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I’m honored to be making art during this time. My hope is that this film has much of the beautiful art that’s coming out at this time, speaks to that in a way that is powerful, in a way that we can look back on and say this is how we felt. They are the very blood that runs within us. The film is designed to get us to that point, and those three words are more than words. And the current moment of the declaration that the lives of black people, our very breath, our very dignity, our very humanity, are valuable and matter to the world. The current moment of mass criminalization, of incarceration as an industry, prison as profit, punishment as profit. Really, it’s to give context to the current moment. We’re giving you 150 years of oppression in 100 minutes.
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The whole film is a virtual tour through racism. What do you see in these three words? What is their primary role in the tradition that your film traces from slavery to mass incarceration?ĭuVernay: The final act of our picture is all about Black Lives Matter, not as some kind of dutiful, “Oh it’s the present moment, we should do something.” Every line, every frame of this film leads you to that place, leads you to the now, leads you to the movement. Three gifted black women gave us three very powerful words: black lives matter. Lantigua-Williams: Let’s put that into political context right now. Do I think that? Or do I think what someone wants me to think of that? That’s what we try to excavate in the doc. Rethink everything that I think, challenge myself. It makes me want to really interrogate what I think, read more deeply, understand more deeply.
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The very ideas that we hold in our head are for someone’s profit and political gain. The idea you have in your head was not built by you per se, but built by preconceived notions that were passed down generation after generation. Who is the criminal? Why do we think that? Do you understand the architecture around an idea that you hold in your head? The design of it, the very construction of it is most likely not truly yours but something that was given to you. Identification, labels, how those very things have worked against us. Were you trying to create that?ĭuVernay: Yeah, absolutely. What is a person? What is property? What is an enslaved person? Is he really free? What is a minor crime? Listening to it as I’m watching it, I’m hearing emphasis on the duality, on who gets to name things. Juleyka Lantigua-Williams: A lot of the film is about questioning definitions of things and questioning the way that things are labeled.
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The conversation has been edited for clarity and length. I talked with DuVernay about her words, about her intent, and about how she came to listen so well and hear so clearly. It pricks and prods throughout the documentary’s 100-minute run time. Is it a condemnation of past deeds or an accusation aimed at everyone who is complicit? Its effect doesn’t numb the viewer. Throughout the film’s continuous reveal, a single word flashes in giant white letters on a black background: CRIMINAL. The “southern strategy” is unmasked as a political calculation that decimated black neighborhoods but won the southern white vote. The academic and civil-rights advocate Michelle Alexander unpacks how the rhetorical war started by Richard Nixon and continued by Ronald Reagan escalated into a literal war, a “nearly genocidal” one. Premised as a historical survey that maps the genetic link between slavery and today’s prison-industrial complex, 13th explodes the “mythology of black criminality,” as The New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb at one point in the film refers to the successive and successful measures undertaken by political authorities to disempower African Americans over the past three centuries. At other times it wrestles with oxymorons that target black Americans: truth in sentencing, War on Drugs, tough on crime, law and order, minor crimes. Sometimes the film confronts words in seemingly contradictory pairs: person/ property, slave/ freed person, labor force/ prison workers. The Rare Experimental Musician to Embrace the Spotlight Spencer Kornhaberġ3th, out Friday on Netflix, compels viewers to sit upright, pay attention, and interrogate words in their most naked form as they’re analyzed and unpacked by DuVernay’s subjects, who include Angela Davis, Charles Rangel, and Henry Louis Gates.