Surviving Mankind

Four short documentaries, two of them Oscar nominated, are thrown together for the price of one in this latest screening from Laemmle Theaters' Documentary Days 2000. The films aren't especially related to one another, save for the fact that two of them are about the Holocaust, long a popular topic for documentarians given that the subject matter is guaranteed to stir the emotions no matter what the quality of the filmmaking is. Fortunately, one of the two, Silence, features an original take, animating the verbal account of a woman who lived in the Nazi camps until the age of five. The animation is fast and fluid, and at times recalls Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus. Eyewitness, on the other hand, suffers from a bombastic narrator who seems to think he's reading a horror-suspense novel to a radio audience. When we see an aging survivor of Auschwitz return to his ruined cell and look out the barred window, do we really need someone to dramatically intone "From a tiny window, he feels the sun, warm on his face"? And when we are informed that one series of drawings must have originated from the French section of the death camps because it features the words "liberte, egalite, fraternite," well, the word "Duh" comes to mind. The display of artwork from the camps is interesting, but better suited to a gallery than a film. On a somewhat lighter note, The Wildest Show in the South takes a look at the Angola Prison Rodeo in Louisiana, the one time of the year when the prisoners get to put on a show, taste the outside, and risk life and limb for cash prizes. Like Eyewitness, this one is up for an Oscar, but infinitely more deserving of such honors. Finally, there's Chan K'in Viejo: The Last of the Mayans, set in the Mexican rain forest and featuring a centenarian tribal elder as he relates the creation stories of his people, depicts their way of life, and envisions an apocalypse and eventual rebirth. It's a downbeat way to close things (we are informed that the elder recently passed away, and his way of life seems headed in the same direction), but, with luck, it will make people think about the lives that are eclipsed and endangered by industrialization. For this reason, it seems valuable to transpose the stories of the last Mayans with the images of death camp survivors and prison lifers, as such may inspire hope, compassion, and a sense that all are linked in the brotherhood of man.