Lee Anne SchmittLee Anne Schmitt: An Anthropology of Americanism Arindam Sen July 2026 Interviews Issue 118 In the last 20 years, across four feature-length and a handful of short films, US filmmaker Lee Anne Schmitt has presented a critical portrait of American history that grapples with the complex implications of its foundational ethos seeped in private ownership, white supremacy, and patriarchy. Rather than taking the all too familiar path of isolating instances of political and structural violence that is both entrenched in and intrinsic to the country’s very being and thus piling up rhetoric, her essay films labour to provide space for critical reflection, encouraging us to probe the relational dynamics of family, community, corporations, race, and gender. In her first feature-length film California Company Town (2008), Anne Schmitt presents a portrait of abandoned industrial townships on the West Coast state that are testament to the rise and fall of the American dream. Her next feature film The Last Buffalo Hunt (2011), shot in the Henry Mountains in rural Utah where the last remaining bison herds are regularly hunted, is a treatise on White masculinity. Purge This Land (2017) takes the biography of abolitionist John Brown as its point of departure to offer an assessment of variegated racism underpinning American society. In her latest film Evidence (2025), Anne Schmitt scrutinises the deep ties between the anti-environmental policies of the American chemical giant The Olin Corporation, the penetration of conservative think tanks in education, media, and judiciary across America, and her own family history. Evidence I caught up with the filmmaker during the retrospective of her films at DOK Leipzig, 2025. We spoke about the salient features of her practice, parenthood, her formative influences, her interest in archives, photography, and landscape, the space between immediacy and reflection where her films reside, and their reception at film festivals among other things. – A.S Across California Company Town, Purge This Land, and Evidence, the average time you take to complete your films is close to five years. Apart from shooting, it’s clear that you spend a lot of time on reflection, research, exploration, and iteration. But I do want to hear you speak about the timeframe. I make my films very much alone and I’m very reliant on leave-from-work to do certain kinds of work like the editing in a really substantial way. It’s a year of research and contemplation, then a couple of years usually filming, and a year or so of editing. Editing is really kind of churning the ideas and creating these archives of material, which is when writing enters the process. So it’s slow and circular. Most of the films take about six years by the time they get out into the world. Have the research, editing, and shooting stages remained more or less the same as you’ve been working over the years? On some films I’ll film and then I’ll go back in to try and figure out if I need more. California Company Town in particular was like that where I felt I needed to explore some other towns. In that film it was important to go to the spaces and they were really spread out. It was just me pretty much without a production, filming when I could find time. But it can also be a bit circular, I usually have a first phase with a question I know, but then the question opens up and it takes me in directions where I need to go back in and research more, or do some more reading or writing. Evidence was very different. It started in the same way where I researched and had a map of places to go to and film that were mostly around industrial sites. After that it basically became a homebound film, partly due to COVID and partly because that year I realised I wanted the film to be much more domestic and internal so that the filming, the writing, and the editing were kind of constant. I was filming or kept incorporating things almost until I finished the film. The last thing I filmed was probably the books, but even during that, I filmed some domestic images. So that was a really long circular process because when you’re making a certain kind of work, it’s so dependent on what your other demands are. When I started that film, I was on leave and I had a lot of time with which I reached a certain point. And then when COVID came, I was in this deeply administrative role at the school where I teach, it demanded a lot of taking care of students. I barely had time to film and it’s a very hard film to get into. It’s difficult to deal with days and days of people’s sorrow, worry about COVID, and then jump back into the sort of dark material in the film. Evidence Also, between 2016 and 2025, the terrain has shifted. I don’t like the narrative of shock, “where has all this come from?” regarding Trump’s first term of presidency, but things did change, and people’s awareness about politics and money kept changing with it. Every time I took a break on that film, I’d have to come back and contemplate where we were at. When the first term came to an end, I was grappling with people’s willingness to be like, “oh, that’s over!”