# 4 Little Girls (1997)

### reviewed by
David Sunga

    4 Little Girls (1997)
    Rating: 4.0 stars  (out of 4.0)
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    Key to rating system:
    2.0  stars         Debatable
    2.5 stars        Some people may like it
    3.0 stars        I liked it
    3.5 stars        I am biased in favor of the movie
    4.0  stars        I felt the movie's impact personally or it stood out
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    A Movie Review by David Sunga

    A documentary directed by Spike Lee

Ingredients: black and white photos, interviews with people, tight close-up shots of faces, Governor George Wallace standing in a school doorway

Synopsis: This documentary explores the senseless bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama on September 15, 1963 which cut short the lives of four children attending Sunday school: Addie Mae Collins (14), Carole Denise McNair (11), Cynthia Wesley (14), and Carole Rosamond Robertson (14). The bombing was a defining moment in the civil rights movement because it awakened Americans to the real nature and ultimate perversity of racist hatred. Interviews with people such as Walter Cronkite, George Wallace, Coretta Scott King, civil rights leaders, the former Mayor of Birmingham, and clergy are interspersed with photos and film clips that locate the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church within the context of the heated battle for racial integration which was occurring in Birmingham, Alabama at that time. But the meat of the story is the memories of the friends and family of the four slain girls. They're all older now, and we get to watch them during the interviews as they think back and explain things. Of course some details are crystal clear and forever remembered, while others are fuzzy or lost in time. At one point a mother stops and shows us her daughter's doll collection, which she has faithfully kept pristine for over thirty years. Another person says with difficulty, "It's not easy. Because we had put so much of this behind us."

Opinion: In some documentaries history is examined without emotion as if it happened in limbo to people we don't know - - to people who wear black and white clothing on grainy film. Not in this documentary. In '4 Little Girls' Spike Lee foregoes dramatization or chronology and instead opts to do this material as a set of interviews showing the plain and simple (or even contradictory) truth the way people remember it. As real flesh and blood folks ramble on about the people and events of Birmingham in the 1960s, the camera allows us to watch every unconscious tick of the muscles on their faces - - including the parents' and siblings' determined efforts to keep a stiff upper lip and hold back tears. Through this documentary Spike Lee reminds us that history is neither impartial nor located in the past. History is today, living life as we live it.

    Reviewed by David Sunga
    November 30, 1997

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