Black History Month: Daily Updates

Spike Lee (1957 - ) Film director

Inarguably the most important and well-known Black film director in American history, Spike Lee has built a varied filmography devoted to chronicling Black experiences in the United States. From highly personal movies set in his native New York City to sweeping historical epics to trenchant social criticism, Lee’s confrontational, dynamic cinematic style is equal parts infuriating and electrifying, but also singularly his own.

According to author Todd McGowan, “Spike Lee is a filmmaker of excess. Excess characterizes each of his films—through unconventional shots, extreme characters, improbable scenes, and many other ways. Lee’s films employ these types of excess to intervene in critical issues that trouble the contemporary world—the question of the subject’s singularity, the role that fantasy plays in structuring our reality, the political impact of passion, the power of paranoia in shaping social relations, the damage that the insistence on community inflicts, the problem of transcendence, and the struggles of the spectator.”

A graduate of Morehouse College, a historically Black institution in Atlanta, GA, Lee made his directorial debut with the low-budget black-and-white feature She’s Gotta Have It in 1986. His most lasting and important film is 1989’s Do The Right Thing, which is set on one block in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, New York on the hottest day of the summer. An initial disagreement between a Black resident and the white Italian-American owner of a neighborhood pizzeria escalates into a conflagration by the film’s end. Its incendiary conclusion, in which a Black man is choked to death by a New York City police officer, was met with outrage and criticism by the largely white film commentariat under the ludicrous assumption that Black audiences would riot in the theatres. Lee himself finds the critiques absurd: “I don't remember people saying people were going to come out of theaters killing people after they watched Arnold Schwarzenegger films.”

Since Do The Right Thing, Lee has been a stalwart American filmmaker, bringing an innovative visual style to his work that shows his interest in the history of cinema. In addition to directing, Lee teaches film production at New York University and compiled a list of films he thinks are essential to any aspiring filmmaker’s education. Meanwhile, he has directed such notable films as Malcolm X (1992), a biopic of the Civil Rights activist starring frequent collaborator Denzel Washington in the title role; Clockers (1995), an adaptation of a novel by Richard Price that examines violence in the drug trade in Brooklyn housing projects; Bamboozled (2000), a lacerating satire about images of Black people in film and television; and 25th Hour (2002), the first major film to be shot in New York City after 9/11. Primarily known for his narrative film work, Lee is also an accomplished documentarian, telling the story of the Birmingham, AL church bombing in his film 4 Little Girls (1996) and post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans in When The Levees Broke (2006) and If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise (2011). 

Though many of Lee’s films have garnered praise throughout his career, his 2018 effort BlacKkKlansman, a fictionalization of the true story of Ron Stallworth, a Black Colorado Springs police officer who, working with a white partner, infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan, led to renewed appreciation of his contributions to cinema history. His most recent fiction film, the Vietnam vet story Da 5 Bloods, premiered in 2020 and is now streaming on Netflix, and his concert film David Byrne’s American Utopia debuted in the fall of 2021 on HBO.

Spike Lee’s unique point of view demonstrates the importance of a diverse filmmaking landscape. He holds up a mirror to American society, even when—some might argue especially when—it is unlikely to like what it sees.

In Their Words

“I want people to think about the power of images, not just in terms of race, but how imagery is used and what sort of social impact it has—how it influences how we talk, how we think, how we view one another. In particular, I want them to see how film and television have historically, from the birth of both mediums, produced and perpetuated distorted images.”

Learn More

LISTEN: "Spike Lee" - The Black List Podacst (46 min)

READ: Contemporary Film Makers: Spike Lee

WATCH: ‘Do the Right Thing’ | Anatomy of a Scene - The New York Times