USA drama
1986
bw 88 min.
Director: Spike Lee
CLV: $49.95 - available
1 disc, catalog # CC1381L
From the opening credits of Spike Lee's seminal film, She's Gotta Have It,
viewers in 1986 were able to recognize the presence of an extraordinary talent.
For it was Lee, a graduate of the New York University's Tisch School of the
Arts (which also produced Down by Law director Jim Jarmusch), who brought black
cinema back to the forefront of American consciousness, simultaneously
reintroducing black characters, reinvigorating an independent mode of
production, and creating a new aesthetic. Black film had had an extraordinary
presence in America in the '30s when director Oscar Micheaux's "all colored" or
"race" films played to large but segregated audiences. By the '80s, however,
black film was largely a joke. Blacks appeared in Hollywood films as comic
relief, either as male, sexless buffoons or as sexually inert mammies. Neither
character type touched the other, maintaining an asexuality that offered
comfort in the alabaster wasteland of historical misrepresentation. This was a
condition that Lee rectified in perhaps the film's most significant
contribution to black cinematic history: real people with real lives, touching.
From the beginning, Lee's plan was to represent the real life concerns of black
men and women. As a native of Brooklyn and the son of a school teacher and
musician, Lee had been exposed from an early age to the myriad complexities of
life. From this grew an unparalleled filmic intelligence, one that rushed past
the slower eddies of standard cinema, pushing into unexplored ravines of
thought and offering a form of visual presentation we did not know we were
prepared to accept. In the darkened cinema space, during the opening sequence,
beautiful in its black-and-whiteness, David Lee's startlingly fresh photographs
set the scene (Brooklyn) of Nola Darling's life and loves. We prepared
ourselves for a quiet evocation of complacent youth--not at all what the film
turned out to be, but I am writing here of expectations, and what we had grown
to expect of black cinema in general. We did not expect anything of Nola
Darling, really, except a watered-down version of her forebears. But Nola was
different. Nola was different because she was a studied, amused, and distanced
subject with a being apart from Lee's vision, even as he created her. And that
is the hallmark of an artist: to create the frame in which a character can
exist fully, independently. Nola, then, was the first image of the independent
black woman and this image is doubly provocative in being wholly female and
entirely sexual. She stands surrounded by a gallery of male characters
(including Lee himself as the inimitable, classic, comedic creation, Mars
Blackmon) who did not attempt to understand Nola because she interfered,
jarred, and messed with their (very shaky) ideas about their own insecure male
identity. None of this would have come to the fore had Lee not elected to tell
his tale in the sparest terms imaginable, a style that Lee, the inveterate
filmgoer, inherited from an artistic forefather, French filmmaker Robert
Bresson. But Lee's style is what he terms a "guerrilla style". It is rough,
confrontational, and makes the necessities of a low budget into virtues. Part
of the credit for the film's incredible visual style must go to Ernest
Dickerson, the cinematographer. Dickerson and Lee met at NYU and began working
together on Lee's student film, Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads, and
the collaboration has continued through all of Lee's films to date. She's Gotta
Have It is a watershed in American filmmaking, and in Lee's career, for a
number of reasons: it depicts love with very little external torment; it shows
youth culture being responsible for itself; and it offers humor without
buffoonery. Lee made the film for a song ($175,000 at final cost, including
post-production) and as always, ingenuity was the key. This ingenuity has since
inspired other filmmakers, low on financing but high on ideas and the desire to
continue a tradition. In terms of Lee's own career, She's Gotta Have It
demonstrates a certain innocence. Never again would Lee see relationships
between men and women (a central motif in his work) with such lyricism. Indeed,
School Daze, Jungle Fever, and Malcolm X are marked by a deep, romantic
cynicism and watchfulness which Lee did not have in She's Gotta Have It: his
first film demonstrates a certain folly and trust that has since been lost.
Sitting in the dark, watching Spike Lee at the beginning with She's Gotta Have
It felt like the beginning of something, something made over, something made
new.
--Hilton Als
CREDITS
Writer, Director, Editor: Spike Lee
Cinematography: Ernest Dickerson
Music: Bill Lee
Producer: Shelton J. Lee
Associate
Producer: Pamm Jackson
Production Design: Wynn Thomas
Art Direction: Ron
Paley
Sound Design: Barry Alexander Brown
Production Supervisor: Monty Ross
TRANSFER
The Criterion Collection is proud to present the unrated director's cut of
She's Gotta Have It in its original theatrical aspect ratio of 1.66:1. This new
digital transfer, approved by director Spike Lee and cinematographer Ernest
Dickerson, was made from a 35mm fine grain master, the original 35mm magnetic
audio master, and a 35mm print.
Go to Voyager's Spike Lee Site
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