.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded Lee the Oscar for best adapted screenplay for his most recent biopic about an undercover Colorado Springs Police operation investigating the Ku Klux Klan during the post Martin Luther King Jr. assassination years in BlacKkKlansman (2018). 

Lee once again explores group dynamics and the power of the many in a crowd to influence the one lone individual while underscoring the importance for the individual to maintain a certain amount of independence from the group.

Lee has cast Denzel Washington in the leading role four times, beginning with Mo’ Better Blues (1990).

Lee used cinema to portray a more realistic black personality to audiences as far away as possible from cliché and stereotypes that had typically been created by white directors.

Lee infused his scripts with the racial politics evidenced in New York city streets. Lee was not exactly making art house films in the European tradition, but his films were made artfully dialectic with the purpose of contributing something positive to the American psyche: first of all, by portraying the real black identity; and, secondly, by removing the black cliché from the collective consciousness.

The films have a kind of in your face ‘this is who we are’ atmosphere and direction that reflects a decidedly Brooklyn centric point of view of the world. The film narratives are intentionally built around that neighbourhood bias.

Film critic Roger Ebert stated that black characters in a Spike Lee film relate to each other rather than to the white audience (Sterritt, p 39).

In that sense of challenging mainstream perceptions within the collective consciousness, Lee forced a rewrite of the cultural narrative in America.

Lee created a nexus of race sex, place and time (Sterritt, p 99). But rather than to insight hatred, to educate blacks as much as whites about the identity of African Americans.

The documentary tone and atmosphere grounds the truth of the content thereby making the reality believable apart from any attempts to dramatize and fantasize the difficult reality in the streets.

Hollywood films had reinforced the white hegemony with a strict code that limited ideologies that challenged white power. Movie production studios insisted on entertaining with the prevailing ideas of power as opposed to educating about racial equality and tolerance.

But New York City was once again a tinder box of racial strife.

Lee’s niche market films about blacks in urban settings changed the way America thought about the Inner Cities while pushing a new black identity into the middle class that was apart from the civil rights record of a previous generation.

Do the Right Thing, by Ed Guerrero, London, bfi Publishing, 2001.

Spike Lee’s America, by David Sterritt, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.