Thursday, October 21, 2010
Most Transformative Spike Lee film
I think my pick for this question would have to be "The 25th hour". It sticks out for a couple for a couple of reasons. The first is that it is doesn't have African-American characters as a focus, but instead a group of caucasians, which is pretty notable for Spike, and I think the first time that he had done that. The other notable feature is that it was adapted from an existing book, also a first for Spike. More than those firsts, it simply deals with things that he hadn't given much space to in his work. It's a post-911 piece that doesn't put that event in the foreground but doesn't exclude it either. It looks at white bourgeouis drug dealing and organized crime. It tries to get inside the head of a character on his last day before jail and also pays homage to earlier techniques in Lee's other films. Some of these elements are derived from the source material of the text, but in general it is Spike's sure hand at the directorial wheel and his typically beautiful cinematography applied to this out of the ordinary (for him) story that makes it my choice for most transformative, at least as seen against the backdrop of his body of work.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Another excellent post from you and thanks for including the key things that make this film stand out, book adaption being one of those things. A few people have mentioned 25th hour, making me think this might be perhaps a good feature to show. I have been toying around with the idea of teaching a course just on Spike Lee, which would provide plenty of time to take up his more out of the box and transformtive films. Also, I didn't mention this in class, but I don't think a film has to be on the whole transformative, I think it is still worthy to pull out moments of cinematic resistance, since such few films will ever be 100% "transformative." Because as Lubaino says, the next question will become, transformative compared to what?
ReplyDelete