Digging (a little more) into Red Hook Summer

I wanted to revisit some of the points raised by myself and Milani concerning the cinematography of Red Hook Summer. For reference’s sake, here is my previous blog post (with comments from Milani and myself), and Milani’s post about Lee’s choice of cinematographer for the film.

Kerwin DeVonish was the cinematographer for Red Hook Summer, and as this IMDB demonstrates, we can see that DeVonish has very few feature-length films under his belt. Lee’s choice of cinematographer was my first stop in doing some blog-level research for this post, because I think that the imperfections I mentioned in my post, and the less-than-pleasant viewing experience Milani described ties in most closely to the stylistic and technical choices made by DeVonish and Lee.

To elaborate briefly on my post: I loved Red Hook Summer for its narrative honesty. In my previous post, I described many of the cinematic choices as “technical imperfections.” If I had thought it through more carefully, I might have proposed that Lee and DeVonish’s embrace of what I can only assume was a medley of handheld, (barely) stedicam, and iPad footage suggests a certain privileging of narrative over technical seamlessness. I did insist that Lee does not make bad film. Or at least, he doesn’t make film’s poorly–a nice workaround the hackneyed “intention” word. What I mean is that Lee is one of the most consistent filmmakers I’ve ever had the pleasure of watching. His films, worlds unto themselves that they are, hold to their own narrative and aesthetic rules. And Red Hook is no exception. We can locate the seamless production in the shaky camera, the unruly lighting, ill-fit framing, and awkwardly teleological contrivance of certain shots. In other words, the film seems seamless because we are constantly aware that there’s someone walking with and maneuvering a camera. We can feel the camera’s presence in the scenes of the film as it moves in and backs away from the characters, or waits, static for the characters to run by. We may not see it, but we feel its cumbersome presence. And yet the story goes on. Why?

What gets me (and I may have mentioned it in my previous post) is that we know Lee can make a camera do invisible, weightless work. He’s mastered the tracking shot. If you think about it, every Lee film we’ve watched thus far has involved a character strutting, stumbling, shuffling, or sprinting down a sidewalk. And the camera’s been there alongside them. The epithet montage  in Do the Right Thing seemed more organic than many of the conversations in Red Hook–and the DtRT scenes were filmed on a dolly! Sure we can give the obvious, somewhat superficial answer, that the film was an economically-conscious film for Lee, but lest we forget, She’s Gotta Have  It was made on practically nothing, in 12 days, and without one of the most prolific and successful careers in the industry for 25 years backing it up. Lee’s worked with children before (a nod to Stu’s post), he knows how to get them to act, he’s written most of his own work, he knows how to screen write, and in case I didn’t get the point across a minute ago, he’s the director of Do the Right Thing, Mo’ Better Blues, Malcolm X, Miracle at St. Anna, Inside Man, 25th Hour, and the recent class favorite, Crooklyn. He knows what he’s doing, and he does what he knows. The camerawork and cinematography in this film did not get by this man.

Moving away then from the language of imperfection, I’d like to propose the more proactive word array of artistic intent. Rather than accounting for imperfections, I’d like to look at Crooklyn and attribute what I (we) can to Lee’s artistic intentions for this film. Though I may be winding up for another post, I’d like to mine the internets quickly and include here a few video and article links that may help us to get a feel for what was going through Lee’s head.

This video reiterates what Professor Parham’s been talking about for a couple weeks now, the important place of childhood in Lee’s filmography. Here though, we have it from the horse’s mouth. Lee discusses very briefly he desire to put genuine, black, young kids on screen.

The following pair of videos comprise a wonderful interview with a terrible host. Lee discusses financing RHS, as well as some of his motivations behind the film. The second video simply makes me grin for the amount of composure we can see in Lee’s face as he admirably resists the ignorance of his interviewer. Please pay close attention to the question of authorship (one that I think is closely tied to the creative impulse) at 1:30. Beautiful.

And then below, 4:00 is also just gold…

The second piece especially makes me wonder… can we imagine Lee fully as a creative artist? Something about reducing many of his artistic choices to the removed “intentional” modifier mitigates his talent. Sometimes it sounds as though the recognition of the “intentional” achievement is what redeems a decision from becoming extraneous at best, or at worse, a happy coincidence.