dir. Spike Lee
year. 1991
country. USA
run-time. 132 mins
rating. 15
£6.00 (£4.50 conc.)
Doors: 7.00pm
Film: 7.30pm
October in Britain is Black History Month, and for Deptford Cinema that means a sweeping retrospective of director Spike Lee’s joints. Since his breakout first feature She's Gotta Have It back in 1986, African-American filmmaker Spike Lee has built an incredibly diverse, politically-charged, and hugely respected filmography that is famed for its pull-no-punches focus on the Black American experience in a society still infused with racism, from his early-career feature Do the Right Thing to the recent Cannes-winning police drama BlackKklansman. Lee’s films hungrily fuse satire, anger, provocative ideological positions, and plenty of humour into compelling expressionistic rockets. Lee’s films dance freely between being realistic and symbolic, lighthearted and tragic, funny and savage, sometimes all within the same scene. Identity, racial prejudice, and the struggles to compromise and co-exist as a minority in the modern world all come under his microscope, even as his 2006 film Inside Man showed him more than capable of switching to more mainstream genre fare. His expressive visual approaches means certain ‘Spike-isms’ are now an immediately recognisable cinematographic flourishes: such as his love of free-floating dolly shots. His longstanding collaboration with Denzel Washington, in films such as Malcolm X and He Got Game, remains one of the most rewarding actor-director collaborations in recent film history. There is so much to be angered by, to be moved by, and to laugh at, in Lee’s filmography that you surely can’t afford to miss out on this retrospective.
JUNGLE FEVER
Though famed for his collaborations with Denzel Washington, filmmaker Spike Lee also repeatedly teamed -to great effect- with rising black star Wesley Snipes (Blade) in the 1990s. Snipes is never better here in Jungle Fever (written and directed by Lee) as a black New York middle-class architect struggling to define his identity when buffeted by the various forces of class, misogyny and racism that swirl around him when he embarks on an affair with his Italian American white assistant, Angie (Annabella Sciorra). Watch for a barnstorming supporting turn from Samuel L. Jackson.
Doors Open 7pm*
*Programme Start 7.30pm*
*Age Restriction over 15