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.
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?