In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter 28 Spike Lee’s 4 Little Girls The Politics of the Documentary Interview Paula J. Massood I think this is a very political film. But to me, the most important story to tell was the story of these four little girls and let that be the focus. But the politics is there. It’s not exempt. Spike Lee In July 1997, Spike Lee released his first feature-length documentary film, 4 Little Girls. Made with backing from the Home Box Office cable network, the film played briefly in theaters before it premiered on television in February 1998. Unlike the majority of Lee’s fiction films about African American history, such as Malcolm X (1992) and Miracle at St. Anna (2008), 4 Little Girls was notably lacking in controversy. In fact, it garnered wide critical acclaim, receiving Oscar and Emmy nominations among other awards. While the film’s subject matter, the 1963 bombing of a southern church and the death of four young African American girls, is noteworthy in itself, its critical reception was most often based on its formal qualities rather than its content. Many critics noted, for example, Lee’s “lean, straightforward documentary style” (Maslin), while others mentioned his directorial “restraint” (Armstrong) and the film’s overall “lack [of] the stylistic idiosyncrasies for which the director is known” (McCarthy). In fact, Todd McCarthy of Variety went as far as describing the film’s style as “a conventional, talking-heads-and-archival-clips approach.” In short, for what seemed like the first time, Lee had produced a conventional , noncontroversial film in which he took a back seat to his subject. 476 P A U L A J . M A S S O O D But is 4 Little Girls a departure from the director’s more noticeably reflexive style—seen in such films as Do the Right Thing (1989), Clockers (1995), and Bamboozled (2000)—or does it play with documentary form less visibly? The answer to this question lies in two different, though related, factors: Lee’s stylistic choices, which range from the less obvious to the blatantly self-conscious, and the press surrounding the film, which tended to deemphasize the director’s role. Indeed, despite the effective removal, or “deauteuring ,” of Lee from 4 Little Girls, the film shares more similarities with than differences from his other films, both fiction and nonfiction, including a focus on African American history, a reflexive style, and an unmistakable directorial presence. The following discussion will consider this assertion by focusing on the film’s formal components, especially its use and reinvention of the conventions of the documentary interview. 4 Little Girls opens with the strains of Joan Baez’s voice performing Richard Farina’s “Birmingham Sunday” (1964). The song commemorates the events of September 15, 1963, when four members of the local Ku Klux Klan set off a bomb in the basement of the 16th Baptist Church in Birmingham , Alabama. The blast killed four young girls—Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Addie Mae Collins—as they prepared to attend services that morning. This opening scene not only introduces the film’s subject matter, it also sets the tone and style for what follows, in which image and sound collaborate to produce different textual meanings and audience responses. In all, the opening to 4 Little Girls lasts the length of “Birmingham Sunday,” or roughly four minutes. It starts with a black-and-white tracking shot of a cemetery and then cuts to archival footage of different moments in the community’s history of civil rights struggles, most notably the “Children ’s Crusade” of May 3, 1963, when local police turned fire hoses and dogs on marchers, many of whom were children.1 The film then cuts back to a medium long shot of the cemetery, which appears in color. As the song introduces the four girls by name, a shot of each girl’s headstone appears, accompanied by a floating black-and-white cutout of her portrait. The images are intercut with more black-and-white archival footage of protests and marches, visually linking the girls’ deaths to the larger political events in Birmingham from the time. As the song narrates the events, the footage alternates between historical images from the day of the bombing and present-day color footage of the church and a sculpture commemorating the tragedy. The moving camera comes to rest on a plaque dedicated to the four girls, after which the song ends and the screen...

Share