. And then while finishing the film, there was this freight train of legislation at the beginning of Trump’s second term. So the contemporary research took a lot of time and it was just a very hard film to deal with, because there was so much coming at me while trying to create a space to make work that’s not reactive. Evidence, where the research is integral, is a domestic film that talks about domestic violence and ties it up to a broader history of patriarchal conservative politics in America. The thought out interwovenness of the personal and the historical here not just puts the two things together and sees what might resonate but rather works out the grander logic of things. It is striking because neither the personal nor the historical gets subsumed at any point. Evidence is like two tributaries that came together into a river but are not subsumed at the point where they mix, I guess. It also has very much to do with the phase of life; I was making the film in my 50s, caught between contemplating my parents and my children, the past and the present, and the care required in both directions. This phase makes you question why you’re doing things a certain way. Sometimes those questions are thoughtful and sometimes they’re in the moment and reactive. There are personal narratives in the second part of the film which I finished first, the part about domestic construction and the inherent violence of gender and patriarchy. Then as I researched, the film became more historically specific and at the same time, immediate, about politics happening in the now. The research caught up and the film had threads from my early work that I did after graduate school relating to gender and construction. In the film, I also wanted to reveal another level while still making a personal film. A lot of my work uses anecdotes and subjective stories of history. California Company Town is based on things people told me. Here, it’s more from my childhood. But in Evidence they are used in a very precise way, like a layered text that is written to have a poetic resonance of multiple meanings. It’s my story, but it’s also standing in for an experience beyond that. Then the stories are refined until it gets as minimal or as spare as possible. Do you rehearse the text a lot? Are the pauses predetermined? Do you check frequently if the words go with the image or not? It’s totally integrated. I write the text. I have an outline of what I’m doing. I have embodied all the research which is why it takes so long. I do a picture edit. In Evidence, I also did a sound edit of these really critical sounds from childhood tapes and things that I knew I wanted. Then I just speak into a microphone and record it into the audio track. I listen to it, as soon as it is in the track, you can hear everything that’s unnecessary and I take that out. Then at some point, I transcribe the audio. I don’t read it, once I’ve transcribed it, I articulate it again. I keep doing it again and again until I have the sections that feel set. If it starts to rhyme too much with the images or the associations feel too clear, I’ll move it around a little. I print it out and do a tense check, because everything’s jumping back and forth. The difficulty then is in rerecording it and trying to get the same intimacy and tone. I don’t rehearse, by myself or with anyone. The act of doing it again and again creates a little bit of a choreography of the text that I know pretty well. Then, in the editing and even in the final phase, I take pauses between words, I get into certain intonations. I try to get rid of the annoying habits I have of how I phrase things. And then in Evidence, I was able to go to a recording studio and record a cleaner version. In Purge This Land I couldn’t, because that was such an intimate film. So I ended up using the one I recorded in my studio which is essentially my garage and just did another pass with a better microphone. It worked better that way than getting the cleaner audio version. I never do a separate written document, just an outline. I speak and then double check the research, making sure I’ve spoken things right. It’s a long iterative process. Purge this Land In Evidence, aside from working with texts, you also filmed many books. One can think of any number of filmmakers, from Harun Farocki to Moyra Davey, who have used the book as an image. Usually what is filmed is something that holds an appeal for the filmmakers, emotional or intellectual. That’s not the case in Evidence, if anything, the feeling towards these books is one of revulsion. They are not something you picked out of your reading shelf. Did you get them from a library and at what stage did you decide to use the books as images in the film? I did bring some books from the library but I had to buy those the library didn’t have. To use the books as images in the film was the very last decision. The Olin Foundation published those they funded, so that part of the research was easy. It was tedious and overwhelming because a lot of the ideas in the book have gone viral and have become established. I had started with the title Evidence rather early and then it was about finding traces. The evidence was in the books and there were my childhood objects, and both became archives. The books piled up in my studio. Later when the California fires happened and we had to evacuate the house, we needed to get rid of a lot of things and the easiest one was this stockpile of conservative literature. I was happy to let that go, it was liberating not to need them anymore. Did the books reveal something that came as a surprise? Initially, people like Charles Murray tried to be serious, like academics, evidencing arguments with citations and statistics. As you move through the ‘80s, even with the same authors, the books increasingly become carriers of political opinions and aimed at the mass market. From making the effort to be taken seriously, they decided to go in directly. That was a bit terrifying; there was a rejection of academics and higher learning in favour of mass media and by the end there are just book titles meant to be provocative and assaultive. They didn’t attempt a real argument. That was really striking. Changing track a bit, I did want to ask you if something from film history has been particularly generative in your filmmaking. I have a background in performance before filmmaking and I feel that they are quite similar. They are both textual and gestural, accumulating different kinds of experience around language. My first films were quite performative. But I realised that what interested me more was understanding the grammar of film and that what I was trying was better done in editing. I’ve been