Malcolm 11 Final Scene Essay

The final scene of the film includes a depiction of the assassination of Malcolm X, and through a necessarily mediated redacted history, attempts to openly address the problems and trauma of the histoical world. Lee works to readjust and resituate spectator assumptions and expectations through constructed filmmaking, which Manthia Diawara says is necessary for spectator engagement. Set at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan, the speech was scheduled to be delivered to the Organization of Afro-American Unity, on February 21, 1965.
As a function of fairly representing the events surrounding and including the assassination, director Spike Lee attempts to maintain narrative balance in lifting written words to visual image, as he uses redacted history to sway his audience. It is difficult, when this scene is viewed individually and out of the surrounding narrative, to fully suspend disbelief – especially in light of the current 21st century political climate, and the fact that there are no true “physical” representation of the event. It is the need for suspended disbelief that pushes this scene into redacted history. Selective memory and recounting, the impact and pressures of surviving agents (incuding familial sources, the Nation of Islam and the Federal Bureau of

Ranging from the sounds of loud and supporting hand-clapping and a child's voice, to an abrupt absence of sound bridged by fearful shouting voices, colored by gunshots and the sound of spent shells clinking in their wake, to the keening of a suddenly widowed wife as a song of loss, the sound in this scene triggers what Elizabeth Alexander describes as an embodied response to witnessed trauma. Having seen and heard, through the narrative device of redacted history, the event of assassination, the spectator becomes a witness and must, in due course, empathize with the traumatic