BSA 206 S2W13 : Successful Black People

Oscar Micheaux

Micheaux was a director of colour in old Hollywood, which makes his career quite a feat already, his films looked at contemporary black life of the time and strived to represent it in a different light than what main stream hollywood was putting out (which were usually white actors in black face) - his most famous film Within Our Gates came out four years after The Birth of a Nation, and must have been a response in some form to that film.

Spike Lee

Spike Lee is the most popular of this lot and definitely the one I am most interested in seeing the work of. He is highly respected and one of the artists that started the indie revolution around the late 80's and 90's, just before filmmakers like Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson came on the scene.


My personal experience with him has just been things that I've heard, and knowing that some of his films are classics (like Do The Right Thing, which we ended up watching some of in class, and Maclolm X). I've wanted to look into his work but have never gotten there yet, the only film of his I had seen is regrettably the remake of Chan-Wook Park's Oldboy in 2013.


Oh yeah more controversy about this piece of trash film was the posters, the originals like the one included here were designed by an artist called Juan Luis Garcia, someone who didn't get credited or paid, and instead the studio just ripped it off with the much inferior officially released version. 


I say regrettably because the instance with that movie seems very much removed from Lee's own work and his voice doesn't seem to shine through all that much, the original Korean film was already so good and unique in its own right that adapting it left little room for alteration, the things they did change seem to be for reasons of censorship or are changes that actually hinder the story.

My first impressions of Lee were somewhat negative for this reason, as well as the way he presents himself in interviews - an ego and attitude that took some getting used to. Like other big auteurs of that time (e.g. Tarantino) the person himself appears imperfect, annoying and maybe even a unfinished, somehow the films he puts out are great and fully formed though. Always an interesting juxtaposition.



Spike grew up in an Italian neighborhood and belonging to the only negro family on the block Spike faced some discrimination in his youth, this history and clashing of cultures is evident in his work, not only with most of it being somewhat linked to racial tensions, but specifically with the film we watched in class - which serves as a bit of a reversal, where an Italian family live in a black neighborhood.

The movie is very colourful and stylised, being instantly engaging from an aesthetic perspective - Spike's father (Bill lee) actually composed the Jazzy score to his early films so that was kinda cool to see in the credits and then look into afterwards (I thought it might have been a cousin or brother, or mere coincidence, but it's very interesting that it's his father - creative collaborations between parents and children are much more rare than say the sibling filmmakers we looked at two weeks ago).



I would like to watch the whole film and pay more attention this time around, it seems interesting and the way the narratives weave together seems similar to a documentary of Hurricane Katrina that he made some years later - which also has a Jazz score. The way his style for fiction film-making transformed to fit within the documentary genre is interesting and a line directors don't often cross - Werner Herzog did something similar with his documentaries, wonder how much his style bled across.



One of the characteristics of Spike that puts me off him in the interviews sometimes is how he can put down other filmmakers, as if they don't have the same right to expression as he does - he slags off the movie that won against him at the Academy Awards in the year that Do The Right Thing came out  (Driving Miss Daisy) and again recently when Green Book won against BlacKkKlansman, the poetry of the situation is that both of his best movies were beat by pictures about race relations wherein a black man drives around a white woman and where a white man drives around a black man respectively.  It's kinda funny, the man deserves recognition but it's satisfying to see people who act as if they deserve winning and don't grant the same achievement to someone else end up losing to those they consider less deserving.

One thing you realize very quickly with Spike is that controversy surrounds him and he seems to thrive off it, even in places where it doesn't see warranted. But whatever, he loves drama, let him have it his way. It doesn't really change the quality of his films.

I wanted to watch BlacKkKlansman when it came out last year but missed it, this one looks like it has Spike's voice permeating throughout, will watch it at some point - hopefully also with Malcolm X, Do The Right Thing and She's Gotta Have It, the films that seem to be considered his classics.

   

Ava Duvernay

We also briefly covered Ava Duvernay, who is a female director of colour who works with very similar topics to Spike. Her movies are primarily about race and the tensions that existed or continue existing surrounding it.

She made the movie Selma, about a period of Martin Luther King's life:



This looks quite good, one thing I noticed from her films is that they have a good beat and momentum to them, at least in the advertising. Regardless of the subject matter they seem cool.

This just makes me wanna look into a Martin Luther King speech though, the actor seems to be doing a very good job in the trailer.

She made a documentary called 13th about the prison system in America, and how it seems to be a kind of evolution from the abolishment of slavery:



Like Lee she seems to jump between genres here, from drama to documentary.

She made a big blockbuster thing for Disney called Wrinkle In Time which unfortunately is apparently terrible and lost a lot of money, but it's interesting to see her trying so many different things and not just sticking to one genre. The problem with this is of course is that this is all I really knew her from because it's her most publicized and advertised work. I had heard of Selma but first time I heard her name linked with something was this Disney film, which is a bit unfortunate, like Spike my first impression was a negative one, but maybe looking into her work will prove a positive experience - of what she's made I think I'd be most interested in the MLK biopic.

She's been doing a series for Netflix so again always seeming to jump onto something new.