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Documentary Thread #2


Egg Shen

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6 minutes ago, Bellenda Carlisle said:

I thought "another great one to see unspoilt" was a dodgy way of talking about Dear Zachary, sounded like a right nutter. "I spat out my popcorn lads, great twist".

Anyway it's just emotional pornography as far as I'm concerned, no thanks.

Absolutely agree with this. An important documentary in terms of what it brought into the public eye but as an actual piece of filmmaking, taken critically, it's shite.

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still looking out for the latest ESPN 30 for 30, Chuck and Tito. Cant find it anywhere?

Did find out though that ESPN has a £9.99 a month subscription service (or £69.99 a year) that gives you access to the full 30 for 30 catalogue, full E:60 catalogue and a shit ton of other ESPN films. You also get loads of live American sports chucked in like college football. I may have to pay for a few months and bings on those documentaries.

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1 minute ago, Egg Shen said:

what did you find unbelievable about it?

Unbelievable more in a "wow he went through all of this and never questioned it" kinda way. Not that I don't believe it but it showed such blind faith in one person to tell him his life. It's so tough to imagine being in that position really.

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On 11/1/2019 at 9:04 PM, DavidB6937 said:

Unbelievable more in a "wow he went through all of this and never questioned it" kinda way. Not that I don't believe it but it showed such blind faith in one person to tell him his life. It's so tough to imagine being in that position really.

What I don’t understand is why you would keep pushing the subject. I’d like to think if I was ever in that situation and was told the same answer I’d be glad I knew nothing more then the answer. 
 

an average doc with an extra ordinary story

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One episode in to The Devil Next Door, a new Netflix series on John Demjanjuk, a naturalised American citizen who, in the '80s, was accused of being a Nazi war criminal and feared guard at Treblinka extermination camp. It's compelling, and chilling in places, though so far I would say it could probably have been a single hour long documentary, it doesn't need to have been stretched out to a series. But then I could easily change my mind as it goes on, depending on the direction it takes.

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12 hours ago, BomberPat said:

One episode in to The Devil Next Door, a new Netflix series on John Demjanjuk, a naturalised American citizen who, in the '80s, was accused of being a Nazi war criminal and feared guard at Treblinka extermination camp. It's compelling, and chilling in places, though so far I would say it could probably have been a single hour long documentary, it doesn't need to have been stretched out to a series. But then I could easily change my mind as it goes on, depending on the direction it takes.

We watched the first 2 eps last night. Unsurprisingly it's pretty strong stuff & I thought the same thing about how they're going to stretch a series out of this....until the end of the 2nd episode.

 

 

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Yeah, I was just in the middle of editing my post when you'd replied, to say that I take it back, and it absolutely should have been a series.

There's some "character study" stuff of some of the key players that they could afford to lose, and they could have hit the key bullet points in an hour, but giving it more time allows them to show more of the actual trial, which is by far the most powerful part of the whole documentary for me.

I was only notionally aware of the case, so genuinely didn't know how things were going to go all the way through, and was absolutely hooked from the end of the second episode all the way to the end of the series. 

There's some distressing bits - footage and photos of corpses, footage from concentration camps, a significant amount of blood at one point - so it's far from an easy watch, but it touches on so many things...the question of culpability in something as vast and incomprehensible as the Nazi war machine, questions of what constitutes sufficient proof, survivors' guilt, the morality of pursuing legal cases decades after the fact and against elderly people, and the pressures/expectations on the immediate family.

Something that I felt went slightly glossed over and under-explored, actually, was the Demjanjuk family defence fund's connection to various unsavoury types - they discuss Edward O'Connor's past as a Nazi sympathiser, but the context I was aware of the case from was in my prior reading on holocaust denial; some of the defence fund came from the Institute for Historical Review (a holocaust denial/revisionist organisation), from the KKK, and other deniers like Jerome Brentar. There's also questions around the extent to which anti-semitism or not wanting their own pasts looked into too much might have coloured the reasons for some of Demjanjuk's associates insisting on his innocence, which admittedly was touched upon, but not really explored (for understandable reasons). I wonder if, to some extent, some allowances had to be made to ensure the family's involvement with the series. 

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A more fun new one is Rich Hall's Red Menace, on the iPlayer. Might be my favourite of the BBC4 history docs he's done - right balance of funny and informative, looking at the Cold War, and the history of American fear of Communism and Russia, with some good tangents into relevant pop culture.

Absolutely banging soundtrack, too.

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