"We do have a few problems here in Jasper as far as, uh, racial."

As an admirer of William Faulkner, Chantal Akerman was already planning to make a film regarding the American South at the time of James Byrd Jr.'s tragic lynching (by dragging) at the hands of three subhuman racists in Jasper, Texas. While Akerman seems to have taken footage from various Southern states, she makes the city of Jasper the film's nominal focus. In due course viewers hear from jaded journalists, beleaguered residents, an affable if soft-pedaling sheriff, and a number of Byrd's friends and family members. Ultimately more suggestive than informative, these talking head sequences (along with a fair amount of footage from Byrd's memorial) are intriguing…

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…

It moves slowly, on little tippy toes, but this film sneaks up on you.... and by its final scene...you have an emotional elephant sitting on your chest.

At least that was my experience.

Chantal Akerman travels to Texas and documents the milieu and the emotional aftermath of a horrible 1998 hate crime. With the film's long static shots and long pans...its like an amateur is behind the camera...until you begin to give yourself to the process and realize Akerman is insisting that we spend TIME observing everything...not blowing through the Texas countryside and black neighborhoods like our pants are on fire.

For days after watching this, I began to slow down and really look at the environment when I walk…

I feel like now, a few weeks after I've seen this extraordinary and deeply unsettling "documentary" by Chantal Akerman, "about" the 1999 lynching of James Byrd, Jr., I can start to voice some words on it.

As you would expect from Akerman, this is neither ordinary nor straightforward in that cloying, CNN-ish type of trash headline mode. It is gravely concerned with the way a road curves in Jasper, Texas — and, by extension, with the cacophonously silent history that has existed, still exists, on that road — as it is in the dimensions of a community church in which the funeral of a murdered member takes place, uninterrupted, allowed to unfold in all its un-shaped-by-plot sorrow.

Akerman is much…

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…

I am in the process of reading Isabel Wilkinson's Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, in which the author draws philosophical and rigorously historical parallels between the rigid caste system of India; the eugenics and ethnic purification of National Socialism; and the looser, economically motivated form of American apartheid. It is hard to think that the connection between Blacks in America and European Jews was far from Akerman's mind given her roots in the Holocaust.

Akerman trains her deadpan lens on life in the South, with the strict monotony (and attendant narrative economy) that she applies in the seemingly abstract exercises of Hotel Monterey. Her locale here is Jasper County, Texas. To anchor the scene throughout, she leans on steady…

Akerman's SOUTH is a crushingly effective look at racial violence in the deep south of the United States. The project seems to have morphed during filming - my understanding is she was doing a general profile of the South when William Byrd, Jr. was lynched in eastern Texas, leading her to reorient the focus on the documentary. In her typical style, she doesn't insert herself into the documentary, content to be an observer and to allow interview subjects to tell their story uninterrupted. She also presents long, contemplative shots of the landscape that are often loaded with additional ominous meaning - a pair of shots of beautiful old-growth trees is recontextualized immediately as an elderly African-American woman explains that you…

A portrait of darkness in the American South after the grim killing of James Byrd Jr.

There’s bittersweet moments of familial strength and faith in the church, later contrasted with a sociologist’s explanation of white supremacist growth through church infiltration. The deniability to hold white supremacists (and specifically their leaders) accountable is incredibly frustrating; to in turn use anarchist tactics for racist ends is horrifically disgusting and infuriating. Undeniably there is still a documentable hierarchy in white supremacist organizations... so they are not fully decentralized thankfully. Their ultimately fascist goals lead to authoritarian ends regardless of what methods they use to achieve it anyways.

Earlier on, the sober testimony of the sheriff only serves to emphasize how useless cops are.…