Yesterday I saw a remarkable film about the American prison system at The Dryden Theatre. Brett Story’s The Prison in 12 Landscapes is a series of vignettes that stitch together a quiet but compelling narrative. It approaches mass incarceration tangentially, from multiple vantage points, in an effort to define the contours of a prison system that has been deliberately disappeared, camouflaged, rendered inaccessible. By painting American landscapes rooted in diverse geographies, histories and socio-economic realities, the film is able to explore many dimensions of the prison system such as urban decay, environmental degradation, poverty, unemployment, gentrification, job creation, policing, racism, injustice, the criminalization of protest, etc. By refusing to shoot inside prisons, not only does the film avoid the usual images of human beings ensnared in cages but it also decenters crime from the discussion of mass incarceration.
Inspired by the work of Ruthie Wilson Gilmore, Angela Davis and others in the anti-prison movement, Brett’s film aims to interrupt our complacency and questions the very logic of an invisibilized carceral system, a crime and punishment experiment that’s not more than 200 years old, but impacts millions of people.
As a filmmaker, I found amazing parallels with my own work. For example, the idea that documentary film is a malleable art form, not straightforward reportage, the refusal to be tied to a linear plot, the freedom to mix beautiful imagery with heavy content, the decision to discard cliched images that reinforce certain stereotypes by using alternative modes of representation, the invitation for audiences to fill in the blanks and interact with the material, etc. Much like what I did with A Thin Wall, Brett too decouples the various audio-visual components of film (visuals, background noise, voice-over, music, graphics, etc) and puts them back together according to her own ethical and aesthetic preferences. It’s a different way to construct documentary film.
After the screening, I asked her if perhaps this was a feminine way to articulate film, our own écriture féminine which doesn’t subscribe to the Ken Burns formula 🙂