Tensions build across New York in the Summer of '77. It's hot, there's a power-outage, disco is king, punk has just been born and a serial killer is stalking the streets.
* * *
Auteurist critics love to look for recurring themes in a director's work. If you watch a lot of Hitchcock films you will find a lot of overbearing mothers and wrongly accused men, early Scorsese films feature a lot of men that are frightened by/can't deal with female sexuality and of course all Coen Brothers films exemplify their "much ado about nothing" worldview. In this way, a career is really one long film where particular philosophies and obsessions are continually addressed in (hopefully) different ways, from (hopefully) different angles and with (hopefully) varying emphasis.
For example: In Do The Right Thing, Spike Lee chose to explore how warm weather was capable of exacerbating tensions and prejudices on one particular Brooklyn block on the hottest day of the year. Ten years later with Summer of Sam, Spike chose to examine this same phenomenon but from the perspective of an entire neighborhood (and city by extension) over the course of a whole summer. Though similar in some ways, the cinematography used to visually express the heat is different. Variations on a theme as they say. Summer of Sam is also notable for being a major work in Lee's continued anthropological examination of Italian-Americans that began with Do The Right Thing and Jungle Fever.
I'll take that over Michael Bay's recurring themes of hot women and loud noises any day of the week.
No comments:
Post a Comment