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Product Description: Documents the events surrounding the 1963 bombing of an African American Baptist Church in Alabama, which resulted in the deaths of four young girls.
Genre: Documentary
Rating: NR
Release Date: 8-JAN-2002
Media Type: DVDAmazon.com essential video: There are many remarkable things about the documentary 4 Little Girls. Spike Lee's striking, beautifully realized film is a cinematic lesson of what kind of material is better suited to the documentary format. In his first documentary, Lee shares an attribute of Ken Burns: the major event in his documentary is not seen on camera. Except for four quick glimpses of black-and-white autopsy photos, the picture stays clear from the bombing. Lee remains with the faces, the girls' friends, families, and the historic figures of the era. They've all grown up since the bombing but their memories haven't faded. The vital facts of the case are certainly here: the troubled history of Birmingham, the court proceedings, friends' last run-ins with the girls. What touches us deeper though are those witnesses telling us of living through the core era of segregation and bigotry: a father explaining to his child why she can't have a sandwich in a cafeteria and a woman offering up tears of past events. There's even an interview with George Wallace, the prince of segregation, that belongs in a David Lynch feature. Lee's film asserts the bombing energized the civil rights movement and when the voice of America, Walter Cronkite, echoes those sentiments, you believe he may have it right. --Doug Thomas
Customer Reviews:
- Excellent Documentary: I am a middle school teacher and used this documentary to help my students visualize what segregation looked like in the 1960s. We read The Watsons Go to Birmingham which focuses on segregation in the south but it was not until watching the documentary that it really became real for my students. Not being completely familiar with segregation in Brimingham myself, this documentary also hit home for me. It is very informational and is also done very well so that it keeps even a 12 year olds attention.
- Good Movie, but, needs more substance. Additionally, sequence of events needs to be more organized: Good Movie, but, needs more substance. Sequence of events also needs to be more organized.
- Disturbing but an unfortunate page in US History...: I guess time is the only way for us to measure our progress and I'm happy to see that the wheels of justice finally turned on those who committed that act of cowardly terrorism. There are no other words for bigotry and racial hated other than "ignorance". This includes any extremists who would kill someone because of the color of their skin or how they were put on this Earth by the same God they worship. I hope all those graves have been filled with those people and America and the world can finally move on and use everyone's ability to make this world a better place. This was an excellent documentary and I'd recommend it to anyone when they shape their character and the character of those they are responsible to teach. Our children need to know how not to act and this film should be mandatory viewing in our schools and our homes because change starts with them...Thanks Spike Lee...
- African-Americans: A very good movie to show a story that turned into a pivotal moment in the civil rights of the 60's.
- The beginning of the Civil Rights movement: Having spent time in Mississippi researching a documentary and reading just about every book about the history of the Delta (I recommend The Most Southern Place on Earth, The 1927 Flood and Worse Than Slavery about Parchman Farm) this is a story that shows both the end of segregation and the beginning of the civil rights era. I have always felt that the turning point was when the Black population realized that they grossly outnumbered the Whites and capitalized on naive but touching events like Rosa Parks' story to exercise their economic power. Certainly the story of Emmitt Till and the subsequent publication of his open coffin funeral in The Chicago Defender, the nation's most important Black newspaper at the time.
Since this time, Blacks have demonstrated their power in numbers, won the Civil Rights Act (ironically signed by Texan President Lyndon Johnson) and saw the Delta economy shift away from Agriculture with the arrival of the cotton picking machine, and economically to Tunica MS (the third most popular gambling destination in America)leaving the Blacks who won the civil right movement to work as dealers, maids and fish cleaners on the Catfish farms which dot the southern delta. The political gains (as with rights granted during Reconstruction) lost to mechanization, share cropping and the recommendations of government committees studying "the Negro Problem" and never speaking to one. Why Clinton is so respected by Blacks escapes me. As late as 1999, the president was from Arkansas, the vice president from Tennessee and the speaker of the house from Mississippi. Civil rights and Delta Blacks had lost their economic power after sacreficing these 4 Little Girls, Emmitt Till and so many lynching victim, free but living in poverty in a land where they grossly out-number the While population. It's a story worth studying and this is a video worth watching along with the stories of Rosa Parks, Emmitt Till, and Miss Evers Boys. Think it through; it's not changed much since those days. The Delta goes on forever; it gives new meaning to "You Can Run But You Can't Hide."
In its wake, it has given us John Lee Hooker, Sam Cooke, David Ruffin, Sonny Boy Williamson II, Muddy Waters, Pine Top Perkins, Al Green (from Arkansas), Robert Johnson, James Cotton, Robert Lockwood, Jr, Rev. Willie Morganfield and so many more classic and original artists who stood up to the White majority with the value of their music.
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