Spike Lee's Joints podcast

#Fine Arts #Books #Arts #John E. Drabinski #Spike Lee #Film #Cinema #Black Studies #Film Theory #African American Studies

44:09

When a young Eva Kollisch arrives as a refugee in New York in 1940, she finds a community among socialists who share her values and idealism. She soon discovers ‘the cause’ isn’t as idyllic as it seems. Little does she know this is the beginning of a lifelong commitment to activism and her determination to create radical change in ways that include belonging, love and one's full self. In addition to Eva Kollisch’s memoirs Girl in Movement (2000) and The Ground Under My Feet (2014), LBI’s collections include an oral history interview with Eva conducted in 2014 and the papers of Eva’s mother, poet Margarete Kolllisch, which document Eva’s childhood experience on the Kindertransport. Learn more at www.lbi.org/kollisch . Exile is a production of the Leo Baeck Institute , New York | Berlin and Antica Productions . It’s narrated by Mandy Patinkin. Executive Producers include Katrina Onstad, Stuart Coxe, and Bernie Blum. Senior Producer is Debbie Pacheco. Associate Producers are Hailey Choi and Emily Morantz. Research and translation by Isabella Kempf. Sound design and audio mix by Philip Wilson, with help from Cameron McIver. Theme music by Oliver Wickham. Voice acting by Natalia Bushnik. Special thanks to the Kollisch family for the use of Eva’s two memoirs, “Girl in Movement” and “The Ground Under My Feet”, the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College and their “Voices of Feminism Oral History Project”, and Soundtrack New York.…

Spike Lee's Joints

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20-30 minute reflections on particular Spike Lee films, from School Daze up through Black KkKlansman - précis for a book-length study of Lee's cinema, reflections on a course I've taught a number of times at Amherst College and University of Maryland. In these podcast pieces, I pay particular attention to issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality as they emerge inside particular films and in the history-memory of African American life. How does Lee's cinema think? How does sound and image help us understand representation of Black bodies, Black people, and Black life? What are Lee's innovations, what challenges does he present us with in sound and image? And how can we see questions of masculinity, gender and racial formation, historical violence, and institutional violence evolve across his decades of filmmaking?

27 episoder

Spike Lee's Joints

updated for 2 år siden

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27 episoder

#Fine Arts #Books #Arts #John E. Drabinski #Spike Lee #Film #Cinema #Black Studies #Film Theory #African American Studies

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Spike Lee's Joints

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27 - Supplement 1: Spike Lee's Musical Conscience 24:10

for 2 years siden24:10

24:10

A discussion of the role of music in Spike Lee's cinema, examining the function of music as atmospheric, iconic, and moral conscience. In particular, I am interested in how jazz forms the atmospheric or ambient sound in his work, reminding us of Bleek's drunken defense of jazz as African American affect, tradition, and mood in Mo' Better Blues . As well, I am interested in how Lee uses key songs by Stevie Wonder and related figures to indicate the moral frame of a given film, an entry ramp into the meaning of the film an d composed of sound embedded in Black cultural life.…

Spike Lee's Joints

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26 - BlacKkKlansman as Retrospective and Militant Memory 30:18

for 2 years siden30:18

30:18

A reckoning with Spike Lee's 2018 film BlacKkKlansman as a retrospective on his previous films on race, racism, and U.S. history, as well as his treatment of memory of atrocity as the basis for real militancy. Lee revisits his ontology of antiblack racism, embedding it in political institutions and social-cultural practices, here linking those institutions and practices to the history of lynching, policing, and the alt-right riots in Charlottesville, Virginia. That series of links ends with an evocation of militancy: we have to confront the past, present, and future with both vigilance and the capacity for violence against the present, in the name of and toward a different - forever in the interrogative for Lee - kind of future.…

