***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C
directed by Linda Ellman

by Alex Jackson I know I'm beating a dead horse here, but I think the documentary too often gets a pass as cinema. All of the focus is on the subject matter and next to no interest is paid to technique. The core audience for documentaries might be the same one Pauline Kael described in her infamous essay "Fear of Movies", i.e., the people who refused to see Carrie, Taxi Driver, or even Jaws because they "don't like violence" (read: they don't like anything that is going to take them out of their comfort zone). The larger problem isn't simply that films, on a visceral level, ought to be pleasurable or, at minimum, interesting, but that the lack of filmmaking excitement in most documentaries is intended to approximate objectivity, which is poisonous to art. "Objectivity," almost by definition, eliminates values and any perceivable human element, and once art eliminates values and any perceivable human element, it ceases to have any utility.

**½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C
directed by Keith A. Beauchamp

by Alex Jackson For most of us Americans, our view of the pre-civil rights movement South has focused more on the sun than on the storm. While Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks are an established part of our cultural history, the lynching of Emmett Louis Till has more or less floundered in relative obscurity despite being just as if not more essential to racial progress. We understand, in a perfunctory way, that those who led the civil rights movement were heroes, but our understanding of what they were fighting against is diffused and vague. So… Martin Luther King, Jr. made it so that blacks could sit at the front of the bus and use the same water fountains as whites? That is essentially all that this period of history has come to mean in a society that believes children should be protected from the uglier facts of history at the cost of retaining an ignorance of a backyard holocaust. The greatest achievement of The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till, perhaps its only real achievement, is that it provides some sort of visual record of this time and place. The film works on the most primitive level of documentary cinema: it educates you about something important that has otherwise been grossly underexposed.