Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? premiered at Sundance in January as a live presentation, with, as Vadim Rizov notes at Filmmaker, director Travis Wilkerson “narrating a complex mixture of slides and video onstage.” Wilkerson will be on hand for a Q&A at the Howard Gilman Theater tomorrow evening (October 1) when the film is presented in the Spotlight on Documentary section of this year’s New York Film Festival.
Gun? “recounts the 1946 murder of a black man by one of [Wilkerson’s] white relatives,” writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. “Serving as the movie’s narrator—and making the expressive most of his deep, darkly insinuating sepulchral voice—Mr. Wilkerson sifts through the personal and the political, travels down eerily lonely Alabama byways and deep into anguished history. The result is an urgent, often corrosive look at America’s past and present through the prism of family, patriarchy, white supremacy and black resistance.”
Researching the shooting, Wilkerson “finds almost no information,” notes Bilge Ebiri in the Village Voice. “Even more disturbingly, he finds very little record of his great-grandfather’s victim, a man named Bill Spann—not even a grave. The film thus becomes a meditation on family and belonging, but from a disturbing perspective: Wilkerson has a lifetime of memories and records from his own family—movies, pictures, interviews, living members—but it’s as if Bill Spann and his bloodline have been wiped off the face of the earth. The director finds no solutions, offering just an unresolved, unforgettable look at a land haunted by horror, hate, and slaughter.”
Celluloid Liberation Front in the new issue of Cinema Scope:
Though at times the director appears overwhelmed by the inherited guilt, the film remains legible as an indictment of the white middle-class family on which American mythology rests, and not only of Wilkerson’s own. The film’s insistence on identity politics can also be seen as problematic, as it distracts us from the structural nature of racism and the historical necessity of slavery for a system based on exploitation and economic growth. “Black” and “white” are often framed as sectarian entities rather than antithetical political attitudes (with the former standing for resistance and the latter for oppression). “Whiteness can incinerate a whole family,” declares the director near the film’s end, “give it enough time and it will incinerate the world.” Though “whiteness” may be intended as a symbolic category, especially when pronounced by a class-conscious filmmaker like Wilkerson, the film, for more or less obvious reasons, does tend to personalize and condense racism to its symptomatic manifestation (i.e., white versus black violence). As Wilkerson’s filmed investigation proceeds, S.E. Branch’s killing of Bill Spann turns out to possibly be one of the very many in a long list of unspeakable crimes. Thus the felonious nature of racism is identified with “monstrosity” while in fact it is an (un)official privilege that American democracy has granted white citizens ever since chained Africans were imported to the U.S. as free labor.
For Hyperallergic, Craig Hubert talks with Wilkerson “about the ambivalence he sometimes felt while telling this story, the struggle of working with a limited amount of factual evidence, and how he dealt with a story that offers no catharsis.”
NYFF 2017 Index. For news and items of interest throughout the day, every day, follow @CriterionDaily.
from The Criterion Current http://ift.tt/2xFzZil
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento