US director and Jury President of the 74th Cannes Film Festival Spike Lee poses as he arrives for the screening of the film “Benedetta” at the 74th edition of the Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, southern France, on July 9, 2021. (Photo by CHRISTOPHE SIMON / AFP via Getty Images)
It’d be so easy to think of Spike Lee as his generation’s Orson Welles. Fiercely independent and artistically unique, Lee rarely bends to conventional Hollywood storytelling. He rarely employs a classic three-act structure and isn’t afraid to play with form — leaning on freeze frames, montages, and his signature double dolly shot — to remind the viewer they’re watching a movie. His films are critical, ambitious, impish, imaginative, and almost always boldly political. He often operates outside of the Hollywood system, consistently searching and finding budgets for unpredictable projects. It’d be easy to compare Lee to Welles. But there is no other Spike Lee.
On a systemically unequal movie landscape, where the creative lifespan for a Black filmmaker is all too short, Lee has persisted. No Black American filmmaker comes close to his output of work, and few have defined American life through several generations like him. Lee’s films are unabashedly Black and proudly New York. They tell the stories of…
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