Sightlines · a viewing thread

Reckoning with the Color Line

A run through a century of American film on race — from the movie that industrialized screen racism to the ones that talk back to it — best watched in rough chronological conversation.

More film-school canon than crowd fare, and several ask a lot of you: an ugly three-hour silent at the root, racism confronted head-on, and endings built to hurt — essential viewing, but not a light night.

• The Birth of a Nation (1915)
• Do the Right Thing (1989)
• Boyz n the Hood (1991)
• American History X (1998)
• BlacKkKlansman (2018)
• Malcolm X (1992) — The overlooked epic that rhymes with BlacKkKlansman on Spike Lee's whole project — pull down this three-hour life of Malcolm X and it becomes the missing spine of the whole thread, tracing the color line through one man's radicalization.
• 4 Little Girls (1997) — If BlacKkKlansman's history landed, this is the under-seen Spike Lee documentary to finally watch — the 1963 Birmingham church bombing told through the families, an ending built to hurt exactly the way this thread's do.
• Menace II Society (1993) — The overlooked Watts twin to Boyz n the Hood — the Hughes brothers' harder, more fatalistic take on the same summer and the same streets, with a gut-punch ending you'll wish you could unsee.
• The Hate U Give (2018) — The one that carries Do the Right Thing's police-killing rage into the present — a girl forced to testify to what she saw, the contemporary chapter this century-long conversation has been building toward.
• Straight Outta Compton (2015) — The overlooked one that turns Boyz n the Hood's Compton into music history — N.W.A. answering police harassment with 'Fuck tha Police,' the color line fought on the mic instead of the corner.