Ear­li­er today, we high­light­ed some free cin­e­mat­ic offer­ings online, includ­ing the new civ­il rights film Just Mer­cy, and a slew of films in the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion made by African Amer­i­can direc­tors. Then we stum­bled upon this. Above, you can watch Ava DuVer­nay’s Oscar-nom­i­nat­ed film 13th. Com­bin­ing archival footage with tes­ti­mo­ny from activists and schol­ars, DuVer­nay’s doc­u­men­tary focus­es on the U.S. prison sys­tem and “how the coun­try’s his­to­ry of racial inequal­i­ty dri­ves the high rate of incar­cer­a­tion in Amer­i­ca.” It won Best Doc­u­men­tary at the Emmys, the BAF­TAs and the NAACP Image Awards.

Update: Dur­ing the month of June, DuVer­nay’s film, Sel­ma, is also stream­ing free online.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ava DuVernay’s Sel­ma Is Now Free to Stream Online: Watch the Award-Win­ning Director’s Film About Mar­tin Luther King’s 1965 Vot­ing-Rights March

Watch Free Films by African Amer­i­can Film­mak­ers in the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion … and the New Civ­il Rights Film, Just Mer­cy

Watch the First-Ever Kiss on Film Between Two Black Actors, Just Hon­ored by the Library of Con­gress (1898)

Watch the Pio­neer­ing Films of Oscar Micheaux, America’s First Great African-Amer­i­can Film­mak­er

The Art of The Black Pan­thers: A Short Doc­u­men­tary on the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Artist Emory Dou­glas

pic.twitter.com/nvdyLOE9Qh

— Ian Mant­gani (@mant_a_tangi) May 28, 2020

Most who saw the last fea­ture by Mar­tin Scors­ese, 2019’s The Irish­man, saw it at home. That had to do with the fact that the bud­get came from Net­flix, which sure­ly aimed to get its not incon­sid­er­able mon­ey’s worth by offer­ing the film on its own stream­ing ser­vice as soon as pos­si­ble. If The Irish­man’s financ­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion was a sign of the times, Scors­ese’s new short is even more so: shot on a smart­phone by the famed direc­tor him­self, it recent­ly pre­miered on Mary Beard’s BBC spe­cial about “lock­down cul­ture.” See­ing as the coro­n­avirus isn’t known to spare famous auteurs — and indeed does seem dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly to harm indi­vid­u­als over age 70 — Scors­ese has spent a great deal of time at home over the past few months. But like all true cre­ators, he has­n’t stopped doing what he does.

“Been quite a while, now, that I’ve been quar­an­tined,” says Scors­ese, turn­ing his cam­era away from a screen­ing of Alfred Hitch­cock­’s The Wrong Man on his office wall. “We had been work­ing so hard on so many dif­fer­ent projects, and things were spin­ning and spin­ning and spin­ning, and sud­den­ly there was a crash. And a stop.” At first, “there was a day or so of a kind of relief. I did­n’t have to go any­where or do any­thing. I mean, I had to do every­thing, but I did­n’t have to do it then.” Then, “the anx­i­ety set in.” But as time passed, and as he tru­ly felt that time pass­ing, “a sense of relief set­tled in. And a real sense of free­dom, because you can’t do any­thing else. I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be in this room. I don’t know when we’re going to be able to actu­al­ly start pro­duc­tion in this film.”

By “this film” Scors­ese means Killers of the Flower Moon, a $200 mil­lion true-crime West­ern set in 1920s Okla­homa that will bring Leonar­do DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, the direc­tor’s lead­ing men of choice, togeth­er in a Scors­ese fea­ture for the first time. As a joint pro­duc­tion between Apple and Para­mount, notes the Observ­er’s Bran­don Katz, the pic­ture “will receive all the nec­es­sary fund­ing it needs while still receiv­ing a world­wide the­atri­cal roll­out,” but the ques­tion of when its shoot can start — and indeed, when movie­go­ers will return to the­aters — remains open. “I do know that, giv­en the grace of time and life, we will be in pro­duc­tion some­how,” says Scors­ese in his lock­down short, after a few shots of the mem­o­ra­bil­ia on his shelves.

Toward the end of this per­son­al dis­patch, Scors­ese remem­bers his final con­ver­sa­tion with the Iran­ian film­mak­er Abbas Kiarosta­mi. “We were at a din­ner in Lyon a few years ago and he looked at me and said, ‘Don’t do any­thing you don’t want to do.’ He knew. He under­stood. One can’t depend on time. One does­n’t know. Ulti­mate­ly that time has to be worth it, even if it’s just exist­ing. Even if it’s just being alive, breath­ing — if you can, under these cir­cum­stances.” But as we’ve all learned, cir­cum­stances can change, and sud­den­ly; it falls to us only to make best use of the sit­u­a­tion in which we find our­selves. To under­score that last truth, Scors­ese char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly cites a clas­sic Amer­i­can movie. Though our lives may be restrict­ed, as we see in Robert Siod­mak’s Hem­ing­way adap­ta­tion The Killers, noth­ing’s stop­ping us from keep­ing our eyes on the stars.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Film­mak­ing of Mar­tin Scors­ese Demys­ti­fied in 6 Video Essays

How Mar­tin Scors­ese Directs a Movie: The Tech­niques Behind Taxi Dri­ver, Rag­ing Bull, and More