Spike Lee's Joints

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25 - Memory, Rage, and Death in When the Levees Broke 33:14

for 2 years siden33:14

33:14

A second reflection piece on Spike Lee's multi-volume documentary When the Levees Broke , focusing on questions of memory, mourning, melancholia, and rage. I'm particularly interested in how death and displacement function in the memory-work of the film, and how Lee's crafting of context to show dead Black bodies on the screen is a story about the extent of antiblack racism and cruelty: removing not only the right to live and right to not be killed, but also, and most emphatically, the erasure of dignity in and after death.…

Spike Lee's Joints

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24 - History, Culture, and Antiblackness in When the Levees Broke 30:16

for 2 years siden30:16

30:16

An examination of how Spike Lee builds an account of antiblackness into his documentary film When the Levees Broke . In particular, I am interested in how that account attends to the specificity of New Orleans as a Black city, the embeddedness of forms and figures of slavery in antiblack practices, and how Lee draws these out of the experiences and reflections of common people who survived the catastrophe we call "Hurricane Katrina."…

Spike Lee's Joints

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23 - Mourning, Childhood, and the Body in 4 Little Girls 29:12

for 2 years siden29:12

29:12

An examination of four key elements in Spike Lee's 1997 documentary 4 Little Girls , focused on the process of mourning, childhood, and Lee's decision to show autopsy photos of the four murdered girls. The closing witness of Chris McNair (inaccurately called "Ron" in the comments, apologies for the misspeak!) reflects the refinement of memory in the film, Alpha Robertson extends the meaning of witness to the expanse of life, the closing credits scene with home video footage of two children set memory in childhood, and Lee's attempt to ethically stage the revelation of autopsy photos in order to remind us of the materiality of the bombing sets memory in the physicality of atrocity.…

Spike Lee's Joints

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22 - Witness and Crafting Knowledge in 4 Little Girls 25:51

for 2 years siden25:51

25:51

A series of remarks on method and framing in Spike Lee's 1997 documentary film 4 Little Girls . I am interested in two things that frame the film. First, Lee's deliberate exclusion of narratives of white transformation from the meaning of the death of four girls in the 1963 church bombing, accomplished in large part by his derisive and dismissive treatment of George Wallace's late in life "turn away" from racism. Second, Lee's withdrawal of himself from the composition of the film, letting witnesses be the source of their own knowledge and transmission of affect. This moves Lee away from the role of creator of knowledge, and toward the ethics of editing - crafting the knowledge given in witness into the sound and image of the screen.…

Spike Lee's Joints

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21 - Mourning and Loss in Chi-Raq 26:28

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26:28

An examination of two critical scenes in Chi-Raq that, for me, tell us what the film is about and what is for Spike Lee the endgame of making cinema about gun violence. The first scene is around the 25:00 mark, where Irene, played by Jennifer Hudson, cleans the blood of her murdered daughter off the sidewalk as Hudson sings "I Run" in the background. This is Lee's iteration of the theme "women's work," here as the work of mourning and literally and figuratively cleaning up the mess of men's gun violence. The second scene is around the 50:00 marks scene in which a non-professional actor and former gang member in a wheelchair describes his regret and mourning of a life enmeshed in gun violence. Both scenes bridge the fictional and farcical elements of the film to the social reality of gun violence in Black communities, breaking the walls of the film and screen while also articulating what Chi-Raq is actually about .…

Spike Lee's Joints

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20 - Mixed-Genre and Cinematic Success in Chi-Raq 29:47

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29:47

Thinking through the problem of mixed-genre in Spike Lee's 2015 film Chi-Raq , how it operates as a fragmented address to gun violence, and how that address clarifies our criteria for a successful cinematic work. In particular, I am interested in how the farcical story of a sex strike, the melodrama elements of storytelling, and quasi-documentary moments combine to instruct morally and politically. That instruction, I argue, is an extension of Lee's broad political values - embodied in the figure and film Malcolm X - around Black communities healing themselves rather than waiting for systemic change or changes in white people and white social-political structures.…

Spike Lee's Joints

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19 - Childhood, Melancholy, and Joy in Red Hook Summer 22:40

