Interesting and biting article from The Guardian’s Hadley Freeman titled “Politics? See a film instead – If you want to know what is happening in the US, forget debates. Just go to the movies” She takes Being Elmo (at this year’s HotDocs Festival) and Werner Herzog’s Into the Abyss (opening in Toronto today after its TIFF premiere, see below) as cases in point: “A more revealing look at the state America is currently in (…) is not on TV or in the American press. It is at the cinema. Two new documentary films are both brilliant in themselves but especially so at capturing what this election is about. So if you really want to know the state America is in, turn away from NBC and Fox and look towards a 69-year-old German and a red Muppet.”To my mind, Herzog is adding another chapter to his decades-long investigation of extreme circumstance with this nightmarish documentary, but Hadley sees more of a departure here:
”Into the Abyss is Herzog's most human film since Grizzly Man as it focuses more on people than physical endurance or achievement (… He ) also shows a whole community (…) and, through it, the failure of the American penal system and the near-impossibility of escaping poverty in the US when one has been born into it (…).
In the print version in the Guardian, she concludes with a different sort of death sentence: “To watch these two movies together is to watch the progressive death of the American dream, and to see it become a crippling lie. (...y)ou know a country is in real dire straits when it’s not the politicians who reflect it – it’s Werner Herzog.” I think he will be flattered though.
Read the online article here.
by Jutta Brendemühl, Goethe-Institut Toronto
