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Spike Lee was in town last night, but his speech at USF shied away from a discussion about film. For Lee, it was all about the politics.

Lee, the independent film pioneer and unofficial political activist, spoke at the Sun Dome Corral as part of USF’s lecture series. The immutable film nerd inside me jumped at the opportunity to see the man behind such indie staples as She’s Gotta Have It (1986), Malcolm X (1992) and Do The Right Thing (1989) – Lee’s masterpiece. Plus, the event was free to current students.

Besides the occasional anecdote concerning studio funding, however, Lee did not broach his film career. In light of the Texas and Ohio primaries (occurring as the filmmaker spoke), he was understandably preoccupied with politics. He opened his casual speech with a declaration that “we could all wake up in a new world tomorrow.” Of course, Lee was referring to the potential presidential nomination of Illinois Sen. Barack Obama — an obvious milestone in this ethnocentric superpower of a nation. He explained why nominating the first African-American presidential candidate means more than nominating the first female candidate. There are simply more sociological implications. In a way, Obama’s nomination is the only event that could successfully retire 400 years of slavery, Lee said. The filmmaker paced back and forth on the stage with a tangible mixture of hope and excitement. He suffered through an exhaustive Q & A that made me ashamed of my fellow students and starstruck Tampa residents. Excuse the cliche, but Spike Lee clearly had larger fish to fry – and his demeanor showed it.

Alas, we did not wake up to “a new world” on Wednesday morning. It was Sen. Hillary Clinton who triumphed in the delegate-heavy states of Texas and Ohio. She also nabbed Rhode Island. Obama was left with one victory in Vermont., as well as an unchanged delegate lead.

Lee, along with millions of nail-biting Americans, may be disappointed for now, but Obama is still ahead in this race. Meanwhile, Lee will have no choice but to return to a kick-ass film career.

File photo credit: Danny Norton

Resident film aficionados and aspiring auteurs will want to circle this Friday (March 7) on their calendars. The 2007 Best of the Bay-winning International Cinema Series is returning with a screening of Peter Greenaway’s bizarre and painterly A Zed & Two Noughts (1985) starring Andrea Ferreol, Brian Deacon and Eric Deacon.

My first experience with a Greenaway film was in my freshman year of film school at Valencia Community College in Orlando. For a lecture on key cinematic lighting, the professor (a heavy drinker whom I later encountered stumbling over himself at a Built to Spill concert) decided to show the class The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989). I remember awakening from my disheveled morning haze with utter fascination at the movie’s vivid reds and blues. Every shot is like a meticulous canvas. It comes as no surprise that Greenaway trained as a painter before working as a film editor for the British Central Office of Information in 1965. SPOILER ALERT: Cook also sticks in people’s minds because of a scene in which Michael Gambon’s character is forced to devour a cooked penis in his own restaurant. And, Gambon’s a knight, for chrissake.

Later that semester, the same drunken professor popped in A Zed & Two Noughts for a discussion on Sacha Vierny’s cinematography and Greenaway’s mise-en-scene. The plot is significantly more amorphous than Cook, but I was captivated nonetheless. Zed is the story of a car wreck involving a rare swan in front of the Rotterdam Zoo.

Two women die and a third, Alba (Ferreol), loses her leg. The two widowers, twin zoologists Oliver and Oswald (Eric and Brian Deacon), fixate on their wives’ bodies. They slowly become obsessed with evolution and decomposition. Meanwhile, a mad surgeon plots to use Alba as a subject in his experiments with animals and Vermeer homage.

The combination of lighting, production design and bone-dry British humor reflected in the cartoonish acting and

tongue-in-cheeck musical score from Michael Nyman began to make Greenaway’s touch fairly recognizable to me. Few directors ever capture their voice and present it with such Kubrickian symmetry (Stanley Kubrick arguably being greatest technical filmmaker of all time).

Zed will be presented as part of the “Surrealism and the Avant-Garde” in conjunction with the Dali and Film series at the Salvador Dali Museum. Like Dali’s own foray into film, Un Chien Andalou (1929) (better known, unofficially, as “the one where the girl’s eyeball gets sliced open with a shaving razor”), Zed displays more attention to dream-like shot composition and experimental editing than most international cinema. In the academic spirit of Louis Bunuel, Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, and of course, Dali himself, Zed is a fine example of truly innovative counter-culture. Every snot-nosed adolescent who thinks directors like Sam Raimi are continually reinventing the cinema should trash their Spiderman trilogy and attend this event. After all, it is free.

Fri., March 7, 7:00 p.m., Miller Auditorium, 200 54th Avenue South, St. Petersburg, Florida, Free Event, 727-864-7979. English, 115 min –Jason Kushner