drawn to a certain kind of political and essay filmmaking, but also have this real core in feminist video and performance art. Yvonne Rainer is an influence in a lot of ways. I really like her presentation of texts in films like Lives of Performers and Journeys from Berlin. Then there is Chick Strand, I like how in Soft Fiction she uses anecdotes and lets it hang there as is. They’re not quotations, they have their own life. Jonas Mekas’ Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania has always been a big influence. But actually one of my biggest influences is Dan Graham’s Rock My Religion, the messiness of it. When I made California Company Town, to a lot of people it read like a structuralist film, maybe because I came from CalArts and James Benning is thanked in the credits, but I’m very much not a structuralist filmmaker. California Company Town There’s kind of a messiness to my work, a lot of the time I think: what’s the simplest next thing to do in the film? How to draw these really disparate ideas into a single thing? I love all that. I go back to that film (Rock My Religion) all the time and I love the voiceover in it, it’s completely un-practiced. Text and how they are read in film is something I always think a lot about. That’s what interests me in film. It’s also the thing that gets most critiqued: the presence of too much text to grapple with; people say that it gets in the way of the cinema experience. My cinema experience has really included a lot of textual works. Figures like Hartmut Bitomsky, Harun Farocki, or the way in which text is presented in Lawrence Weiner’s A Second Quarter were my immediate associations. I studied with Hartmut Bitomsky and Thom Anderson. Coming out of CalArts, if you’re making landscape films, people tend to think of James Benning, but it was really Thom I went to CalArts for and learned from. He helped me become the sort of filmmaker I am, the ethics that he brings to his teaching, the way he is, and the way that it comes into the films is very organic, which is a weird word for him if you’ve met him. For me, the process of making the film and the process of thinking through film is very much tied to what I’m also thinking in my life. So there’s this personal aspect to that too, and there’s a personal ethic to that. But I will say that I was in a lot of their classes watching a lot of these political films and they were all by men. At some point I was like, okay, well, I’ve seen a lot of Farocki films now that I love. But what would it be like to make one of these films? What would it be like to voice them? How does this resonate then with Joan Jonas’s or Yvonne Rainer’s work or these other histories that were so important to me, which in some ways is about embodying and claiming a space on screen? So there’s some dialogue there. Do you feel that the term “essay films” is a suitable descriptor for your practice? When I started to show California Company Town, people would talk about it as a documentary and I thought that was interesting, that’s not how I set out to think about it. How do I feel about the term ‘essay film’? I don’t know if there is a better term for the films. It does seem like the term that best describes, dramaturgically, what’s happening in the films. There are two things: the essay film doesn’t have a kind of cathartic arc that you would expect from another form, and it doesn’t have a direct association with things on the screen – you’re really associating with the voice. There are people that try to have neutrality in that voice, but it doesn’t really matter. You’re still responding to the film through the voice and it is linked to the making of the film. So I don’t know what other term I would advocate for. It’s useful to have a term when people ask you what you’re doing. I have grown used to being shown as a documentary filmmaker in the sense that the films document something that one can come back to decades later, as one often does with political films, even once the immediacy of the politics might have changed, the impact is still very different from reading an essay. Essay filmmakers, historically, along with portrait filmmakers are also the ones I feel most aligned with, someone like Deborah Stratman. Fiction-hybrid documentary is also something that resonates. California Company Town In the films, you voice a critical commentary on the corporatist, racist, anti-environmental, and patriarchal foundations of the American nation. This is something that is consistent, though it manifests in very different ways across films. From Purge This Land however, there is also an evident shift which gets even more pronounced in Evidence, the entwinements of these general concerns with the personal and the familial. How much of it can be attributed to becoming a mother? As I say in the last film, I never planned to be a parent and I never wanted to be a mother. When you’re a woman and bear a child, it’s like half your identity gets claimed for things that you’ve never had any intention of participating in. The way my partner has to carry parenthood and the way I carry it are so different. Having watched all the films this week, the very personal is actually there in the early work, like in the short film, The Wash (2005). In California Company Town, the difference in the way I am using personal experience is when I say “I”, it is to say things I have experienced in the place. In Purge This Land, I am saying why I’m doing things and why I’m drawn to things, and what I’m experiencing in this space. I am also referencing things off the screen. Making this film about abolitionist John Brown, part of my interest was in him moving to Kansas and the domestic life of his family. You can visit the John Brown Museum in Osawatomie, Kansas, where he lived with his four sons and a daughter in a small cabin during the quest across Kansas. It was just this incredible domestic space, his home that