Spike Lee's Bamboozled—15 Years Later

Celebrating its 15th anniversary this year, Spike Lee’s Bamboozled is among the director’s most polarizing works—a furious, uncompromising satire that finds the racist traditions of blackface and minstrelsy in contemporary media. This Wednesday, BAMcinématek welcomes Lee for a post-screening conversation about Bamboozled and its legacy, followed by a nine-film series that explores race and media across a wide range of periods.

Writer-curator Ashley Clark, whose monograph Facing Blackness: Media and Minstrelsy in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled is now on sale, spoke with us about the enduring resonance of the film and the urgency of its contemporary context.

Of all the Spike Lee films you might have written a book on, what in particular drew you to Bamboozled, and were there specific aspects of its critical reception that you were seeking to address or change?

Spike Lee has made a number of very knotty, awkward films that are resistant to a concrete interpretation. When he makes films that don’t go down well with critics, including Girl 6, She Hate Me, and Miracle at St. Anna, I think they’re still always very interesting, with lots to unpack. Of all his films that are not critically acclaimed, Bamboozled is the most fascinating. There’s so much to dig into aesthetically, politically, and tonally. A lot of critics at the time said it was a mess, and they didn’t give Lee enough credit for his deliberate artistic choices, like shooting on digital video, and the seeming randomness of the editing. None of this is by accident, and I wanted to dig into it as a piece of experimental filmmaking and argue for the effects of its technical approach.

The other major thing: many critics said it was unnecessary and dated—that everybody knew blackface wasn’t funny and not politically correct. But Lee used controversial, brutal satire to make the point that, even if we don’t have actual blackface minstrelsy today, a lot of the stereotypes from that supposedly bygone era persist in mainstream entertainment. Maybe it was difficult for people to look honestly at where we were in 2000, and to see that some of these issues were, and remain, in full effect, particularly in institutions, where there is a terrible lack of diversity at gatekeeper level, and what the fallout from that inequality can be, representationally-speaking.

Spike Lee—By Any Means Necessary

by Michael Koresky

Rosie Perez and Spike Lee in Do the Right Thing. Photo: Universal/Photofest

There are many ways critics, journalists, and other kinds of commentators have tended to categorize Spike Lee. He has been called the most important African-American filmmaker of our time. Or perhaps he’s the most controversial American filmmaker. Or the most political. Or, most suspiciously, the most angry. The “most” business is a most tiresome one, isn’t it? A wildly formidable, inspiringly versatile director such as Spike Lee deserves more consideration—and intense focus—than the mere hyperbole his blistering films appear to invite. By Any Means Necessary: A Spike Lee Joints Retrospective, co-presented by BAMcinématek and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, will take place at BAM Rose Cinemas from June 29 to July 10.

Media discussion of Lee as a controversial figure has long distracted from considerations of his aesthetics. If one looks back over his career, without the pre- and mis-conceptions that have dogged him, the idea of Spike Lee as a provocateur first seems specious. From the first, he was a director with the vibrancy and gameness of a French New Waver. Nearly 30 years of increasingly prepackaged American indies have only made his black-and-white feature debut, She’s Gotta Have It (1986) seem that much more pleasurably shocking. The NYU film school graduate had already begun to make a name for himself with his hour-long Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads (1983)—the first student film ever selected for Lincoln Center’s prestigious New Directors/New Films festival—but She’s Gotta Have It introduced him to the world, making a splash at festivals from Cannes to San Francisco (where, legendarily, premiere audiences were so blissed out by the film’s first half-hour that they didn’t budge when a neighborhood-wide blackout interrupted the film for 30 excruciating minutes).

Spike Lee: The Bard of Brooklyn

Brooklyn has been so integral to the public persona of Spike Lee that it’s surprising to realize how long it has actually been since he ventured back to the borough of his childhood to shoot a feature film. Born in Atlanta, Lee moved to Cobble Hill when he was young, and his continued devotion to Brooklyn is evident not just in the fact that his production company, 40 Acres and a Mule, is still located a few blocks away from BAM, but also in the major local community events he has organized here, such as the Brooklyn Loves Michael Jackson celebration that draws tens of thousands of fans to Prospect Park every summer. In a recent interview Lee even spoke about commuting daily to his Fort Greene office from his current home on the Upper East Side. (As the press has delighted in noting, though, he has stopped short of switching his allegiance to the New York Knicks over to the Brooklyn Nets.)

Brooklyn Reel Estate: Fort Greene and She's Gotta Have It

“Spike Lee's first feature-length film, She’s Gotta Have It, which was set in Fort Greene, was a turning point for both the neighborhood and for Fort Greene's younger generation of creative artists… She’s Gotta Have It took place in a black neighborhood, it was about black people and it was from a black perspective,” says writer Thulani Davis, “but nobody said anything about that within the context of the narrative. It was taken for granted.”  —E.R. Shipp, The New York Times, “Their Muse is Malcolm X” (December 4, 1988)

Tonight’s edition of BAMcinématek’s monthly Brooklyn film series spotlights BAM’s ‘hood in a Fort Greene double-feature with Nelson George’s documentary Brooklyn Boheme about the Fort Greene renaissance in the 80s along with one of the products of that explosive period of creativity, Spike Lee’s debut feature She’s Gotta Have It.

It’s been nearly 26 years since Spike Lee shot his first feature for $175,000 and joined contemporaries Jim Jarmusch and Steven Soderbergh to usher in a new wave of American independent cinema, but the film’s playful, fresh energy and its cultural relevance have not diminished even a tad. Released when Brooklyn still played second fiddle to Manhattan in the eyes of most of the world outside New York, Lee’s film was one of the first cultural entertainment objects that portrayed Brooklyn as a colorful (even if the film is largely black and white), imaginative, and cool habitat—one which possessed a low-key, but vital sense of artistic community that rivaled its more well-advertised neighbor up north. There was more to Brooklyn than crime, car chases, and Coney Island.

It’s fascinating that its release coincided with the infancy of BAM’s Next Wave Festival (launched in 1983) and these were two of the horns that trumpeted to the world that Brooklyn had arrived. Indeed, “Their Muse is Malcolm X,” the seminal New York Times article on Fort Greene’s emergence as a center of black creativity, posits that the rush of media attention on the neighborhood that resulted from Lee’s film fostered a population surge of artists and creative thinkers that was a harbinger of the Brooklyn we know today.

Lee’s love letter to Fort Greene, where his film production company 40 Acres and a Mule still sits only a stone’s throw from BAM, features a handful of well-known Brooklyn locations as well as many Fort Greene shots that capture the flavor of the neighborhood.

Here’s a gallery of memorable images from the film (some of which resemble photographs by Brooklyn photographer Jamel Shabazz):