Nola Darling keeps three suitors on the go in Brooklyn, in black and white made for under $200,000 (1986)
She's Gotta Have It — his breakthrough; he played the bicycle courier Mars Blackmon.
Film · Hollywood
Spike Lee
born 1957 · American
New Black Cinema
Spike Lee made a black-and-white feature for under $200,000 in 1986 and opened American cinema to a generation of Black film-makers. His films are argumentative, formally restless and rooted in Brooklyn, mixing broad comedy, direct address to camera and sudden documentary fury. He waited more than thirty years for a competitive Academy Award, and has been a professor at his old film school for most of that time.
How to spot them
- ▸The double dolly: actor and camera on the same rig, so the character seems to float through the street
- ▸Characters speaking straight down the lens, and a montage of racial slurs traded with the audience
- ▸Brooklyn — Fort Greene, Bedford-Stuyvesant — saturated in reds and heat
- ▸The credit 'A Spike Lee Joint', and scores by his father Bill Lee or by Terence Blanchard
- ▸Archive footage cut into the fiction at the end, tying the story to a real death or a real march
Key films
A bin is thrown through a pizzeria window on the hottest day of the year, and Radio Raheem carries a boom box (1989)
Do the Right Thing — set on one Bedford-Stuyvesant block; its Best Picture snub is still argued over.
A Harlem architect and his Italian-American secretary begin an affair that turns both families against them (1991)
Jungle Fever — it won a special supporting-actor prize at Cannes for Samuel L. Jackson.
A three-hour life of a Nation of Islam minister, ending with schoolchildren in Harlem and Soweto standing up in class (1992)
Malcolm X — Denzel Washington was nominated for Best Actor; the coda features Nelson Mandela.
A documentary on the 1963 bombing of a Birmingham, Alabama church (1997)
4 Little Girls — nominated for Best Documentary Feature.
A Black officer in 1970s Colorado Springs infiltrates a white-supremacist chapter by telephone while a Jewish colleague attends the meetings (2018)
BlacKkKlansman — Grand Prix at Cannes, and his first competitive Oscar.
Four veterans return to Vietnam for buried gold and the body of their squad leader (2020)
Da 5 Bloods — with Delroy Lindo and a final performance by Chadwick Boseman.
A New York music mogul is told his son has been kidnapped, and the kidnappers have taken the wrong boy (2025)
Highest 2 Lowest — a reworking of Kurosawa's High and Low, and his fifth film with Denzel Washington.
Quick-fire facts
- •Born Shelton Jackson Lee in Atlanta on 20 March 1957 and raised in Fort Greene, Brooklyn; his mother nicknamed him Spike
- •His graduate thesis film at NYU, Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads, won a student Academy Award in 1983
- •His production company is called 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, after the Reconstruction-era promise to freed slaves
- •Do the Right Thing lost the Palme d'Or in 1989 to Sex, Lies, and Videotape and was not nominated for Best Picture; Driving Miss Daisy won that year's award
- •He received an Academy Honorary Award in 2015 and his first competitive Oscar, for Best Adapted Screenplay, for BlacKkKlansman in 2019
- •His father, the jazz bassist Bill Lee, scored his early films; Terence Blanchard has scored most of the later ones
- •He directed the Nike advertisements in which he appeared as Mars Blackmon alongside Michael Jordan
- •In 2021 he became the first Black president of the Cannes Film Festival jury
- •He is artistic director of the graduate film programme at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, and a courtside fixture at New York Knicks games
- •His documentary work includes When the Levees Broke (2006) on Hurricane Katrina and NYC Epicenters (2021)
Drill it — 10 cards
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Sources
- American Masters, PBS — Spike Lee: About the Filmmaker
- Spike Lee, with Kaleem Aftab — That's My Story and I'm Sticking to It