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had been provisionally allocated to the liberal white director Norman Jewison, Lee fought hard to take it over, arguing that only an African American filmmaker could do justice to such a key figure in black history. While the film he eventually delivered is well regarded for its dissemination of Malcolm’s life and thought to a contemporary mass audience, bell hooks, a figure of interest to us already in this chapter, states baldly that ‘there is no visual standpoint or direction in Malcolm X that would indicate that a white director could not have made this film
depressingly, as was highlighted in a number of studies, it demonstrated the disturbing extent of the Bureau’s surveillance of individuals associated with the black freedom struggle. 20 Perhaps most pointed of all was the observation of African American filmmaker Spike Lee who, on being made aware of the more than 3,600 pages of FBI papers released on Malcolm X, reflected if that was what the Bureau was prepared to admit to, what did that suggest about what was not released, what files were destroyed and which ‘documents will we never know about?’ 21 Malcolm X continued