The Films of 2023

[Matt]

Frederick Wiseman’s 2023 film MENUS-PLAISIRS LES TROISGROS will be airing/streaming on PBS on March 22. As they say, “check your local listings,” because my PBS affiliate never airs this kind of thing. It will probably be free to view on the PBS app for at least a couple of weeks.

[Red Screamer]

Incident. Bill Morrison’s latest dive into the archives takes him into the world of police body cameras and surveillance footage. From a half dozen or so sources, he reconstructs the narrative of the police murder of a civilian in Chicago. If you follow documentary filmmaking, this idea has unsurprisingly made the rounds in the last decade, as footage of these crimes increases while the crimes themselves never seem to stop. Morrison’s film stands out for its effective and clear filmmaking narrating the events of the afternoon in quadrant split screen, but in its stunning accumulation of detail, it also becomes a stark statement on how the truth can be shaped and obscured in real time under the gaze of a camera. In the 1960s, the asylum in Titicut Follies proudly showed its work to the cameras, with no sense that it could come off badly. But in the 2010s, our media savvy has totally changed how we interact with the technology. Incident shows this Chicago police force immediately banding together, without a word, to put on a show in order to give evidence to a false version of events, like a group hallucination. The film suggests that body cameras haven’t made the police more careful or more accountable, it’s just made their lies more elaborate — and now “backed up” by video. It’s a chilling portrait of how cameras change the way people act, and how a powerful group can wield them like a weapon, even when they also contain the facts that can prove them wrong. The reflexive human responses of the two officers at the heart of the crime (guilt, fear, shame) claw away at their masks that tell the lie, that they were in danger, that they did nothing wrong, which they’re praying they can get away with. And, spoiler, they do: they aren’t penalized for a murder or for a cover up but for, essentially, acting against police filmmaking procedure: turning cameras on at improper times, discussing an incident on camera.

[criterionsnob]

Frederick Wiseman’s 2023 film MENUS-PLAISIRS LES TROISGROS will be airing/streaming on PBS on March 22. As they say, “check your local listings,” because my PBS affiliate never airs this kind of thing. It will probably be free to view on the PBS app for at least a couple of weeks.

Now streaming for free on PBS.