What Makes Taxi Dri­ver So Pow­er­ful? An In-Depth Study of Mar­tin Scorsese’s Exis­ten­tial Film on the Human Con­di­tion

Mar­tin Scors­ese Explains the Dif­fer­ence Between Cin­e­ma and Movies

Mar­tin Scorsese’s Very First Films: Three Imag­i­na­tive Short Works

11-Year-Old Mar­tin Scors­ese Draws Sto­ry­boards for His Imag­ined Roman Epic Film, The Eter­nal City

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

When beloved actor Bill Nunn died in Sep­tem­ber of 2016, two months before the elec­tion, his pass­ing felt prophet­ic of more bad things to come. Best known as the boom­box-tot­ing, ulti­mate Pub­lic Ene­my fan Radio Raheem in Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing, Nunn’s char­ac­ter is mur­dered by a gang of cops, who put him in a choke­hold and suf­fo­cate him. At the time, Raheem’s death was a fic­tion­al restate­ment of what had come before, as Lee explains above in the 30th anniver­sary com­men­tary on the film.

“I’m renam­ing this ‘Anato­my of a Mur­der,’” he says, explain­ing how he based the scene of Raheem’s death on the 1983 killing of graf­fi­ti artist Michael Stew­art, who was stran­gled by 11 NYC tran­sit offi­cers. “The things that are hap­pen­ing in this film,” he says, “are still rel­e­vant today.” Lee then ref­er­ences the death of Eric Gar­ner, killed in exact­ly the same way as Raheem. Now we have seen the mur­der of George Floyd, asphyx­i­at­ed with a knee to the neck. These on-cam­era killings are trau­mat­ic, but Lee has not shied away from the pow­er of doc­u­men­tary images.

He reclaimed his place as a big-bud­get inter­preter of Amer­i­can racism with Black­kKlans­man, a fic­tion­al­ized film that ends with extreme­ly hard-to-watch (espe­cial­ly for those who were there) real footage of the mur­der of anti-racist activist Heather Hey­er in Char­lottesville. Lee faced a good deal of crit­i­cism over the use of this video, but he has again tak­en real-life footage of racial­ly-moti­vat­ed killings, this time by the police, and cut them togeth­er with fic­tion, edit­ing togeth­er the death of Raheem with the deaths of Gar­ner and Floyd.

3 Broth­ers-Radio Raheem, Eric Gar­ner And George Floyd. pic.twitter.com/EB0cXQELzE

— Spike Lee (@SpikeLeeJoint) June 1, 2020

Call­ing the short “3 Broth­ers,” he opens with the ques­tion, “Will His­to­ry Stop Repeat­ing Itself?” Lee Debuted the film on the CNN spe­cial “I Can’t Breathe: Black Men Liv­ing & Dying in Amer­i­ca.” The cumu­la­tive effects of his­to­ry are crit­i­cal to under­stand­ing the moment we are in, he says. The rage and protest on streets around the world are not a reac­tion to a sin­gle event—they are a con­fronta­tion with hun­dreds of years of vio­lent con­trol over black bod­ies, a state of affairs always includ­ing mur­der with impuni­ty. “The attack on black bod­ies has been here from the get-go,” Lee says.

Lee’s short is hard to watch, and I don’t blame any­one who nev­er wants to see this footage again (I don’t). The mur­ders of indi­vid­ual, unarmed black men by groups of offi­cers take on an eerie monot­o­ny in their same­ness over time. “The killings caught on cam­era,” writes his­to­ri­an Robert Greene II, “offer a dis­turb­ing reminder of the numer­ous pho­tographs of lynch­ings dis­persed through­out the nation in the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. Some were cat­a­logued by the NAACP and dis­played as exam­ples of Amer­i­can bru­tal­i­ty and bar­barism. Oth­ers, how­ev­er, were fea­tured on post­cards and sent to white Amer­i­cans through­out the coun­try, small trin­kets of white ter­ror.”

This chill­ing his­to­ry gives rise to an under­stand­able ambiva­lence about shar­ing videos of police killings. Are these evi­dence of bar­barous injus­tice or racist snuff films run­ning on an end­less loop? As in the lynch­ing pho­tographs, it depends on the audi­ence and the con­text in which the videos are shown. But when Spike Lee made Do the Right Thing—pre-Rod­ney King and cell phone cameras—hardly any­one out­side of heav­i­ly policed black neigh­bor­hoods wit­nessed first­hand the kind of bru­tal­i­ty that is now so depress­ing­ly famil­iar in our news­feeds.

The death of Radio Raheem was shock­ing to audi­ences, as it was dev­as­tat­ing to the char­ac­ters and remains, for those who grew up with the film, a mov­ing cin­e­mat­ic touch­stone of the time. It is tru­ly heart­break­ing and enrag­ing that such scenes have become com­mon cur­ren­cy on social media, instead of his­toric exam­ples of the bru­tal­i­ty of the past—a sto­ry, as one per­son wrote of the 1968 police killing of poet Hen­ry Dumas, of “gen­er­a­tions of lost poten­tial.”

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Spike Lee Shares His NYU Teach­ing List of 87 Essen­tial Films Every Aspir­ing Direc­tor Should See

How Spike Lee Got His First Big Break: From She’s Got­ta Have It to That Icon­ic Air Jor­dan Ad

Spike Lee Directs, “Wake Up,” a Five-Minute Cam­paign Film for Bernie Sanders

Gil Scott-Heron Spells Out Why “The Rev­o­lu­tion Will Not Be Tele­vised”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness