Film #32 among my 52 Films by Women 2017

This documentary from Belgium's renowned writer-director Chantal Akerman focuses on the events surrounding a hate crime that occurred in Jasper, Texas in 1998. An African-American man named James Byrd Jr. was beaten by three white men before they chained him and dragged him behind their pick-up truck for three miles on country roads. Pieces of his body were found strewn all along the route, and his torso was dumped in front of a black cemetery.

To set the stage for an exploration of the racial prejudice that motivated such a ghastly act, Akerman first takes on a drive through the rural south, including scenes from Alabama and Arkansas as well as…

There's some staggering imagery in here for sure (the deep focus on the woman singing in church, the prison workers). Akerman seems to be making a very loose connection to her own history of growing up around relatives who survived the holocaust, and the parallels between that genocide and the persistent racism in America. Chantal is a filmmaker of personal interests, frequently inserting herself into the narrative, and I'm unsure if it's needed here. The problem with that is that if Chantal didn't follow her interests it wouldn't be her movie. Clumsy is the word that comes to mind when thinking about South. It's too big of a topic and the movie never really sinks it's teeth into the subject…

The apex of Akerman's exploration of the way humans shape and are shaped by the space they occupy. Also the best use of talking heads ever (?) providing both the requisite historical context while also imploring the viewer to interrogate the pieces of history that aren't being touched on. In this way Akerman has sort of figured out how to aestheticize and give form to America's institutionalized racism. Trees are no longer just trees, the gas stations and country homes hide something sinister, and a sustained shot of a country road from the back of a truck asserts itself as one of the most gut-wrenching scenes ever filmed.

Its very easy to make a movie about how small towns aren't…

Very much an outsider's film, both in the almost traditional "please-explain-this-to-the-camera" talking-head scenes (which are still somewhat non-traditional in that they show the whole body and, weirdly, fade to black whenever there's a cut mid-interview) and in the myriad of long takes, be them the static shots from very far back or the ones where the camera takes a car ride around town. In endless car rides we seem to join Akerman in a search for meaning, for something among these cars and homes and woods that could crack the code of man's cruelty to man, put us on the path to solving it. Some scenes pack some of that meaning (the scene with the sheriff and with the historian…

Film #32 among my 52 Films by Women 2017

This documentary from Belgium's renowned writer-director Chantal Akerman focuses on the events surrounding a hate crime that occurred in Jasper, Texas in 1998. An African-American man named James Byrd Jr. was beaten by three white men before they chained him and dragged him behind their pick-up truck for three miles on country roads. Pieces of his body were found strewn all along the route, and his torso was dumped in front of a black cemetery.

To set the stage for an exploration of the racial prejudice that motivated such a ghastly act, Akerman first takes on a drive through the rural south, including scenes from Alabama and Arkansas as well as…

The apex of Akerman's exploration of the way humans shape and are shaped by the space they occupy. Also the best use of talking heads ever (?) providing both the requisite historical context while also imploring the viewer to interrogate the pieces of history that aren't being touched on. In this way Akerman has sort of figured out how to aestheticize and give form to America's institutionalized racism. Trees are no longer just trees, the gas stations and country homes hide something sinister, and a sustained shot of a country road from the back of a truck asserts itself as one of the most gut-wrenching scenes ever filmed.

Its very easy to make a movie about how small towns aren't…