Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Rewind Wednesday: Class is in Session edition!!

It's that time of the week again, Rewind Wednesday! Today's feature is one that is very near and dear to my heart. It features my alma mater Clark Atlanta University (at the time Clark College) as well as some of my other fellow Atlanta University Center (AUC) institutions. This film I personally think put ATL on the map!! Well if you haven't figured it out yet I'm talking about Spike Lee's 1988 musical-drama School Daze! This film would include a huge cast of great actors and actress who have really blown up in today's tv and film. It would star such greats as Laurence Fishburne, Giancarlo Esposito, Tisha Campbell-Martin, Samuel Jackson, Jasmine Guy, and Ossie Davis just to name a few.

Based in part on Spike Lee's experiences at Atlanta's Morehouse College, it is a story about fraternity and sorority members clashing with other students at a historically black college during homecoming weekend. This would be Lee's second feature film in which he directed. In addition, it would highlight what it meant to be a college educated student, and more specifically an African American (black) student. The student's at Mission College needed to understand that they were responsible for what goes on around them and that they would need to own up to that!




One interesting thing to note about this film was that Spike Lee had the actors stay in separate hotels during filming. The actors playing the "wannabes" had better accommodations than the ones playing the "jigaboos", which contributed to the on-camera animosity between the two camps. This truly helped to show the authenticity of what could and may have happened on a typical day in the life of an HBCU. The method approached used would yield strong results - the fight that occurs at the step show between Dap's crew and the Gammas was not in the script; on the day of the shooting of the scene, the fight broke out, and Lee ordered that the cameras keep rolling. Now keep in mind even though "Mission College," and "Gamma Phi Gamma" were fictional, a chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity actually appears in School Daze.




School Daze truly captured the reality of many African American students attending college and it gave future students an idea of what they could obtain in life. Many folks could completely vibe with the whole fraternity/sorority versus "GDI" issue. For some who did attend an HBCU you could identify with what was being portrayed in the film. Whereas on the other hand at a predominantly white institution some of the other issues around skin color may be new to the individual. I will definitely say this this is must see for any African American student attending or planning on attending college - especially if they plan on attending an Historically Black Colege or University. (This should be a ritual for those going to the AUC [Clark Atlanta, Morehouse, Spelman, and Morris Brown]).

In the end you truly must wake up!! Dap's (Laurence Fishburn) point in this movie was "to encourage the student body to wake up and take notice to what was going on around them.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

School Daze is one of my favorite Spike Lee movies; I have lost count of how many times I have watched my DVD and the soundtrack is lovely!

G-Breezy's Favorite Movies

  • Bourne Identity/Supremacy/Ultimatum
  • Die Hard series
  • Do the Right Thing
  • Fracture
  • Idlewild
  • Imitation of Life
  • Inside Man
  • James Bond series
  • Love Jones
  • Malcolm X