JOINT VENTURES With a diverse filmmaking career, spanning more than 30 years, Spike Lee is one of cinema’s most unique and influential voices. kaleem aftab reveals why...
THE EARLY YEARS It was at the Cannes Film Festival, where his debut film She’s Gotta Have It premiered in 1986, that ‘A Spike Lee Joint’ first entered the cinematic vernacular. The colloquial use of the term joint instead of film in the credits immediately set the filmmaker apart from his peers and announced in a simple, yet effective way that the New Yorker’s films would be imbued with a sense of history, social realism and blackness. Joint has long been used as a term, especially in song, to refer to prisons, speakeasy bars, and marijuana, and Spike embraced the edginess of the word. It established him as both provocateur and connector; he would bring the full variety and hues of African-American life to cinema and jettison many of the stereotypes of black people that had hitherto been perpetuated and reinforced by an American cinema scene historically dominated by white males.
His early films – She’s Gotta Have It, School Daze (1988), Do the Right Thing (1989), Mo’ Better Blues (1990), Jungle Fever (1991) – put middle-class black America on screen for the first time. His protagonists were artists, students, musicians, architects as well as the unemployed and drug addicts. These films were set in the real world and given an immediacy by their desire to talk about current political events, from police brutality and wrongful arrests to race riots. His films met these issues head on, flipping the perspective so we heard from the oppressed rather than the oppressor. These five films, written and directed by Lee, ensured he was the most talked about director on the planet. DOCUMENTING HISTORY To many, Spike Lee is an even greater documentarian than he is a narrative filmmaker. His choice of documentary subjects and the sensitivity and tenderness with which he treats
JOHN DAVID WASHINGTON ÒSpike Lee has a very unique way of recruiting and pitching stuff. It was a phone call, very brief, ÔI got a book for you. Read it.Õ I was blown away, obviously, just by the fact this really happenedÉ I mean, this is a guy IÕve idolized since I was a kid. He gave people of colour, men and women, a voice, a platform, and he chose me. I was beyond excited and just couldnÕt wait to get to work.Õ [From BlacKkKlansman production notes, 2018]
Washington made his acting debut in Malcolm X (1992) and was one of the leads in BlacKkKlansman (2018) B L A C K K K L A N S M A N ( 2 018 )
T H E 2018 D A V I D L E A N L E C T U R E
