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Doc “Strange” Historic documentary offers University Club members disturbing parallels to today’s political climate Story and photo by Stephen Vrattos On Thur sday evening, February 25, Associate Editor of University of California’s Film Quarterly magazine, Regina Longo, paid a visit to the University Club. With her was a copy of the 1948 Civil Rights documentary, “Strange Victory,” by legendary filmmaker Leo Hurwitz. Best remembered for “Verdict for Tomorrow,” the 1961 Emmy and Peabody Award-winning film of the Adolf Eichmann trial, Hurwitz was a pioneer of documentary filmmaking, who was blacklisted during the McCarthy Era for his strong left-wing political beliefs. “Victory” was one of the industry’s earliest efforts in documentary filmmaking. Like so many of the 2017 April  ¢movies made in those fledgling COURIER  years of cinema, it was created on nitrate, an unforgiving substance; highly flammable with low resiliency, which grew brittle and TOWERS disintegrated over a few years. As such, the film was believed to have been lost. Fortunately, a copy was discovered SHORE at Columbia University, donated, along with the rest of Hurwitz’s materials, by the documentary’s NORTH producer, Barney Rossett. With the help of Milestone Film & Video, “Victory” was restored and Legendary Film Documentarian, 10  premiered at the 2015 Berlin Film Leo Hurwitz Festival, where it won the coveted Golden Bear Award, the first ever documentary to have done so. Longo’s introduction was brief to allow time for questions and discussion following the 64-minute doc’s screening. The film’s confrontational opening immediately gets the audience thinking: “This was yesterday… This is how it was… Remember?” intones a resonant male voice. Brutal images of the second world war flash across the screen, interspersed with mundane shots of daily life in America. Hitler, Swastikas, the horrific treatment of Jews in concentration camps, set against snippets of busy American city streets, coffee shops, idyllic countryside scenes. Back and forth, the images bombard the viewer, leading to the shots of the allied victory and then… peace? Abruptly, the mood shifts and the audience is transported to the birthing ward of a hospital. Gone, too, is the stentorian narrator, replaced by the friendly, upbeat tones of a woman, carrying over seemingly endless shots of newborns. Black, white, brown, Asian, infants of all ethnicities beaming and laughing; a new age aborning – so to speak – full of innocence and hope… Or is it? Horrific images recur, but this time more disturbing shots of Fascism during the war are juxtaposed with startling images of a new evil; the Ku Klux Klan burning crosses, lynchings, vandalism and graffiti filled with anti-Semitism and racial hatred. The brotherhood which developed during the war, the coming together of peoples, ethnicities and religions across the world, uniting against Fascism and Hitler’s twisted notion that all men are created unequal; perhaps the war’s only positive aspect… Where did it go? Suddenly, another blunt departure, this time to examine the plight of the “Negro” in post-war America. In the only linear segment of the film, Hurwitz dramatizes an African-American’s difficulty in seeking gainful employment. A former Air Force pilot, who fought and risked his life alongside his white countrymen, arrives at an office for a scheduled interview, only to be told upon his arrival that all the jobs had been filled. It is a poignant moment and arguably the most effective of a documentary otherwise mired in a cacophony of imagery and overwrought soapboxing by Hurwitz, beating his message over the heads of the audience. His heavy-handed usage of historic images and video footage of Hitler’s propaganda machine – so effectively utilized to stir the masses in pre-war 1930’s Germany – to drive his point across, seemed propaganda itself, the irony of which was not lost on the University Club members as evinced by their thoughtful observations and queries after the screening. “Very choppy,” University Club President Shirley Wershba asserted, saying she’d have made significant edits, tightening the script and scaling back the film’s repetitiveness. “It’s not the finest film,” Longo agreed, citing Hurwitz’s brow-beating of the viewer with his message. “It doesn’t give the audience the respect to figure it out.” Still, despite its failings, Hurwitz’s doc is believed by Longo to be superior to The “Strange Victory” poster displays a portrait of actual Tusgegee Airman Virgil Richardson, who appears in the film as an African- American seeking employment in post-WWII America Civil Rights documentary, industry darling and 2017 Academy Award nominee “I Am Not Your Negro” by James Baldwin. “I Am Not Your Negro let’s white people off the hook. Strange Victory does not,” she explained. And yet, the importance of “Strange Victory” lay not in its quality of story or production, so much as its historic significance to documentary filmmaking. Still, the eerie similarity of the movie’s themes to the current atmosphere in the world more than half a century later were shocking and not lost on the audience, many of which believed “Strange Victory” to be worthy, despite its flaws. “We lived through those times,” University Club member Claire Levitan remarked. “It’s good stuff… It needs work to be shown to young people, but it’s worthy material.” Captive audience for Speaker Longo


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