Da, Comrade! Hip-Hop, Soviet Montage, & Do the Right Thing

Posted on January 17, 2008

Various forms of revolution- Dziga Vertov, Cinema God and premier montagist made brilliant films like Man With A Movie Camera, using jump-cuts and clever editing to make his mark: Buggin’ Out, played by Giancarlo Esposito, inspired by Public Enemy. (Source- Vertov, Buggin’ Out)

‘Statement on Sound’ is a landmark 1928 joint statement by the early Soviet masters Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandrov. It is largely an attempt at predicting the impact of sound in cinema, just a single year after the seminal premiere of The Jazz Singer in 1927.

The Jazz Singer wasn’t the first film to achieve ’sound cinema’: experiments with the technology date all the way back to Edison/WK Dickson’s first experiments, but it was the first large commercial success and quickly blazed a trail for other films to follow, domestically and internationally.

‘Statement on Sound’ was an attempt to reconcile silent film tradition with the meteoric rise of the ‘talkies’ in the late ‘20s, a change that made a huge impact on the global film industry, drastically altering the everything from the technology to the aesthetics of the cinema. The revolution of sound cinema sparked a sea-change in moviemaking, as the new mechanism rapidly swept away 32 years of silent cinema.

Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing is no stranger to revolution. As much a call to action as an exploration of race relations in urban America in the early 1990s, the film relies heavily on its relationship with sound to create for effective commentary. The music of Public Enemy is particularly prominent in the film, and in many ways defines it: for anyone who’s ever seen the film, hearing ‘Fight the Power’ immediately conjures Rosie Perez’s dancing during the credit sequence .

Lee’s use of Public Enemy follows the framework established by ‘Statement on Sound’ more than 60 years before Do The Right Thing. Hip-hop is uniquely qualified to fulfill the predictions for sound cinema put forward by Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandrov. It is linked to the Soviet montage movement though reliance on musical juxtaposition in the form of sampling, sharing a common dependence upon rhythm with montage

The video for Public Enemy’s Fight the Power!

Eisenstein defines montage as “an idea that DERIVES from the collision between two shots that are independent of one another.” Sampling, in hip-hop, is the tool that allows an artist to “digitally duplicate any existing sounds and play them back in any key or pitch, in any order, and sequence and loop them endlessly”, a trait that bears obvious similarity to montage’s constructive properties embodied by the artifice of film editing. Eisenstein’s filmic “collision” in montage is synonymous with hip-hop’s beat. For example, a music producer can create a totally new simulacrum through the selective sampling of James Brown’s ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag’ with an MC providing lyrics far removed from the original song, in the same way that the montage editor will create a new simulacrum by sandwiching shots of the Tsar’s troops gunning down the serfs between images of animal slaughter, giving the footage new meaning through juxtaposition.

Sound and Cinema Montage- The top clip is from the classic montage film Strike!, as the Imperial (no, not these Imperials) troops shoot protesting workers, intercut with a cow being slaughtered- the workers are slaughtered like animals. The bottom clip is Mix Master Mike playing about with some classic Delta Blues. In both cases, a totally new product emerges from the disparate parts made to construct them.

When the GZA pulls quotes and music from Shogun Assassin or Rhymefest takes the hook from The Stroke’s ‘Someday’ and puts their own rhythms and beats over them, a totally different sound and meaning is created out of the fusion of the original sources. Both montage and sampling are processes reliant on temporal collocation created through editing: the metric and rhythmic aspects of montage clearly correspond to hip-hop sampling’s use of looping, the scratch, the backspin, and the mutability of both pitch and beat through the production process. The kino-eye’s visual “four dimensions (three +time)” is contemporaneous to hip-hop’s audio amalgamation of widely disparate source materials.

Public Enemy’s sound is a textbook example of classic hip-hop sampling: ‘Fight The Power’, as featured in Do The Right Thing, is notorious for its sound, and described as being “…like a James Brown cut deconstructed and rebuilt again with scrap metal.” This reconstructive property is a trait shared with the montage movement: Kuleshov’s 1924 film The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West In The Land of the Bolsheviks used stock footage of American landmarks such as the White House to create the effect that the film had been shot on location, an example of the ability of montage to create a new diegetic world in the same fashion that Public Enemy’s scratch-drenched sampling of Queen’s interpretation of the Flash Gordon theme was lent to the opening of ‘Terminator X To The Edge of Panic’.

Terminator X to the Edge of Panic

Spike Lee embraces the reconstructive and generative properties of hip-hop in Do The Right Thing. He replaces montage’s position as the “nerve of film” with sound. Music is absolutely central to the film. Many of the film’s political messages go unspoken by the film’s characters, but Chuck D’s machine gun polemic to “Fight the Power!” gives the film its central message that Mookie fails to grasp before the violent climax of the film.

A concrete example of hip-hop’s supreme place in Do The Right Thing is found in the character of Radio Raheem. Raheem is defined by his music: it follows him everywhere in the form of his iconic boom box. As he says when confronted in the film with the fact that he plays only one song, Radio Raheem expresses how central Public Enemy and specifically ‘Fight The Power’ is to his character: “I don’t like nothing else.” His music and his character are so strongly intertwined that when ‘Fight The Power’ finally grinds to a halt under the blows of Vito’s baseball bat, Radio Raheem himself dies as well. The sudden silence after Vito’s baseball bat frenzy is broken only by the sounds of confrontation and eventual riot that consume the neighborhood and marks the crescendo of Do The Right Thing by drawing attention to the sudden replacement of ‘Fight The Power’ with the noises of violence, a sound design technique that is reminiscent of montage’s use of rapid-fire close-ups in the Odessa Steps sequence of Battleship Potemkin to draw attention to that film’s zenith. ‘Fight The Power’ returns only as Smiley pastes an ironic picture of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X on the walls of the pizzeria as it burns, and even then it is a chaotic rendition lacking the melody and ‘power’ of previous iterations of the song and simultaneously reflecting the destruction that defines the end of the film and reinforcing the role of hip-hop in the Do The Right Thing as the source of much of the film’s expository meaning. The Soviet montage movement and hip-hop are linked by a reliance on collocation, rhythm, and editing. Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing uses musical juxtaposition in the form hip-hop to both create and translate filmic meaning to the audience in a way that is evocative of Eisenstein’s montage-hieroglyph.

On top, Radio Raheem’s death as overwhelming sounds of violence take over, finally ending Public Enemy. In the middle, the famous Odessa steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin. On the bottom, is Vertov’s classic film Man With a Movie Camera.

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