he kept returning to, where his wife was. So from there, in the film I wanted to give more credence to the consideration of the domestic and the house as a political space. I think it’s also the difference between being 30, as I was in the first film, and now, being in my 50s. You realise that you have a finite time and that the days are important. When you are young, you live in the world of ideas and crave experiences, but down the road, family and responsibilities become part of the routine, and it becomes an arbitrary separation when that is not acknowledged in the work itself. To return to Purge This Land, the real question for me was how I, as a white woman, can address racial inequity in the US, without being patronising or centring myself in a certain way. To do that, I had to acknowledge positions. I wanted to do it in a way where I wasn’t in a voiceover saying I will never understand, but rather figuring out how to do it. I said to myself, let’s give some evidence of what my position really is and that’s where I also asked my partner to dialogue through creating the soundtrack as a reference to a certain era of music. So that there was this other voice, and it had some opacity to it. Was that the beginning of collaboration with your partner Jeff Parker? He wrote some music for a very small project I did for Red Cat. Usually I hadn’t worked with a composer and I had been resistant to soundtrack music. But in Purge This Land, it’s really another voice/narration. It’s a dialogue that took me a long time to figure out. I think in Evidence, the music works in a spatial way, it is trying to create a communal setting. I don’t know if that makes sense, but it’s creating a room for people where they can be with their ideas of a certain time. The music’s huge for that. What am I offering in this room? The soundtrack, like some of the images, offers a place to hold the ideas without being overwhelmed by this barrage of information, to create space around the ideas. That was one of the main challenges in making this film, to ensure that people don’t feel engulfed by the sense of crises at the end of it. For anyone who has a child, it’s natural to talk about parenting because it’s a big part of daily life, but it is not so simple. In my case, for both my kids, my stepdaughter and my son, it’s not as if I feel transformed in a gynaecological way, it’s more about the consideration that now my time has to involve others, and that is something that makes you deeply think about community structure and priorities. Some of it comes automatically with the kid in the film, but it also comes through Jeff’s music, my film world, and teaching world. Purge this Land I was trying to estimate the emotional and psychological impact of the CCTV footage of Tamir Rice playing in the park, minutes before he was shot and killed by Cleveland police, that you include in Purge This Land. It’s harrowing to look at it in general, but as a mother, or all mothers, of a young black child in America, that must be nerve wrecking. I suppose that did have some personal resonance for you. For sure. It’s a very difficult section to watch, period. If you have anyone in your life who is a black or a non-white kid in their teens that you care about, the dangers they are subjected to by the refusal of the society to see them as vulnerable, makes you aware of the danger they live with every day. Tamir Rice was just a 12-year-old boy playing in a park when he was shot and killed. In Purge This Land, a few other moments are meant to echo that, for example, the film ends with an anecdote of a young John Brown witnessing an enslaved child being beaten; it is suggested that that was enough for him to understand the injustice of the system. There is the real embodied violence that often unfolds, but the question is, why is it not enough? How many of these incidents do you need? It was important to use the footage of Tamir Rice playing and not what comes after because I think it’s proven completely ineffective to continue to re-traumatise people by showing and fetishising these images of violence, which doesn’t change anything. It hasn’t made white culture rise up and overturn the system, it certainly hasn’t stopped the violence. It’s not that acts of violence shouldn’t be recorded for evidence, it can have a judicial presence in some cases, but in culture, I don’t think it is a useful tactic. Ezra’s (my son’s) presence in Purge This Land was only in traces. There’s one image of my partner filmed through the window, giving him a bath when he was a baby, and a few other images of care and domesticity. It gets pushed a little bit further in Evidence. But I didn’t want to make my son a character in an emotive way like some documentaries do, borrowing from dramaturgy and narrative filmmaking. That’s something I’ve never been comfortable with. I struggled with it when I made The Last Buffalo Hunt and I’ve never been driven to make a film like that again, as much as I actually liked making it. You frequently see documentary filmmakers use a subject in the way I used Terry there, and when this subject sees the film, they see that they’re being used as emblematic of the system and it’s a really painful process. Terry was aware of that too, he was very smart. When he watched the film, he felt exhausted, tired, and beaten down. He knew that none of what was in the film was untrue, but it was weird to see it so clearly. I talked to him about it, that the film is not about him, but rather him as an image in it. Were you in touch with Terry afterwards? I talked to Terry for a number of years after the film before we sort of drifted apart. He had a car accident, and it was kind of hard to track him down after that. Then he passed away, maybe five years ago. That film came out in 2011, it was in the middle of Obama’s first term of presidency and I was pregnant when it premiered. We were filming when Obama was