Introduction

Abstract

Introduction:BlacKkKlansman, "On the Right Side of History"? Delphine Letort (bio) Loosely based on former police officer Ron Stallworth's recollections of his infiltration into the Colorado Springs chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, BlacKkKlansman (dir. Spike Lee, 2018) exploits the paradoxical situation of its black author passing for a white supremacist to integrate the "Organization" as a powerful source of humor and critique. Director Spike Lee uses the autobiographical narrative as a source text to trace the roots of the Trumpian rhetoric in a history of nativist activism, embedded in the history and the images of Hollywood. BlacKkKlansman uses intertextual references to depict a racially divisive culture, which undergirds films that produce 'whiteness' and 'blackness' for antithetical audiences. Excerpts from The Birth of a Nation (dir. D. W. Griffith, 1915) and Gone with the Wind (dir. Victor Fleming, 1939) underpin the mythology of white supremacy whereas those from Blaxploitation films nostalgically evoke the activist atmosphere of the Black Power era. Situated at the crossroads of black and white cinemas, BlacKkKlansman is a title that connotes the color line as a space of encounter and separation between two communities who find themselves trapped by a history of violence, which the film shows in its final photograph of Heather Heyer who died during a Black Lives Matter protest. In an interview with the New York Times on January 22, 2019, Lee declared: "And I feel that many years to come, when historians search for a piece of art that clearly shows what is happening today, BlacKkKlansman will be one of the first things they look at because this film is on the right side of history."1 This Close-Up takes those words at face value and considers BlacKkKlansman as a unique film deserving attention for its intervention in the contemporary political and racial polemics. Like every Spike Lee Joint film, BlacKkKlansman is controversial and at the epicenter of debates about cinema and politics. Some reviews celebrated Lee's film as: the "best nondocumentary feature in more than a decade and one of his greatest," [End Page 203] "a hellraising masterpiece," and a "hot-damn triumph—one of the year's best films," as well as "a major comeback."2 Yet the filmmaker's provocative political style—"the impassioned work of a cinema giant who has again found his voice and the power to make it heard" and "this admirably, unruly filmmaker back at the height of his provocative powers"—also drew a number of criticisms regarding form and content.3 Some French critics, for example, recommended the film while expressing some uneasiness about the mixture of politics and entertainment that is nonetheless characteristic of Lee's filmmaking. For example, Le Monde explained that "Spike Lee is overdoing it. Some gags are a little long. It may not have been necessary to accumulate so much hate speech in the mouths of racist whites. The filmmaker probably chose the caricature style to hammer home his point."4 Libération ambiguously argued that "the author of Do the Right Thing (1989) has not lost any of the rage that goes hand in hand with a certain heaviness—that of militant leaflets and incisive rap slogans. In other words: the fact that Lee has not learned to be subtle over time also proves that he has not given up his fights in any way."5 Télérama was no less ambiguous with the following statement: "Lee has regained his bite, his humor as a dirty kid militant for this anti-racist and anti-Donald Trump charge."6 Lee's racial politics obviously raised some discomfort among these reviewers, who disapproved of the blend of politics and humor in BlacKkKlansman, whereas other critics considered it not an efficient means of critique: "Yet the point of BlacKkKlansman seems to be that laughing at the KKK, dismissing them as an irrelevant group of backward morons, is what got us Donald Trump";7 and "BlacKkKlansman is the rare American film that doesn't treat the KKK as a joke. … The racism on display isn't exactly funny, not unless you find social discomfort humorous."8 The four articles composing this Close-Up relinquish the controversy and examine...