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Book Sections Year : 2021

A plea for do(ing) the right thing. An ordinary dog day in Bed-Stuy

Abstract

Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989) recounts the story of the affects of the hottest day of summer on the large Afro-American community of Bedford- Stuyvesant, Brooklyn (Bed-Stuy for its residents), New York. In this chapter, I will try to show that the main characters of the film (the music, the heat and the neighbourhood) play not only upon how Spike Lee’s shoots the film, through a sensitive camera, but also inflect his general purpose. This shows the non-linear links between an ambient determinism (the heat that leads to the riot) and forms of individual expressiveness, which give the film a political colour quite distant from its legend. One of the key concepts used in this text is “life form” (as used by Ludwig Wittgenstein and his readings by Stanley Cavell, Veena Das or Sandra Laugier), deployed at the level of the neighbourhood, in order to reflect/ examine its natural and social importance.
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Dates and versions

hal-03499913 , version 1 (21-12-2021)

Identifiers

  • HAL Id : hal-03499913 , version 1

Cite

Anthony Pecqueux. A plea for do(ing) the right thing. An ordinary dog day in Bed-Stuy. Arundathi Virmani. Aesthetic Perceptions of Urban Environments, Routledge, p. 127-137, 2021, 9780367280802. ⟨hal-03499913⟩
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