The single most-influential Black American director in the history of mainstream cinema. Forty-three features in forty-three years.
Spike Lee made his first feature, She's Gotta Have It, in 1986 — financed for $175,000, edited in his Brooklyn apartment, distributed by Island Pictures, grossing $7.1m. He has directed forty-three features and shorts in the forty years since. He has founded a production company (40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, named after the Reconstruction-era policy that the U.S. government failed to honour), taught film at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts since 1993, and become one of the most-publicly opinionated figures in contemporary American cinema.
Lee has been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director once — for BlacKkKlansman (2018) — and has won an Honorary Award (2015) and Best Adapted Screenplay (BlacKkKlansman, 2019). The widely-debated 1989 absence of a Best Director nomination for Do the Right Thing — Driving Miss Daisy won Best Picture that year — has been the subject of Lee's public criticism since.
His filmography is unusually large for a working American director. Some of the films are major statements (Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X, 25th Hour, Inside Man, BlacKkKlansman). Some are commercial assignments (Inside Man, He Got Game). Some are documentaries (4 Little Girls, When the Levees Broke). Some are filmed concert documentaries, plays-on-film, NBA films. The breadth is the man — Lee works.
Spike Lee's most-recognisable visual technique is the 'double dolly' shot — the actor and the camera are both mounted on a dolly that moves together, with the actor on a moving platform in front of the camera. The result is the optical effect of the character floating forward while the world behind them moves. The technique appears in almost every Spike Lee film. Mookie at the end of Do the Right Thing. Monty Brogan at the start of 25th Hour. Travis Hubbard in BlacKkKlansman.
What the shot does is detach a character from their environment at a moment of significant emotional or thematic weight. The character is, briefly, no longer in physical space — they are in psychological space. Lee has used the technique consistently since She's Gotta Have It.
Lee's films are unusually closely identified with a specific neighbourhood — Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where Lee grew up and where 40 Acres and a Mule has been based since the 1980s. Crooklyn (1994), Do the Right Thing (1989), He Got Game (1998), Clockers (1995), and many others are explicitly set in Brooklyn. The borough is, in Lee's filmography, what the Italian neighbourhoods are in Scorsese — the specific local that the larger thematic work flows from.
Lee has talked about resisting the term 'Black director' on the grounds that white directors are not described as 'white directors.' His acceptance of the description is conditional: he is a Black director the way Scorsese is an Italian-American director — the identity is one fact among several, not the entirety of the filmography.
Lee's films are politically direct in ways that most American mainstream cinema is not. Do the Right Thing closes with two on-screen quotations — Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X — on the use and morality of violence in response to oppression. The film does not resolve the tension between the two quotations; it asks the audience to. BlacKkKlansman ends with footage of the 2017 Charlottesville white-supremacist rally and the killing of Heather Heyer.
The directness has been criticised across decades as didactic. Lee's defenders argue that the directness is the work — American cinema has historically been so reluctant to engage Black political reality directly that doing so plainly is itself a craft achievement. The argument continues.
If you've never watched a Lee film:
Martin Scorsese (the New York specificity), Akira Kurosawa, the Italian neorealist tradition, the L.A. Rebellion (Charles Burnett, Julie Dash), the political documentary tradition. Lee has cited On the Waterfront, A Place in the Sun, The Battle of Algiers, and Mean Streets as foundational.