elected and things had shifted. Down the years, we drifted away, I probably talked to him a couple of times after Trump was elected. I wasn’t going to Utah, partly because my partner’s interest in going to rural Utah is zero. It’s not something he feels safe doing. So it was harder and harder to find time to go and see my strange cowboy friend in Utah. Terry and I were really close in a weird way. But he’s also a subject. I wish he could see the new film and I’d be curious what he would say. He’d probably hate it. But I don’t think he wouldn’t understand some of it. Can you say something about the use of archival material in your films – photographs, films, paintings, radio, objects? When I made California Company Town, at some point I went to the National Archive and spent a week just exploring, a random search of things, the biggest of which was wanting the Manzanar trace. I found things in there that were really resonant, but it wasn’t systematic research, it was more trying to find objects that crystallise something, like anecdotes, that’ll hit against the other images. But not in a too direct manner or not something that loads up symbolically? I like when things are a little unexpected, like, you know, in the Manzanar in California Company Town, you see the prisoners in the internment camp doing this awful blackface routine, and you know that these moments are not resolvable as victimisation, that’s just culture and society with all the layers that unnerve and displace. In some of the paintings featuring John Brown, you can see how he was so deified, how people elevated him, and turned him into this saviour figure. Of course, he was sort of a demon who had a symbolic value which he himself knew. In the raid on Harpers Ferry, he didn’t think it would be successful. He was making a symbolic political act, and it sort of worked in pushing something that was already in motion. California Company Town I have frequently marvelled at the purely photographic dimension of your filmic compositions which always seems to stand out. What has been your relation to photography over the years? Photography was the first art that I was into, I did photography with my dad’s old camera. I did a lot more of it in Chicago and when I was in CalArts. I didn’t study photography but it always meant something to me in terms of understanding the world. The first film I shot was a performance in a large church where I wanted people to see the performer up close; a friend of mine handed me the [movie] camera and said, you know how to use a camera and this is basically the same. So I filmed a couple of rolls of film and when it was projected, it was this emotive moment of seeing the slowed down footage of the person filmed which was so different from the person on stage, and this stole my interest for a long time. Then I started videoing a lot of performances and at the same time, to become a better photographer. I was driving around, setting up my Bolex and filming. That became my thesis film. I filmed California Company Town over five years, and my year five self was frustrated with the year one self. Those were the moments where I started to stumble over and make beautiful images. That was followed by the questioning of what this was doing, especially in Purge This Land, when I was filming desolate neighbourhoods in Detroit and East St. Louis, locations that have a history of being filmed for their ruins. That is when I became very stoic in my photography. Over time I’ve developed this resistance, I’m sort of turned off by beauty in photography now. There is more of a flatness in Evidence but then I’m trying to offer people certain solace with some intentionally very beautiful nature images because nature is important. Photography is a big drive in the way I film things. I filmed everything except for The Last Buffalo Hunt where we had other photographers. I’m always behind the camera, and so, I have a really direct relationship with the images made. It is very photographic, but then something else happens to them in the editing. It’s a very complicated relationship, there are definitely images that I’m very proud of, that I feel don’t have much place in the film. Then they just live separately, not edited in. An interest in Nature and Landscapes is central to your filmmaking. Where did that interest originate? Is it after you moved to California? I’m a very solitary person. I’ve always wandered around on my own and I’ve always loved history. After moving from New York to Chicago, I did a lot of photography in Chicago and helped friends do some filming. We did a lot of site specific work there in the transforming industrial landscape in the 1990s. There were many music bands in these spaces. I was working with a performance company of seven women and we worked together. I moved to California in the ’90s, which is a lonely place and there I was in a new school and encountering its landscape. I was driving around and would visit a building or a small town, and there would be an immediate curiosity about the history of the place. For someone coming of age in the 1990s, every city was abandoning its industrial centres and those were the places you were allowed to skateboard and have punk concerts in. These places were either moving towards gentrification or just left to rot. I had my camera and I liked driving to these places, and at some point, the two combined. In California, working on my own, I was figuring out what kind of work I could make, especially since it got really hard to get funding for paying anyone and pulling people together. Evidence There are various interconnected threads in your films, for example the link between the mythical individualist male macho-ism in The Last Buffalo Hunt, to private ownership in California Company Town, to racial inequities in Purge This Land, to capitalist culpability in Evidence – token examples from a much longer list. Taken