Director Justin Strawhand uses every known documentary trick in the book (as well as some tricks not in the book) to translate Edwin Black’s The War Against the Weak from 600-page doorstop of exhaustive, collaborative research into a smooth-moving filmed horror show that’s shocking, inventive, and seductive in the most disturbing sense imaginable.
Black’s basic thesis — and slogan on his book’s website — ominously portends that “it began on Long Island and ended at Auschwitz…and yet it never really stopped.” “It” is the scientific study of hereditary genetics, named “eugenics” by Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, developed by American academic elitists to serve their inherently racist and discriminatory fear of the other, and eventually adopted by the Adolf Hitler, who, already obsessed with the notion of denerate peoples like Jews and Gypsies as a threat to Aryan supremacy, became obsessed with American eugenics literature whilst in prison in the 1920s, even writing “amateur anthropologist” Madison Grant a fan letter describing Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race as Hitler’s “bible.” Eugenics theory first resulted in questionable U.S. laws governing the civil rights of the blind, the epileptic, the feeble minded, and the generally lowborn, and ultimately the sterilization or euthanasia of the same. “Eventually,” Black writes, these same theories “led to the Holocaust, the destruction of the Gypsies, the rape of Poland and the decimation of all Europe.”
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On Sunday at True/False, filmmaker/blogger AJ Schnack screened the first thirty minutes of Convention, his verite-style film documenting the 2008 Democratic National Convention with an eye on the Denver locals (politicians, city administrators, journalists, protesters) who were in the mix. Shot by Schnack in collaboration with nearly a dozen documentarians (including the Oscar-nominated directors Laura Poitras and Julia Reichert, and Daniel Junge, who directed the Oscar-shortlisted They Killed Sister Dorothy), the film’s making-of process was almost as much of a serendipity-dependent feat of execution as the event captured on screen.
As his, uh, primary inspiration, Schnack cites Robert Drew’s Primary, a Direct Cinema landmark documenting the Wisconsin primary race between John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. The first American nonfiction picture filmed with sync sound, its IMDb profile reads today as a who’s-who of 60s documentary film: Drew as audio recordist, Albert Maysles and Ricky Leacock behind the camera and D.A. Pennebaker in the editing room. Time will tell if Convention’s slate of collaborators seems as starry 50 years on, but in the present it stands out as a film built out of and on top of connections made on the film festival circuit. If, in the context of the incestuous world of indie film, that hardly seems all that noteworthy, it is relevant that the production seems to have harnessed the scrappy, obsessive energy of that rather insular community and put it to the service of documenting an event that could potentially have meaning to a much larger segment of the population. …Read more
A personal documentary disguised as expose, Justin Donais‘ glastonburykids tracks a few formative months in the lives of teenage troublemakers Lucas, Ben, Dan, Tom and Dylan — known around their lily-white, upper middle class Connecticut suburb as Dub G, short for “Gay Gangsters” (the “gay” part being presumably as much of a joke as “gangster”, although the film never delves’ into the boys’ sexual lives or preferences). Consciously “influenced” by Jackass, the teens rebel against their peers and parents, and the traditional concept of teen rebellion itself, by eschewing sex and partying and instead devoting their nights and weekends to videotaping themselves masterminding and following through with a series of stunts and pranks around the neighborhood — they call it their “anti-drug.”
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