In this opening episode, I describe my interpretative frame for Spike Lee's cinema, focusing on the terms and imperatives Lee brings to cinematic practice - the burden and beauty of representing Black bodies, Black people, and Black life - and how that forms what I call a Black Studies approach to film. My interpretative frame, then, follows Lee's leading clues, but embellishes them with the African American intellectual tradition and its combination of aesthetics, ethics, and politics.