Cinema 101: Spike Lee's ™ Devastating Double Dolly Shot

While Denzel’s Malcolm X rode a dirge-paced float to his own doom, Inside Man’s police negotiator takes an adrenaline-stoked locomotive. When he sees a bankrobber shoot a hostage in the head, he drops all procedural constraints and ignores all survival instincts, a human cannonball bound straight for heavily armed opponents. The double dolly shot can give “a transportive or alienated feeling,” Lee says, “depending on the situation.” Here the situation is a dissociative blinding rage.

In this bleak post-9/11 drama, jailbait Anna Paquin descends upon her high school teacher Jacob (Philip Seymour Hoffman), in a nightclub VIP booth. Lit from beneath, agleam with sweat, suffused with Molly and sexual power, Paquin floats just above the crowd like a carnal angel: visualizing both her buzzed mental state and his transfixed view. Agony and ecstasy in one.

The most iconic double-dolly shot in Lee's career. After driving past the Audubon Ballroom, the site of his assassination, Denzel's Malcolm X parks and walks alone. Shot from below, the figure becomes a living statue, hollow-eyed gaze steady as he feels himself pulled toward his imminent death. Every element works: Lee's jury-rigged camera visualizing a profound existential moment in an actual outsized life.

[Here] we have Sam Cooke singing the great song, “A Change Is Gonna Come.” In doing the research for the film, Dr. Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X’s widow, told me she felt that Malcolm knew he was going to be assassinated when he came to the Audubon Ballroom that Sunday morning. So knowing that, I said let’s use this shot. So maybe we can convey to the audience his mental state.

A small-time manager for Denzel’s trumpeter, Bleek, the gambling-addicted Giant (played by five-six Lee) is walking along when he spots his bookies laying in wait. So he does what anyone would: he levitates, floats a few feet off the ground, rotates 180 degrees, and hovers back the way he came—his shoulders bobbing in what looks like a bad mime's version of "walking." Clumsy, extraneous, impossible to ignore: Spike Lee's first exploratory riff, still seeking a theme.

In this last shot in a true-life tale of a black cop who infiltrated the 1970s Ku Klux Klan, Officer Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) and his activist girlfriend become a Blaxploitation tableau vivant. This time their surreal drift forward, like that of Washington's father, Denzel, in Malcolm X, is borne by history's momentum. No longer a film-school gimmick, the movement renders a psychic condition that's nationwide: the sense of being carried by historical forces we can't see. A breathtaking glimpse into a recurring nightmare.

Even when he’s behind the camera, Spike Lee’s still in your face. After making a splash with She's Gotta Have It back in pre-Kickstarter 1986, the Brooklyn auteur made sure his NYU film school degree got a real workout on the screen: radical angles, changing film stocks, the dipping, swooping camera of someone strung out on cinema craft. Up through his masterful Do The Right Thing, Lee seemed like a bold, post-hip-hop heir to auteurs like Scorsese and Godard. Then, about an hour into Mo' Better Blues, he just seemed to lose his mind. In the midst of this small-scale urban drama, for no reason, one character up and floats off of the ground: leaving the pavement, and film, to move along motionless as scenery rolls past beneath him. This stark break from tradition, and reality, was the first sighting of what we now call the “Spike Lee double-dolly shot”—which brought the audience to its feet when his new BlacKkKlansman premiered at Cannes. The shot has been in several Lee films, often more than once. But only in certain sublime intersections of story, character and moment, has a device Lee first rigged up on a set 30 years ago, come so close to transcending the medium itself.

Cinematographer Ernest Dickerson, and I came up with it for Mo Betta Blues. There’s a shot where my character, Giant, has to walk and somehow we came up with the idea of just letting him ride the dolly. That was really just show-offy, student film stuff. After that, Ernest who shot all my films through Malcolm X, and I decided that if we were going to use the shot, there should be a reason for it.