Ava DuVernay’s documentary argues that American prisons picked up where slavery left off, and it makes the case with rare clarity and speed. The music never lets a sentence sit, and the last half-hour hurries, but we came out knowing things we had not known.
The Thirteenth Amendment to the American constitution, passed in 1865, abolished slavery except as a punishment for crime. Ava DuVernay’s film is about that exception. Her argument, written with her editor Spencer Averick, runs in a straight line: the clause was used within a few years to put freed men back to work in chains, and every system since, from the chain gang to the war on drugs to the privately run prison, has been a new way of doing the same thing. It runs 100 minutes and it does not stop for breath.
It is built from interviews. Michelle Alexander, Angela Davis, Bryan Stevenson and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. do most of the explaining, with Cory Booker, then a senator for New Jersey, speaking for politics. Kira Kelly and Hans Charles film them in bare brick rooms and on empty factory floors, lit from big windows, so that clever people talk about forced labour in the kind of space it was done in. Averick cuts between them quickly and lays the figures over the top in white type. Each time a speaker says the word “criminal” the word itself appears on screen, and by the end we flinched at it, which is the intention. Nixon, Reagan and Clinton each get a chapter, and the film’s point is that this was built by both parties.
We should say plainly what got to us. Near the end DuVernay cuts recent phone footage of Black men being shot by police against archive film from the 1960s of men being beaten by crowds. We were horrified. Then we noticed something worse: we had seen most of the phone footage before, on news sites, and it had stopped registering. Set beside the old film it registered again. That is the best thing the editing does, and it is done without a word of commentary.
The chapter on how prisons became a business is the one that stayed with us longest. David Keene and Michael Hough are on camera to be argued with, and to the film’s credit they are allowed to finish their sentences. The account of how a lobbying group of companies and legislators wrote laws that filled cells, and of who was paid when the cells were full, is delivered by Marie Gottschalk and others in the flat tone of people who have checked the invoices. It is duller than the beatings and it frightened us more.
Now the complaints. Jason Moran’s music sits under almost every sentence, a low pulse that tells us to be worried while a professor is already telling us why, and between chapters the film stops for songs with their lyrics printed on screen. The effect is of a film that does not trust silence, and after an hour we wanted one. The pace costs something too. A century and a half in 100 minutes means the Clinton years go past before the argument about them has quite closed, and there are perhaps two speakers on screen for every one the film has time to let think. The interviewees are nearly all on the same side, and the two or three who are not get less room than the case deserves.
DuVernay had made Selma (2014) before this, a drama about a march, and it shows in the good way: she knows how long to hold on a face after the sentence ends, and she does it with Alexander and Stevenson to great effect. Against the essay documentary tradition, this is a lecture rather than an inquiry. It knows its conclusion before it starts and marshals everything toward it, and that is a fair way to make a film, but it means the viewer who already agrees gets confirmation and the viewer who does not gets a fight.
Watch it with someone who will argue with you afterwards. It is 100 minutes long and you will need another hour.
