The Cinema of Mass Hysteria Sexual Witch Hunts, Here and There by LOUIS PROYECT
Made in 2012, “The Hunt” is Denmark’s entry for Best Foreign Language Film for the Academy Awards ceremony scheduled on March 2nd with all the usual red carpet, tuxedo and designer gown nonsense. Apart from “Philomena”, it puts all the other English language Best Film nominees to shame. Considering that film’s British provenance, one can state that American films continue their steep decline based on the evidence of this year’s nominees, topped off by the inclusion of Martin Scorsese’s woeful “The Wolf of Wall Street”. Now available on Netflix streaming, “The Hunt” is the first narrative film to deal with the “repressed memories” sex abuse witch-hunts of the Reagan years that inspired some of Alexander Cockburn’s best reporting. It was not the first film, however, to tackle the topic. That distinction was earned by Andrew Jarecki, who made the documentary “Capturing the Friedmans” in 2003, a film that was marred by a certain degree of ambivalence by its director. In the years following its release, Jarecki stopped being a fence-sitter and became a passionate defender of Jesse Friedman, one of the film’s subjects whose attempts to clear his name are ongoing. full: http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/01/31/sexual-witch-hunts/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
