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The Spike Lee Brand: A Study of Documentary Filmmaking. Delphine Letort. Albany: SUNY Press, 2015.
Few contemporary American filmmakers have inspired as much scholarship as Spike Lee. Yet, despite the fact that he has directed more feature-length documentaries than fiction films in the last decade, the vast majority of the work on Lee remains about the latter, particularly his earliest ones. In her latest book, Delphine Letort sees the titular "Spike Lee Brand" as clear in all of his films-fiction and nonfiction-but here focuses on the documentaries, since they act as "living histories," just as thought provoking as his fiction films. She also explores how the overt political content of his documentaries stands in dialectical tension with his "sellebrity auteur" persona: "The 'Spike Lee' label has become a trademark that not only connotes the director's commitment to relating stories from the perspective of African Americans, but it also signifies the marketing strategies endorsed by the filmmaker to pursue a career in the mainstream" (8).
Lee's documentaries generally fall into two categories: the historical (4 Little Girls [1997], Jim Brown: All American [2002], When the Levees Broke...