FTVMS 101 - Notes - Week 10

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Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, Universal, 1989)

 

Smokey Robinson, ‘Just my Soul Responding’ (Motown Records, 1974)

Music Video for Public Enemy, ‘Fight the Power’

The politics of representation

minorities or marginalized subjects/peoples/communities

‘most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamps’

‘why are there no brothers on the wall’

posters and billboards of black historical figures in the music video

the Jackie Robinson shirt—Brooklyn Dodgers

 

representation in city spaces—street presence—public and private space

visual and audio presence—e.g. graffiti and hip hop music

How do black/African-American filmmakers represent in a society and an industry structured by racism?

How does one represent racism?

Does racism consist of individual and communal acts of ‘prejudice’?

Does racism consist of ‘institutional’ and systemic forms of oppression?

(Abusive) language as violence

 

Spike Lee biography, ‘independent’ filmmaking in Hollywood, and the conditions of the film’s production

 

Spike Lee--Shelton J. Lee, March 27, 1957

Atlanta, Georgia

Grew up in Brooklyn neighborhoods of Crown Heights, Cobble Hill and Fort Greene

Other family members work on his films-Joie, Cinque, Bill

1975-79 Attended Morehouse College, Atlanta

1980 NYU Attended film school

Met Ernest Dickerson, the cinematographer

1981 fine arts thesis film: Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We cut heads

Best Student Film award from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences

First student film screened at Lincoln Center’s “new directors, new films” series

Forms Forty Acres and a Mule Filmworks

1986 She’s Gotta Have it, 1986 San Francisco film festival--$175,000, grossed $8m.

Island Pictures distributed it--took it to the Cannes Film festival

1986 Prix de Jeunesse--best new director

1988--School Daze--$6.2 m budget, and grossed $18m—released by Columbia Pictures

Do the Right Thing

Studio (dis)interest

Columbia--change of people in upper management.

Paramount wanted the ending changed.

Touchstone turned down DTRT

Budget of 7.5m dollars initially agreed upon with Universal

union and non-union labour--shot in NYC

Universal had released controversial Last Temptation of Christ

Lee insisted on retaining artistic control--final cut

$7.5m budget

Universal wanted to spend $6.5m--agreed to buy the distribution upfront

 

‘Universal is dicking me around. They won’t budge from the $6.5million budget, won’t go a penny over it. It’s ridiculous. White boys get real money, fuck up, lose millions of dollars, and still get chance after chance. Not so with us. You fuck up one time and that’s it.’

 

Spike Lee is a new kind of auteur--like Tarantino, a brand name that has a presence in many different spaces--a shop, ads for milk, Nike ads.

Reliant on African-American celebrity clout to generate the capital to help complete his films e.g. Malcolm X

 

Independent cinema--independence a relational term, not free standing and autonomous position.

‘Independence’ is a calling card that demonstrates to Hollywood executives that a filmmaker can make a film on time with a low budget.

She or he then (ideally) gets a deal with a studio and then makes bigger budget films, usually genre-based movies for that studio.

Young talent picked up with relatively low risk for studios that can distribute films in an increasingly differentiated market

Hollywood is so big and variegated, that it can be leaky--independent films tend to often be as quirky and idiosyncratic (if not more) than films produced in more government-regulated and economically vulnerable film production centres like France, Britain and New Zealand.

 

Spike Lee is also one of the second-generation of filmmakers trained in film schools.

Importance of institutions like film schools and film festivals e.g. Sundance Institute

These institutions can facilitate distribution deals with major film studios/companies and access to a large number of the 26,500 screens/10, 000 theaters in the US.

 

Importance of marketing of films—rise in advertising and marketing budgets to reduce risk

 

 

 

Interpreting Do the Right Thing

 

Mikhail Bakhtin—film as dialogic encounter

 

Heteroglossia—many languages

 

‘The novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized. The internal stratification of any single national language into social dialects, characteristic group behavior, professional jargons, generic languages, languages of generations and generations and age groups, tendentious languages, languages of the authorities, of various circles and of passing fashions, languages that serve the specific sociopolitical purposes of the day, even of the hour (each day has its own slogan, its own vocabulary, its own emphases)—this internal stratification present in every language at any given moment of its historical existence is the indispensable prerequisite for the novel as a genre’

 

Bakhtin, Mikhail (1984) Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. p 263

 

Many voices, perspectives in a heated conversation- multi-vocal or polyphonic—voices set against each other—juxtaposed—no singular point of view, but a set of questions—many discourses put into place together--community picture—the film draws on the history of African American culture and politics—images and sounds of the past.

 

Polyphony

 

Music, allusions to Hollywood musical in film’s dance title sequence, the importance of the DJ Mister Senor Love Daddy’s voice, musical montages, ‘Can’t Stand It’ by Steel Pulse, ‘Fight the Power’, Bill Lee’s score echoes Gershwin and Copeland and their integration of the African-American jazz and blues idioms into ‘classical’ American music.

Interruptions, slow-motion sequences, repeats are analogues to the cuts and scratches of a DJ mix. Do the Right Thing as Old-school hip-hop filmmaking.

 

Henry Louis Gates on the ‘signifyin’ aesthetic’ in African-American culture

The dozens, bragging, boasting, call and response (antiphony), comedy, many aspects of African-American vernacular culture constitute the grammar of this film. This is culturally specific filmmaking

 

Two of the most important images and voices mobilised in the film are those of Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X.

 

These two historical figures are ‘structuring absences’—they’re not present in person but their voices and words echo and their images are refracted through various characters and incidents in the film. The film also ends with their image on the screen.

 

Clip of Smiley explaining photograph of Martin and Malcolm

 

These names and what they represent cannot be uttered easily

Does this suggest that their message(s) cannot be easily translated for the post Civil Rights context of late 1980s urban USA? Is it inappropriate or ineffective? Or are people just deaf to it?

 

The impact of post-industrialism, Reaganism and neoliberal policies on black America

Attacks on affirmative action, job cuts with globalization of capital, loss of manufacturing jobs and growth in service industries, irregular income, cuts in government spending on public services, including education and welfare.

 

Clip of Civil Rights movement and Martin Luther King Jr. from Eyes on the Prize 6:07

 

Southern movement grounded in black churches

Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee

Strategy of the Boycott—buses, lunch counters, department stores and other businesses that segregated customers (and workers)—Buggin’ Out employs similar strategy

Non-violent civil disobedience—legacy of Gandhi and Thoreau

March on Washington 1963

Civil Rights legislation—voter registration

MLK assassinated in April 1968

 

Clip of Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam and MLK from Eyes on the Prize 10:00

Northern and urban movement grounded in The Nation of Islam

Malcolm splits from the Nation of Islam to found the Organization of African Unity

Violence in self-defence—‘by any means necessary’

Economic independence/self-determination—black nationalism

Internationalizing the ‘Negro Problem’--Civil Rights to Human Rights

Malcolm and Martin

Masculinist limitations of black nationalism

 

Clip of ML, Sweet Dick Willie, and Coconut Sid discussing the Korean store and the lack of black-owned businesses in the neighbourhood.

 

Are the reasons for Korean ownership and lack of Black ownership adequately suggested or explained by the film?

The multiracist state

 

 

 

 

 

Black bodies/subjects and the debate about blackness in the film

 

It’s crucial to remember that slavery is the foundational relationship between white and black people in America. It’s less than 150 years ago since the institution of slavery officially ended in the USA. Black bodies were bought and sold as labour for the economic expansion and progress of countries like Britain, Spain and the United States. The wealth of these nations was achieved through violence against Africans, not to mention other colonized peoples.

 

Slaves were international commodities for whites to buy and sell just like cotton, spices, timber, and coffee. They were considered chattels--moveable possessions, things--not human beings.

 

The issue of black people as commodity is important in any discussion of black images, particularly in the world of commerce that is predominantly white owned and white operated. Black images sell. Whites are also consumers of black images. They can consume these without having their own white power and privilege undermined. They can like commodified blackness in films, television and music and still be racist.

 

Clip of Pino and Mookie discussing ‘blackness’

 

Pino: the basketball player Magic Johnson and the musician Prince are not really ‘black’, they’re ‘more than black’. More innocently, we can like black images but never have to meet a real black person. Cinema and television allow us that.  When white audiences saw Birth of a Nation, the image of Gus gave them pleasure because it justified their racist fantasies about blacks. When many whites see images of guns and gangs, drive-by shootings and drug dealers or rap videos on MTV, they assume this is African-American life. Many of the fans of gangsta rap are white youths from the suburbs. Again many of these images sell to a white audience, at worst reinforcing racism, at best perpetuating certain fantasies about black people.

 

Basically blackness (and whiteness) are not defined just by skin colour, but by culturally constructed notions. Black and white people both routinely talk about some individuals being blacker than others. Is Spike Lee really blacker than Halle Berry? Is Will Smith any more or less black than Jay Z? Is Whitney Houston more or less black than Chuck D of Public Enemy? These are highly problematic distinctions!

 

Related to this issue, the film also addresses the fear of miscegenation and gender relations in this black community

 

Clip of Jade and Sal, the responses of Pino and Mookie, Da Mayor and the boy’s mother

 

Spike Lee’s own fears about miscegenation? See Jungle Fever

 

 

Black sexuality in film

 

Historically, white racism has feared but also fantasised about black sexuality

The representation of black sexuality on black terms, albeit Lee’s terms. See She’s Gotta Have It and feminist critiques of Lee’s films.

 

Clip of Tina and Mookie with ice cubes

 

The final shop recalls the almost abstract aesthetics of Harlem Renaissance artists. Remember that one of the major figures of western art, Pablo Picasso, was inspired by an exhibition of African masks in Paris.

 

Reception of the film

 

South Bank Show on Do the Right Thing 6 minutes

 

Clip of a last word from Spike from the DVD (on the press’s reaction to the film)

 

Clip of Making of Do the Right Thing 10 minutes

 

1) Representation

Who has the power to represent? How does one represent

2) Many voices set in dialogic motion in the film

Characters represent social types to some extent—Mookie, Radio Raheem and his message of ‘Fight the Power’, Da Mayor and Little Sister, etc.

3) Racism is structural, systemic and institutional, not just a function of prejudice

The Police are part of a broader system that oppresses black people in the United States.

 

Rich African-American filmmaking tradition—including the ‘race’ cinema of Oscar Micheaux onwards…

 

How many of you would like to see more African-American film, television and media material in other courses? Please respond in evaluations if possible