Of course, there is much more to say about this film. The film leaves us shocked but nevertheless oriented towards the deep roots of our present crises. For me, the film ultimately responds to Greene’s warning through its own masterful balancing of the visceral with the intellectual and the historical. King and the Civil Rights movement used television in this way: Look, this is what segregation looks like these are dogs attacking children these are people being fire hosed.” He punctuates these comments with a note on the inescapable and deeply historical struggle to find the “medium of technology that will confirm your experience such that your basic humanity is recognized.” Van Jones similarly insists that new technology can now “force a conversation” as imagery of police abuse towards African Americans grows increasingly ubiquitous. Cory Greene, one of the featured voices in the film and the founder of How Our Lives Link Together (HOLLA!), sets the tone through his remarks on both the necessity of deploying imagery of violence committed against Black people as well as the perils of oversaturating screens with “Black bodies as dead bodies.” This cautionary note from Greene is balanced by testimony by others, including Cobb who reminds the viewer that “Dr. Towards the end of the film a focus emerges on the politics of the visual and use of shock as a form of reckoning for white audiences. balance the concreteness of the film’s historical narrative about mass incarceration with an insistence on the legacy of slavery, on the consistent failure of this country to come to grips with what historian Kevin Gannon describes as the “centuries-long historical process” of criminalizing and taking away the rights of African Americans. Testimonies from the likes of Michelle Alexander, Jelani Cobb, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Here the footage returns to help us see the past in the present as a white Trump voter sucker-punches an African American protestor. For example, a particular black and white film strip of a Black man being harassed and physically abused by a gang of white men appears multiple times, once in a segment that places it within its original historical context of the 1960s and again in conjunction with violent footage from Donald J.
Unlike more traditional and nostalgic uses of archival imagery where our struggles from the past leave the viewer with a smug sense of accomplishment, 13th reminds us that such imagery is doggedly immanent in our contemporary situation.
The film’s treatment of the past is energized by a sense of urgency to bring about change in the present. Much more than a survey of the history of race in America, Ava DuVernay’s film, 13th, is a form of essayistic advocacy and activism. ”The Visceral and the Historical” Stephen Charbonneau (Florida Atlantic University)