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22:40

A second reflection on Spike Lee's exploration of abandonment in Red Hook Summer , with particular focus on how the lives of the neighborhood revisit key themes of Black childhood and women's work. Children are more precarious in Red Hook Summer than in other Lee films, and women's work is no longer connected to a domestic sphere apart from the dramatics of outside, common space. Lee, I argue, offers us an appreciation of the vulnerability and exhaustion of women who've been tasked with the most difficult and dispiriting work - keeping children alive, witnessing their lives - and the precarity of Black childhood, while at the same time, as always, refusing to make that melancholy total. Instead, Lee entwines melancholy and joy in order to witness witnessing, in order to see and know the persistence of Black care even at the forefront of antiblack violence.…

Spike Lee's Joints

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18 - Abandonment and Memory in Red Hook Summer 23:27

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23:27

A characterization of Spike Lee's 2012 film Red Hook Summer as a meditation on total abandonment. I am specifically concerned with the abandonment of the neighborhood to environmental racism, social and political violence, and ethnic cleansing. How does Lee document life in a space made precarious by gentrification and other forms of violence? How does that documentation sit alongside his previous treatments of Brooklyn as a vibrant, living place?…

Spike Lee's Joints

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17 - Masculinity, Slavery, and the Unprecedented in Get On The Bus 24:39

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24:39

Revisiting the theme of masculinity and the interrogative, I here trace the allusions to slavery in Get On The Bus and how it outlines, along with his treatment of Jeremiah (the film's elder), Lee's commitment to cinema as question-asking and the horizon of the unprecedented. Jeremiah's damaged life contains an ethical imperative: center identity on an expansive, strong sense of blackness. But it also opens up only possibility: his life was not one to emulate, nor is any from the past. Rather, the unprecedented questions asked in Get On The Bus ask each subject in the film (and also us as viewers) to begin again, to make relationships to self, others, and community for the first time.…

Spike Lee's Joints

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16 - Masculinity and the Interrogative in Get On The Bus 26:01

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A first comment on Spike Lee's 1996 film Get On The Bus , discussing it as a self-reckoning by Lee concerned with his previous explorations of masculine identity formation. Lee sees the limits and even harm of previous accounts of masculinity, placing the questions he has for himself, but also Black men more broadly, inside the spatially constrained yet affectively expansive and expanding frame of the bus.…

Spike Lee's Joints

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15 - Childhood, Portraiture, and Possibility in Crooklyn 25:14

for 2 years siden25:14

25:14

A further exploration of the meaning of childhood in Spike Lee's Crooklyn , with particular attention to how childhood and adulthood sit in an ambiguous relation and produce both constriction and possibility. I'm interested in how the song "Ooh Child" by Five Stairsteps expresses the moral and ethical message of the film, namely, that whatever the abject conditions and sense of fate for Black people in an anti-Black world, that suffering is also and always accompanied by great beauty and sense of possibility - here, portrayed in the child-life of Troy. This portrait offers a complex vision of Black girlhood and women's work, appreciating joy and resistance alongside the pathos of everyday life, but also, I think, a broader claim about Black life in a world saturated with antiblackness.…

Spike Lee's Joints

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14 - Black Girlhood and Women's Work in Crooklyn 29:21

for 2 years siden29:21

29:21

A discussion of the relationship between girlhood, childhood, Black life, and women's work in Spike Lee's 1994 film Crooklyn . In this reflection, I read Lee's film - a collaboration with his siblings, especially his sister Joie Lee - as an exercise in portraiture. That is, Lee is not prescribing how Black girls should live, how life should unfold for them, or what sorts of work fall as the responsibility of women, but he is instead describing how in this kind of place girls, children, and women live their age and positioning in the world. Lee brings us the complex space of Black childhood that is either a fiction or a severely compromised reality: saturated with sadness, but also beauty. Insistent on beauty, Lee refuses to see the difficulties of Black life as merely abject.…

Spike Lee's Joints

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13 - The Existential Politics of Malcolm X 22:41

for 2 years siden22:41