Un-lee-shed: 4 Little Girls

This is the fourth in my 2019 bi-monthly series watching Spike Lee’s films that I haven’t yet seen.

4 Little Girls was one of the movies in this series I was looking forward to most, though I’m not sure you can make such a statement without providing an asterisk. You don’t look forward to spending any time with the type of tragedy documented in this movie. I do, however, look forward to watching examples of powerful, emotional filmmaking, and 4 Little Girls was certainly one such example.

It was on my radar at the time it was released in 1997, but I didn’t have the vacuum cleaner mentality I have today about sucking up all the cinematic content worth seeing in a given year. In fact, I might have dinged Spike Lee’s first documentary a little bit for not being a film that was released theatrically, as 4 Little Girls was produced by HBO. I might still arbitrarily ding it for that reason, except it’s not really true. The original plan was to debut it on HBO, but all involved realized it was important enough to get a theatrical run before its cable TV premiere. It ran in four theaters in the summer of 1997 and was eventually nominated for an Oscar for best documentary.

The film of course examines the loss of four young black girls in Birmingham, Alabama as a result of a September 1963 church bombing. Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and Denise McNair were those girls, and they were all in the 12 to 14 age range. It was an act of contemptible racism carried out by a true miscreant whose name I will not even mention here. I don’t think he knew the children were going to be killed in the bombing but that hardly changes anything. He reacted smugly and all the footage of him shows him with this big shit-eating grin.

The film goes into the details of the case as well as giving portraits of these four girls from their surviving relatives, who are still clearly shaken from their deaths even three-and-a-half decades later. It’s potent, moving stuff. It’s also shocking. One of the most controversial elements of the film – though I can’t tell if it actually created a controversy or just made it hard to watch – is that there are brief flashes of post-mortem photographs of the children. Lee didn’t want to give just a sentimental celebration of four young girls whose lives were cut tragically short. He wanted to confront us with the reality of what it looks like when victims are pulled out of the rubble of a bombing. You breathe a sigh of thanks that they are only brief flashes, because it means you can’t fully make out what parts of the body might be missing or altered. I didn’t go back to pause it to find out.

Of course, 4 Little Girls didn’t interest me only on the face value of its content. Especially in the context of this series, I wanted to see what aspects of it reminded me most of Spike Lee. There were principally three, though at least one of those three is only superficial.

The first and most obvious is the montage opening, which gives us a bunch of imagery related to the topic set to the song “Birmingham Sunday” sung by Joan Baez, whose lyrics relate directly to this bombing. Although the use of the song makes for a rather obvious creative decision, I was interested and a bit surprised to see that Lee would choose a white artist from a very white type of music (folk music) to introduce this film, though it works beautifully. Many other Lee films start out similarly.

A slightly more Lee use of music was the undercurrent of jazz that plays under a lot of the interview subjects. It’s something he shares in common, aesthetically, with Woody Allen. Maybe it’s a New York thing.

The really superficial Lee trademark was that he interviews frequent collaborator Ossie Davis. That’s not just a random selection based on their friendship, as Davis and wife Ruby Dee were big civil rights activists and participated in Martin Luther King Jr’s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom a mere two weeks before the bombings. But if I were looking for the ways Lee put himself into the film, that felt like an obvious one.

But he didn’t do too much else in that regard, I suspect because it would have distracted from the very sober story he was telling. 4 Little Girls is not about Lee demonstrating his skills as a filmmaker. It’s about wrestling with a period of great racial discord in American history, from the perspective of a time that is only slightly less discordant. Bill Clinton was president when Lee made this film, and though he is often described (mostly by black people) as “America’s first black president” – or at least was before there was an actual black president – it’s clear that the improvement in American society from 1963 to 1997 was comparatively small. Sadly, it probably still is.

When I return to this series in October it will be with the only true flop I am watching, Miracle at St. Anna (2008), which I’m sure has some good parts despite its turkey reputation.