Spike Lee - Auteur Essay

In the film, Do the Right Thing, director Spike Lee presents the audience with the theme of racism. The title represents the everyday choices that we as Americans of various ethnicities, cultures, and race. Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing allows the viewers to decide for themselves the right thing to do about racism. Everyone has the choice to be accepting of cultures, or people different from them. The film portrays how an Italian American named Sal has a neighborhood pizzeria in Bedford-Stuyvesant, New York. The neighborhood is primarily African American, but there is a diverse amount of other cultures made up of, Hispanics, European Americans, also there is a store owned by Koreans. This film displays the discrimination between the races and how this can lead to violence.

An auteur is a singular artist who controls all aspects of a collaborative creative work, a person equivalent to the author of a novel or a play. The term is commonly referenced to filmmakers or directors with a recognizable style or thematic preoccupation.

Director and actor Spike Lee presents his "truth" about race relations in his movie Do the Right Thing. The film exhibits the spectacle of black discrimination and racial altercations. Through serious, angry, and loud sounds, Lee stays true to the ethnicity of his characters, all of which reflect their own individualism. Lee uses insulting diction and intense scenes to show how severe racism can lead to violence.

In an attempt to enlighten audiences with a powerful message about the cancer that hate and violence can bring to a society; writer, director, Spike Lee brings Do the Right Thing to the screen. Fusing a powerful story with creative film making, Lee gives us an insider’s look at life on a blistering summer day in Brooklyn.

Shelton Jackson Lee was born in 1956 as the son of a Jazz musician and an art professor. Lee later grew into the nickname Spike and because of his parent’s background, he became

With a burning determination from his previous refusal, Lee scrapped together funds to create She’s Gotta Have It, a low budget film made in two weeks about a black woman’s encounters with three men. Starring himself as one of the men, a trait very common through out his film career, the movie was an expected success in the United States making $7 million. She’s Gotta Have It emphasized the gender issue of double standards that women face when dating several men at a time. The film, although not directly about racial issues, was definitely a black film which set off his important and controversial career (Sheridan 4).

Alfred Hitchcock is widely regarded as a prime example of an auteur, a theory that emerged in the 1950s by Truffaut, in the ‘politique des auteurs’ of Cahiers du Cinema (Tudor 121). The auteur theory, as defined by Andrew Tudor, is premised on the assumption that “any director creates his films on the basis of a central structure”(140) and thus, if you consider their films in relation to each other, commonalities can be found within them. These commonalities work to demonstrate the view of the director as “the true creator of the film” (Tudor 122). Evidence of an auteur can be found in examining a director’s creative tendencies, in their distinctive themes and motifs, stylistic choices,

The movie Do the Right Thing, composed, coordinated and created by Spike Lee, concentrates on a solitary day of the lives of racially differing individuals who live and work in a lower-class neighborhood in Brooklyn New York. Notwithstanding, this common day happens on one of the most sizzling days of summer. The movie fixates on how social class, race and the ethical choices that the characters make directly affect the way individuals communicate with each other. Furthermore, in this essay I will analyses Spike Lee’s use of mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing, and sound in the film.

As one of the most widely acclaimed and influential directors of the postwar era, Stanley Kubrick enjoyed a reputation and a standing unique among the filmmakers of his day. He had a brilliant career with relatively few films. An outsider, he worked beyond the confines of Hollywood, which he disliked, maintaining complete control of his projects and making movies according to his own ideas and time constraints. To him, filmmaking was a form of art and unlike Hollywood, not a business.

Furthermore, Spike Lee tells the story of a not always likable, sometimes reluctant man. He

Clinton Eastwood Jr. was born on May 31, 1930. His hometown was San Francisco, located in California ( “Clint Eastwood” 1 ). As a kid, Eastwood moved from town to town because of his father’s jobs ( “Clint Eastwood” 2 ). He also loved cars when he was younger ( Mara 8 ). In high school he played basketball. Eastwood was on the varsity basketball team at his high school ( “Clint Eastwood”

Romance and comedy are commonly used in combination as a genre in films. Garry Marshall prefers the

Slowly the scene becomes more and more intense as we keep getting surprised to what Spike endures to survive right until the moment where both Vicious and Spike face off. The spaghetti western genre can be seen through how the fights feel, never giving the viewer a chance to even be able to guess what will happen next before and after that first shot or move is made.

Auteur Theory is based on three premises, the first being technique, the second being personal style, and the third being interior meaning. Furthermore, there is no specific order in which these three aspects must be presented or weighted with regard to a film. An Auteur must give films a distinctive quality thus exerting a personal creative vision and interjecting it into the his or her films.

It is hard to imagine a person who has not heard of Steven Spielberg. He is one of the most renown, if not the most renown, American filmmakers of the century. His films have captivated and helped develop imaginations of contemporary society and remain among the most successful films ever made.