Spike Lee's Joints

A discussion of the role of music in Spike Lee's cinema, examining the function of music as atmospheric, iconic, and moral conscience. In particular, I am interested in how jazz forms the atmospheric or ambient sound in his work, reminding us of Bleek's drunken defense of jazz as African American affect, tradition, and mood in Mo' Better Blues. As well, I am interested in how Lee uses key songs by Stevie Wonder and related figures to indicate the moral frame of a given film, an entry ramp into the meaning of the film an d composed of sound embedded in Black cultural life.

A reckoning with Spike Lee's 2018 film BlacKkKlansman as a retrospective on his previous films on race, racism, and U.S. history, as well as his treatment of memory of atrocity as the basis for real militancy. Lee revisits his ontology of antiblack racism, embedding it in political institutions and social-cultural practices, here linking those institutions and practices to the history of lynching, policing, and the alt-right riots in Charlottesville, Virginia. That series of links ends with an evocation of militancy: we have to confront the past, present, and future with both vigilance and the capacity for violence against the present, in the name of and toward a different - forever in the interrogative for Lee - kind of future.

A second reflection piece on Spike Lee's multi-volume documentary When the Levees Broke, focusing on questions of memory, mourning, melancholia, and rage. I'm particularly interested in how death and displacement function in the memory-work of the film, and how Lee's crafting of context to show dead Black bodies on the screen is a story about the extent of antiblack racism and cruelty: removing not only the right to live and right to not be killed, but also, and most emphatically, the erasure of dignity in and after death.

An examination of how Spike Lee builds an account of antiblackness into his documentary film When the Levees Broke. In particular, I am interested in how that account attends to the specificity of New Orleans as a Black city, the embeddedness of forms and figures of slavery in antiblack practices, and how Lee draws these out of the experiences and reflections of common people who survived the catastrophe we call "Hurricane Katrina."

An examination of four key elements in Spike Lee's 1997 documentary 4 Little Girls, focused on the process of mourning, childhood, and Lee's decision to show autopsy photos of the four murdered girls. The closing witness of Chris McNair (inaccurately called "Ron" in the comments, apologies for the misspeak!) reflects the refinement of memory in the film, Alpha Robertson extends the meaning of witness to the expanse of life, the closing credits scene with home video footage of two children set memory in childhood, and Lee's attempt to ethically stage the revelation of autopsy photos in order to remind us of the materiality of the bombing sets memory in the physicality of atrocity.

A series of remarks on method and framing in Spike Lee's 1997 documentary film 4 Little Girls. I am interested in two things that frame the film. First, Lee's deliberate exclusion of narratives of white transformation from the meaning of the death of four girls in the 1963 church bombing, accomplished in large part by his derisive and dismissive treatment of George Wallace's late in life "turn away" from racism. Second, Lee's withdrawal of himself from the composition of the film, letting witnesses be the source of their own knowledge and transmission of affect. This moves Lee away from the role of creator of knowledge, and toward the ethics of editing - crafting the knowledge given in witness into the sound and image of the screen.

An examination of two critical scenes in Chi-Raq that, for me, tell us what the film is about and what is for Spike Lee the endgame of making cinema about gun violence. The first scene is around the 25:00 mark, where Irene, played by Jennifer Hudson, cleans the blood of her murdered daughter off the sidewalk as Hudson sings "I Run" in the background. This is Lee's iteration of the theme "women's work," here as the work of mourning and literally and figuratively cleaning up the mess of men's gun violence. The second scene is around the 50:00 marks scene in which a non-professional actor and former gang member in a wheelchair describes his regret and mourning of a life enmeshed in gun violence. Both scenes bridge the fictional and farcical elements of the film to the social reality of gun violence in Black communities, breaking the walls of the film and screen while also articulating what Chi-Raq is actually about.

Thinking through the problem of mixed-genre in Spike Lee's 2015 film Chi-Raq, how it operates as a fragmented address to gun violence, and how that address clarifies our criteria for a successful cinematic work. In particular, I am interested in how the farcical story of a sex strike, the melodrama elements of storytelling, and quasi-documentary moments combine to instruct morally and politically. That instruction, I argue, is an extension of Lee's broad political values - embodied in the figure and film Malcolm X - around Black communities healing themselves rather than waiting for systemic change or changes in white people and white social-political structures.

A second reflection on Spike Lee's exploration of abandonment in Red Hook Summer, with particular focus on how the lives of the neighborhood revisit key themes of Black childhood and women's work. Children are more precarious in Red Hook Summer than in other Lee films, and women's work is no longer connected to a domestic sphere apart from the dramatics of outside, common space. Lee, I argue, offers us an appreciation of the vulnerability and exhaustion of women who've been tasked with the most difficult and dispiriting work - keeping children alive, witnessing their lives - and the precarity of Black childhood, while at the same time, as always, refusing to make that melancholy total. Instead, Lee entwines melancholy and joy in order to witness witnessing, in order to see and know the persistence of Black care even at the forefront of antiblack violence.

A characterization of Spike Lee's 2012 film Red Hook Summer as a meditation on total abandonment. I am specifically concerned with the abandonment of the neighborhood to environmental racism, social and political violence, and ethnic cleansing. How does Lee document life in a space made precarious by gentrification and other forms of violence? How does that documentation sit alongside his previous treatments of Brooklyn as a vibrant, living place?