One of my favorite films to watch growing up was Spike Lee’s Crooklyn. This was so for several reasons, the primary one being that it’s protagonist was relatable to me as a young Black girl. Now, making my own projects, I look towards this film as inspiration. When I started to come up with ideas about my final Videography project, I think I unconsciously thought of the story of a young girl dealing with a changing idea of the world from Crooklyn.
Crooklyn is about so many things- growing up, summertime, families, adolescence, death, race-relations and much more. It is both funny and sobering in its subject matter. In some ways, it is both a narrative and a historical documentary. Set in the 1970’s in a Brooklyn neighborhood, the film’s protagonist Troy, is a young girl in a family of four boys. During the summer, she tries to find her place within her family and neighborhood, but within the world. For Lee, it was semi-autobiographical, loosely based on his and his siblings childhood growing up in Brooklyn in the 1970's. This theme of childhood is crucial to the context of the film, the story of the protagonist Troy (Zelda Harris), as well as to that story is told. The opening scene of the film shows the neighborhood as a familiar place. Kids race down a busy summer block, as others play games and adults watch on. It’s not necessary a place free of the bad, or threatening (as exemplified with Lee’s own character Sniffy) but it is a sort of strange caccoon that one acclimates to and eventually learns to live with- something that reminds me so much of my own childhood growing up in Camden, NJ. The interesting thing about Crooklyn is that most of the action takes place within Troy’s neighborhood. I think this is a device that is typical of Lee, but that is useful for understanding how space and place is crucial to telling a good narrative story.
The neighborhood is important element of the film (larger than a motif, almost what the story is made of) is split into three parts. THe first is the neighborhood as the familiar, or the haven. The second is the neighborhood as the nightmare, a place to be escaped. Finally, in the resolution of the film, we get the neighborhood as a reconciliation of the two, a familiar but changing place. This transition of a familiar place into an unfamiliar place is a typical thing that occurs in every childhood/adolescent, and one which Lee captures very well. In Crooklyn, the change signifies the end of summer as well as so many other things- including innocence.
Very accurately, Spike Lee paints a vivid picture of Crooklyn in the 1970s. He captures the identity of the neighborhood and its characters accurately yet humourously. Even more, he captures the feel of summer, the smell, atmosphere, tensions, and tone so well. Having never visited Brooklyn (and furthermore being born after 70s), I was amazed at how familiar the setting felt. It’s something so thrilling yet crucial to kids about summertime, and in my project I wanted to show a piece of that experience.?
Filed under: Portfolio Posts, Things That Inspire
