Black Film Streaming Pick: 4 Little Girls
Among Spike Lee's 5 Best Films
Welcome back to my “Black Film Streaming Pick” series, a continuous column about Black films currently available on streaming platforms. If you haven’t already, take a look at my last pick: Diana Ross’ starring role as a hopeful fashion designer living in Chicago, Mahogany, which is still available on YouTube.
For this edition I decided to highlight Spike Lee’s searing documentary 4 Little Girls (a film I consider to be in his top 5: Malcolm X, Do The Right Thing, Bamboozled, and Get on the Bus being the others)
“I worked hard not to feel anger and hatred, but… I did…. And I just had to work on it and pray,” says Alpha Robertson, the mother of Carole Robertson, one of the four victims in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.
To watch Spike Lee’s reflective documentary 4 Little Girls is to walk through a colonnade, as critic Kelli Weston previously noted, of “personal and public grief.” The film recounts the September 15, 1963 tragedy — whereby dynamite planted by the Ku Klux Klan claimed the lives of four Black children (Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair) in Birmingham, Alabama while they attended church — and the aftershocks felt by those who lived and lost through it.
4 Little Girls primarily builds itself around interviews with the relatives — parents and siblings — and childhood friends of the victims. Each explain, with wistful smiles, their early memories of their loved ones. They share personal photographs and affectations — their dolls and the clothing — belonging to the girls. They also recount the days leading up to the bombings: The premonition of destruction by Queen Nunn, Denise’ neighbor, and Denise’ father remembering broiling a chicken with his daughter as a proverbial Last Supper.
Through these aching echoes, Lee sketches the tenor of Birmingham, a city dominated by virulent racists like the head of police and firefighters, Eugene "Bull" Connor, and noted segregationist Governor George Wallace, before the bombing. Through interviews with locals we discover that dynamiting local Black homes and churches was not an isolated incident restricted to the 16th Street Church (Southern Christian Leadership Conference co-founder Fred Shuttlesworth survived one such attack) and that local KKK members were already targeting the backbone of the Civil Rights movement — the children — long before then.
Though the documentary features famous talking heads like Walter Cronkite, Ossie Davis, and Reggie White, Lee takes great care to not let these well-known faces ground the film. They only briefly appear, and only toward the end to boot. Instead, he keeps the focus on the people most affected by the destruction. And while there are a couple of gruesome seconds, particularly when photos of the deceased girls, their bodies scarred by the blast, appear on screen, they never feel gratuitous or tasteless.
They further the feeling of public and private processing happening within those left behind, particularly, in the vulnerable, naked and uncontrollable grief that ultimately occurs on screen. It should be noted how by 1997, only one of the men accused of bombing the church, Robert Chambliss, had been convicted. And even that didn’t happen until 1977, 14 years after the murders. His co-conspirators — Thomas Blanton and Bobby Cherry — wouldn’t be convicted until 2001 and 2002, respectively, and Herman Cash passed away before charges could be brought against him. In this regard, the crushing feeling of the unresolved hangs over every corner of this picture (side note: I highly recommend reading Kelli Weston’s sharp Sight and Sound piece, which further zooms out on Lee’s penchant for exploring the nature of Black grief in his nonfiction work).
I’ve always liked the trio of Lee, Sam Pollard as editor and Terrence Blanchard as composer (the three also made Jungle Fever, Clockers, and Bamboozled together) and 4 Little Girls — from Pollard’s unflinching cuts to Blanchard’s soul-stirring Jazz score, is very near the peak of their work as a team. Every second of 4 Little Girls, both visually and sonically, is perfectly calibrated to devastating ends and it’s one of Lee’s few films which is so totally controlled, so self-aware of the required tonality, that you know he’s the only person who could and should translate these stories.
You can tell the family and friends of the girls knew that too. In their collective, recurrent message they explain how difficult it is for them to revisit the trauma they took such great care to bury. It’s partly why Lee and DP Ellen Kuras (Bamboozled) rely solely on close-ups, barely framing each subject’s face. You can see the acute effect of every resurfaced memory on a family member or friend’s face. How even when they’re smiling, often they’re doing so to hold back the tears.
It would be a mistake, in that sense, to call Lee’s film conventional. Yes - it relies on talking heads. But that mode of delivery does not immediately equate to conventionality. Lee, more than anything, decentralizes the talking head format to be something more impressionistic, more evocative in its deployment. I think, beyond the fears and despairs the film awakens, that’s why 4 Little Girls sticks with me.
And yet, oddly, I recently rewatched Lee’s film sorta on accident. A couple nights ago, I was rewatching Claire Denis’ Beau Travail on Criterion Channel, and for one of the supplementals, Barry Jenkins interviews Denis by Zoom (how I missed this I’ll never know). The mood of their discussion is partly guided by the murder of George Floyd, which occurred the day before their planned conversation. Jenkins highlights how Denis’ picture favors the people over the institutions, and through them, she prods at the cracks within these systems. You can certainly sense the rawness and the public processing of the event, the murder of George Floyd, slipping through in Jenkins and Denis’ chat, which seems on the edge of spinning out to a more difficult, visceral terrain.
My mind, afterwards, instantly jumped to 4 Little Girls. Mostly because what makes Lee’s documentary successful is what makes Beau Travail a masterwork too. It too favors people and how individuals, collectively, can upend heinous establishments. How the loss of a person or a family can be so great as to leave the affected nearly broken.
Lee also doesn’t pretend to believe in the causal nature of history. In the film’s most telling cut, various Civil Rights leaders explain how the deaths of the girls led to the revitalization of the Civil Rights movement and to lasting change. Lee and Pollard incisively smash to a montage of the present-day bombing campaign that’s continued by racists against Black churches and homes. Lee, like most great documentary filmmakers, doesn’t allow the past to be distant. In some form the past is always the present. It’s that truthfulness, that demystification, that still makes 4 Little Girls a difficult, urgent and always timely watch. And among Spike Lee’s best films.
4 Little Girls is available to stream on HBO Max.