8 THENEWYORKER,JULY27, 2020
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newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town ALAMYWilliam Greaves, who directed the metafictional masterwork “Symbio-
psychotaxiplasm: Take One,” made documentaries of similar originality,
including “Ida B. Wells: A Passion for Justice,” from 1989 (now streaming
on Kanopy and YouTube). Wells, who was born enslaved in 1862, a year
before emancipation, started her career as a schoolteacher. In Memphis,
in 1887, outraged by an unsuccessful court battle protesting her removal
from a train car on the basis of race, she became a journalist and activist
whose work proved vastly influential, even internationally. With inves-
tigative rigor and insightful political strategizing, she publicized and
challenged the horrors of lynchings, defended the civil rights of Black
people, and resisted the erasure of Black American history. Greaves
depicts Wells’s life and work fervently, joining excerpts from Wells’s
memoirs (read on camera by Toni Morrison), interviews with scholars
(including Paula Giddings and Troy Duster, Wells’s grandson), and his
own written narration (spoken by Al Freeman, Jr.) with teeming visual
documentation. In counterpoint with the voices on the soundtrack, he
brings a dramatic array of engravings, photographs, and printed archives
to life with great imaginative power.—Richard BrodyWHATTO STREAM
describing the scheme. The story, including its
cat-and-mouse aftermath, combines the intricate
excitement of a thriller with righteous histori-
cal outrage, and highlights the grave threat to
freedom posed by politicized law-enforcement
officials. The activists’ revelations, plus a crucial
follow-up with two of the film’s interviewees—
the journalists Betty Medsger, who broke the
story in the Post, and Carl Stern—ultimately
led to Senate hearings in 1975 (where dirty
tricks against Martin Luther King, Jr., were
disclosed). Only unimaginative reënactments
mar the fine fabric of Hamilton’s cinematic
journalism.—R.B. (Streaming on Amazon.)Red Hollywood
Thom Andersen and Noël Burch’s extraordinary
documentary, from 1996, about the postwar per-
secution and purge of Communists in the movie
business, gathers and analyzes an alluring selec-tion of film clips showcasing the work of writers,
directors, and actors who were investigated by
the government and blacklisted by the industry.
(Targeted directors included such luminaries as
Nicholas Ray, Abraham Polonsky, Joseph Losey,
Orson Welles, and Charlie Chaplin.) Andersen
and Burch brilliantly contextualize the clips
with onscreen interviews and with their own
incisive commentary (spoken by Billy Wood-
berry), which reveals the films’ hidden political
references alongside overt ones. The documen-
tarians show that Hollywood’s frankest depic-
tions of twentieth-century history—including
the Depression, labor conflicts, Jim Crow, the
Spanish Civil War, the rise of fascism in Europe,
the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the
economic subordination of American women—
were the work of Communists; when they were
purged from the studios, their subjects of inter-
est were purged, too, leaving Hollywood stuck
in politically timid conformity.—R.B. (Streaming
on Kanopy and Sundance Now.)Seberg
Kristen Stewart, armed with short-cropped hair
and spiky emotional responses, digs deep into
the role of Jean Seberg. Benedict Andrews’s
movie takes us through just one of the many
dismaying chapters in the actress’s life. The
story begins, appropriately, in 1968, in Paris,
where Seberg lives with her husband, Romain
Gary (Yvan Attal). On a flight to America, she
meets an activist named Hakim Jamal (An-
thony Mackie), and she not only embarks on
an affair with him but also starts devoting her
energies, and her money, to radical causes. As
a result, the F.B.I. agents Jack Solomon (Jack
O’Connell) and Carl Kowalski (Vince Vaughn)
are instructed to spy on her, and thereafter to
trash her reputation with leaks and lies. The
consequences for her mental health are cruel
and lasting. The film is at its strongest, un-
surprisingly, when Stewart holds center stage;
elsewhere, the focus of dramatic attention seems
to wander.—Anthony Lane (Reviewed in our issue
of 12/16/19.) (Streaming on Amazon Prime.)She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry
This stirring and informative documentary, di-
rected by Mary Dore, about the rise of the wom-
en’s movement in the United States, between
1966 and 1971, is a wise and impassioned blend of
historical clips and interviews with many of the
movement’s leaders. Dore traces the movement
back to Betty Friedan’s book “The Feminine
Mystique” and to the civil-rights movement,
with tributaries from the antiwar movement and
New Left student groups. The movie’s analytical
perspective emphasizes vast changes brought
about by small groups of women. (The Jane
Collective, in Chicago, which provided abortions
when they were illegal, is an exemplary portrait
in courage.) Dore shows the divergence between
the practical and the radical, suggesting that the
movement’s excesses cost it influence. The film’s
view of more recent events is thin, and some
dramatizations are distracting, but the over-all
portrayal, of a time of constant meetings and
conversations that gave voice to stifled frustra-
tions and united untapped energies, is visionary
and heroic. Released in 2014.—R.B. (Streaming
on Amazon Prime, Kanopy, and other services.)digression—mocking liberals and praising the
censorious—about Jews’ and Catholics’ diver-
gent attitudes toward sex. Bruce’s legal travails
ruined him, but they also nourished his art,
transforming him into an outlaw philosopher
of law.—Richard Brody (Streaming on YouTube.)
1971
This documentary, from 2014, by Johanna Ham-
ilton, unpacks a crucial but little-known episode
in modern political and journalistic history. On
March 8, 1971, eight antiwar activists broke
into a small F.B.I. office in the aptly named
town of Media, Pennsylvania, and stole files
documenting the government’s attempted sup-
pression of legitimate dissent. They then mailed
copies to the Washington Post, which, despite
government pressure, reported on the files. The
eight perpetrators were never found. Hamilton
films five of them admitting to the break-in and