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Four Little Girls. Dir. by Spike Lee. 40 Acres and a Mule Filmmakers, Inc., 1997. 101 mins.
In September 1997, Birmingham, Alabama stepped out in formal attire to attend the exclusive theater premiere of Spike Lee's first documentary film, Four Little Girls. It was a gala affair commemorating a tragic event, the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and the killing of Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, Denise McNair, and Addie Mae Collins. A tuxedo-clad and customarily dour Spike Lee patiently answered questions of local newscasters, who covered the premiere like a Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. Birmingham seemed to be owning up to its ignoble past. To no one's surprise, though, Alabama's retro-George Wallace governor, Fob James, declined an invitation to the premiere and obligingly sent an aide in his stead.
After spending a week exclusively at a Birmingham theater, Four Little Girls quietly disappeared until February, when it premiered nationally on HBO (Home Box Office). After receiving little fanfare, it disappeared again. Too bad. Lee draws on his considerable skills as a feature filmmaker to create a unique documentary well worth viewing. What he does best in the one genre, he does equally as well in the other: he provokes. The film impressed students in a graduate seminar at the University of Alabama at Birmingham as both didactic and heart-wrenching. Four Little Girls is, in fact, an emotional tour de force.
To this end, Lee opens with Joan Baez's "Birmingham Sunday" (inspired by the church bombing) scoring the musical backdrop and with the camera placidly sweeping the cemetery plots of the four subjects....