PMA Films: “Eve Biddle Selects”: Do the Right Thing (1989)

Directed by Spike Lee. Rated R. 120 minutes. In English.

Screens as part of "Eve Biddle Selects: Beautiful People Doing Impossible Things," a companion to the exhibition "Eve Biddle: Wonderlands."

Set on one block of Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy Do or Die neighborhood, at the height of summer, this 1989 masterpiece by Spike Lee confirmed him as a writer and filmmaker of peerless vision and passionate social engagement. Over the course of a single day, the easygoing interactions of a cast of unforgettable characters—Da Mayor, Mother Sister, Mister Señor Love Daddy, Tina, Sweet Dick Willie, Buggin Out, Radio Raheem, Sal, Pino, Vito, and Lee’s Mookie among them—give way to heated confrontations as tensions rise along racial fault lines, ultimately exploding into violence. Punctuated by the anthemic refrain of Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” Do the Right Thing is a landmark in American cinema, as politically and emotionally charged and as relevant now as when it first hit the big screen. - Criterion Collection

Beautiful People Doing Impossible Things

I watch movies to be transported to another world. Because I play with scale and color in my art practice, I think a lot about how my images are kind of impossible. No human has a hand 24 inches long. No landscape is cyan blue. These images exist in a kind of Wonderland of my own imagining — much like the fantastical plots of the movies in this series.

Each feature is paired with a short film by my partner, Joshua Frankel — another beautiful person doing impossible things.

—Eve Biddle

Do The Right Thing paired with 

Joshua Frankel’s One and the same body (2025, 3 minutes)

Frankel's award-winning hand-made animation of his memory of synchronous fireflies, encountered with Biddle serendipitously on their honeymoon, is paired with Spike Lee’s masterpiece about life on one block in Brooklyn. 

In their own ways, these films tell stories about unique individuals responding to each other, driven by forces outside themselves, coming together in a single place, on a single day (or night), on a collision course for explosion.

And both works are deeply romantic. The relationship between Mookie and Tina is one of the most sultry in cinema history.

Frankel’s One and the same body is created from 81 ink on paper drawings, manipulated with code. The sound was made with pencils, brushes and paper.