Cinema as Political Activism: Contemporary Meanings in The Spook Who Sat by the Door

In 1973 Sam Greenlee created a film based on his controversial 1969 novel The Spook Who Sat by the Door. It is often mislabeled as blaxploitation—an intentional tactic on his part at the time to attract a distributor. The FBI then purportedly short-circuited Spook’s box office run, given its tale of a black CIA operative who returns to his Chicago community and uses his training to organize and execute a guerilla war against oppressive conditions that keep people trapped in urban ghettoes. The film disappeared for decades, shown mostly in art houses or university classrooms for its importance as a social critique or example of cinema as political activism. Considered by producer Tim Reid to be one of the most significant black films ever made, the film was digitally remastered and rereleased in 2003, and was again celebrated as insightful while at the same time vilified for its depiction of violence rooted in race-based anger. Greenlee insists his film uses the action genre to mask a more complicated political critique about the plight of an oppressed underclass compounded by the legacies of racism. Spook also includes the familiar motif of an aggressive police force charged with maintaining control of such communities—a precarious “peace” that is breached after police shoot an unarmed youth, setting off a violent response. The film endures as a historical text about black militancy in the early 1970s, but also as a study of the revolutionary potential of oppressed peoples anywhere and the use of cinema as a potential tool of liberation.