together they also read as an anthropology of American whiteness that extends centuries now. And yet one is struck by the immediate relevance of the films in relation to the Subprime mortgage crisis, the Black Lives Matter and the Wall Street movements, and nearly everything in Trump’s America. I was wondering if that is because the nature of your concerns are so fundamental, even ontological, that they always seem pertinent? Sometimes, like here in the festival, there’s this tendency to look at Trump as some sort of absolute schism, a singularity, that I find deeply problematic. It’s just another reinforcement of the American exceptionalist paradigm. The immediacy of your films is flattering to deceive, they might speak of politics in the now, but they also labour to show the relationship between the now and a longer history. I wonder if that is sometimes lost on the audience. Private ownership, American exceptionalism, patriarchy, and whiteness are kind of the same thing. When I made California Company Town, I hadn’t connected all these for myself, I don’t know if my thoughts around whiteness specifically were as clear as they are now. Looking at the films together, they kind of say the same thing in different ways, repeating the same argument of this exploitative system being reliant on something inherently carnivorous. The cruelty of this system is intentional. In showing Evidence, I was thinking that The Last Buffalo Hunt is a huge part of it in terms of the idea of masculinity, even though that film is formally very different. Evidence is a look at masculinity and its mirror image of the female, and the fear of masculinity is a big part of it. In the Q&As, certain audiences want to push all these things away from how they frame their experience, which I think is understandable but really a destructive impulse. In a room full of people related to culture, a modicum of self-reflection can’t be missing, a questioning of your relational position. How many times have you heard that this isn’t what America is about? I don’t know if that’s the right framing, because it kind of is. But it doesn’t have to be, you don’t have to accept it as permanence, you can acknowledge progress without thinking of yourselves as a progressive society. Showing the film in different countries was also interesting, audiences tend to respond with “crazy Americans”, sure, but the playbook is followed everywhere, the way in which the evangelical movement was used in Brazil or what happened in Hungary, take a bombastic leader and tie them to certain forces and it becomes a fascist movement. Back to the question of immediacy, I started filming abandoned locations for California Company Town back in 2001/2002 without much deep thought behind it. But then I tied them together and when it came out in 2008 right after the mortgage crisis, many people went, “how did you know?” I wasn’t really trying to make that argument in the film. But of course, as I was driving around, I saw the changes. I have made a couple of short films about this glut of development affecting things and so the housing bubble collapse was not a surprise. In Purge This Land, I really tried to convey that the intense period of violence against black men in America is not an anomaly. Why it is suddenly the focus of attention is a different conversation. That’s perfectly put! The immediacy is not because the films are always reacting but rather because they are concerned with structural factors at play in the story of Americanism. It’s interesting in the Q&As in different places to see how much people want to see Trump as a plague that’s come upon us. Evidence was supposed to be finished in 2020 and then in 2022, and it would have done just fine, but would have been a different film. When the US presidential elections happened in late 2024, I was about to go into post-sound for the film and I never set out for the two timelines to sync up; the film takes a historical look that started with family and gender. The post-screening conversations at the film’s premiere in Berlinale in early 2025 would always be framed by something that had happened around the time, like a new executive order signed by Trump. By the time the film showed in France in March, things had slowed down and it became a sort of historical document because by then, we had moved past what it was pointing to, the executive orders didn’t matter since there was militia on the streets implementing a racist purge. When I was first showing it, the experience in every screening was like Buster Keaton running down the hill with all the boulders coming after him, and me trying to stay ahead, which led me to think, what did I make and how is it resonating? Now it feels like the boulders have crashed and we’re at the bottom of the hill in caves beneath the ground and everything is buried, people are overwhelmed and can’t even keep track of what happened the night before. The reverse of that was when The Last Buffalo Hunt came out in 2012 and people said that we are in a post-racial society and the film is really mean towards the men in the film. That reaction left me in disbelief. The narrative of reclaiming the white male culture from the forgotten men in the middle of the country and the working class was central to J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy when it came out a few years later. Eighth graders were made to read it and it was the entry book for college freshmen. The films are not meant to be revelatory in a banal way, they encourage critical thinking, which is where the power of the films lie. A lot of the things that might seem revelatory, like the power of dark money, have already been exposed for 10-15 years, it’s been in the mainstream. If someone wants to read about how dark money works in the US, I can definitely recommend texts. In a film like Evidence, it was about tying it to specific things such as family and control.
