As I wrote when I saw the film last month at True/False, Justin Strawhand's doc War Against the Weak uses all manner of visual ingenuity to translate Edwin Black's history of the American eugenics movement "from 600-page doorstop of exhaustive, collaborative research into a smooth-moving filmed horror show that’s shocking, inventive, and seductive in the most disturbing sense imaginable." The film screens tomorrow at Full Frame in Durham, North Carolina, in the wake of a recent <a href="http://www2.journalnow.com/content/2009/mar/19/hel ...
- 4/1/2009
- by Karina Longworth
- Spout
Director Justin Strawhand uses every known documentary trick in the book (as well as some tricks not in the book) to translate Edwin Black’s The War Against the Weak from 600-page doorstop of exhaustive, collaborative research into a smooth-moving filmed horror show that’s shocking, inventive, and seductive in the most disturbing sense imaginable. Black’s basic thesis — and slogan on his book’s website — ominously portends that “it began on Long Island and ended at Auschwitz…and yet it never really stopped.” “It” is the scientific study of hereditary genetics, named “eugenics” by Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, developed by American academic elitists to serve their inherently racist and discriminatory fear of the other, and eventually adopted by the Adolf Hitler, who, already obsessed with the notion of denerate peoples like Jews and Gypsies as a threat t ...
- 3/6/2009
- by Karina Longworth
- Spout
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