The Film Society Directing Award is given each year to one of the masters of world cinema.
An Evening with Spike Lee
Wednesday, May 2
7:30 pm
Castro Theatre
429 Castro Street (near Market)
Join us for a special evening honoring the unconventional filmmaking genius of Spike Lee, recipient of this year’s Film Society Directing Award. Retrospective film clips from Lee’s singular career will be followed by an onstage interview conducted by Boston Globe film critic Wesley Morris and a screening of Acts II and III of Lee’s four-act Hurricane Katrina documentary When the Levees Broke.
Spike Lee: Waking Up America for 25 Years
By K.M. Soehnlein
It comes as something of a shock to realize that 25 years have passed since the San Francisco International Film Festival screened Spike Lee’s early, award-winning short Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads. Lee has been on top of his game for more than a quarter of a century, but he still possesses the youthful, provocative ability to stir controversy and a steadfast insistence on speaking truth to power.
Lee began as Mars Blackmon, the boyish, fast-talking seducer he played in his feature debut, She’s Gotta Have It. As Mars implored the film’s heroine with a nonstop string of “please baby please baby please” until she had no choice but to surrender, so Lee seemed to be alerting filmgoers that we would inevitably fall for his singular charms. The SFIFF hosted the world premiere of She’s Gotta Have It in 1986, a screening that will be remembered forever by those in attendance for a mid-reel power outage. As Festival staff rallied, Lee was brought on stage and interviewed by flashlight, holding the crowd for an entertaining hour with the force of his personality. It was an unforgettable debut, both on camera and off, announcing that Spike Lee—director, producer, writer, actor and public figure—was here to stay.
His next feature, School Daze (1988), beat back the sophomore slump through sheer audaciousness. Lee made a musical, a genre long declared dead, with an all-Black cast, before the phrase “New Black Cinema” had gained cultural currency. Lee, who attended Atlanta’s Morehouse College, built the narrative around an intraracial collegiate feud, where skin tone was the dividing line and the dance floor was the battlefield.
School Daze ended with the exhortation, “Wake up!”—the same words that opened Lee’s next film, Do the Right Thing (1989). Unspooling over one sweltering day, the film presents a corner of Brooklyn as a microcosmic pressure-cooker of racial tension. Here Lee established some of his directorial hallmarks: filming characters moving through space as if floating just above the ground; choosing music that imbues both tough and tender scenes with emotional subtext; utilizing his ensemble as a kind of Greek chorus commenting on the main action; and editing montages in which characters mouth racial slurs directly to the camera, simultaneously voicing and refuting the language of bigotry. Lee wasn’t playing it safe, but rather than scaring the mainstream, he was embraced, with an Oscar nomination for his screenplay and a Palme d’Or nomination at Cannes.
The son of a jazz bassist, Lee foregrounded music in Mo’ Better Blues (SFIFF 1991), his first collaboration with Denzel Washington, who smolders as a trumpeter caught between
love and money. Lee returned to the Festival in 1994 with Crooklyn, his most openhearted narrative, an autobiographical take on a 1970s Brooklyn family through the eyes of their young daughter. Between these appearances, Lee released Jungle Fever (1991), which made a star of Wesley Snipes as a married Buppie architect conducting a steamy affair with his Italian-American secretary, and gave Samuel L. Jackson his breakthrough role as a Marvin Gaye–like figure undone by crack. Malcolm X (1993), an epic biography of the grassroots leader anchored by another remarkable performance from Washington, was justifiably cited by both Roger Ebert and Martin Scorsese as among the ten best films of the decade. At age 35, Lee had claimed his place in the canon.
Since Malcolm X, Lee has dazzled audiences with the quality and variety of his work. In the ensemble drama Get on the Bus (1996), he used the Million Man March to craft a character-driven study of African American masculinity, race and sexuality. In Summer of Sam (1999), perhaps his most underappreciated feature, the Italian-American working class spins its wheels while New York City burns and a serial killer terrorizes the urban population. Bamboozled (2000), a caustic satire, features a black TV executive who creates a hit by reviving the minstrel show. Here, Lee skewers contemporary blackface with a white clothing designer named Timmi Hillnigger and gangsta rappers shilling for malt liquor. In 25th Hour (2002), Lee transformed David Benioff’s novel of a white man’s last day before going to prison into a spot-on portrayal of post-9/11 New York. Part valentine, part jeremiad, the film’s litany of racial slurs are embedded in national anxieties about terrorism, heroism and surveillance. In 2005, Lee scored his biggest commercial success with the heist picture Inside Man, starring Denzel Washington, Clive Owen and Jodie Foster.
Lee stated in a 2004 BBC interview that had he not been a filmmaker he might have been a teacher, as his mother had been. Again and again his narratives are built around characters being educated: Malcolm X’s remarkable prison scenes, in which the future revolutionary learns about internalized racism; or Bamboozled’s video montages, which provide a capsule history of minstrelsy’s malevolent legacy. This urge to edify can also be seen in two of Lee’s documentaries: 4 Little Girls, which revisits the civil rights movement via the bombing of an African American church in Alabama; and the extraordinary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006), which recounts Hurricane Katrina’s destruction through the voices of the citizens of New Orleans. Discussing Levees in a recent interview, Lee expressed bewilderment that it took the televised desperation of those stranded by Katrina to get Americans to recognize that poor people still live in this country.
He’s been labeled a Black filmmaker, a New York filmmaker, a filmmaker of jazz, of basketball, of politics. But it may be most accurate to say that Lee is our preeminent filmmaker of the American story. Twenty-five years since he got our attention, Spike Lee is still prodding us to wake up.
K.M. Soehnlein is the author of two novels, The World of Normal Boysand You Can Say You Knew Me When. He served as associate editor of Release Print magazine and has written film commentary for Village Voice, The Advocate, KQED’s Independent View and KALW’s Artery.
Festival Screening
When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts
Selected Filmography
When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (TV) (2006)
Inside Man (2006)
She Hate Me (2004)
25th Hour (2002)
Bamboozled (2000)
The Original Kings of Comedy (2000)
Summer of Sam (1999)
He Got Game (1998)
4 Little Girls (1997)
Get on the Bus (1996)
Girl 6 (1996)
Clockers (1995)
Crooklyn (1994)
Malcolm X (1992)
Jungle Fever (1991)
Mo’ Better Blues (1990)
Do the Right Thing (1989)
School Daze (1988)
She’s Gotta Have It (1986)
Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop:
We Cut Heads (1983)
Previous Recipients
2006 Werner Herzog
2005 Taylor Hackford
2004 Milos Forman
2003 Robert Altman
Previously Known as Akira Kurosawa Award
2002 Warren Beatty
2001 Clint Eastwood
2000 Abbas Kiarostami
1999 Arturo Ripstein
1998 Im Kwon-Taek
1997 Francesco Rosi
1996 Arthur Penn
1995 Stanley Donen
1994 Manoel De Oliveira
1993 Ousmane Sembène
1992 Satyajit Ray
1991 Marcel Carnè
1990 Jirí Menzel
1989 Joseph L. Mankiewicz
1988 Robert Bresson
1987 Michael Powell
1986 Akira Kurosawa