I’ve seen Hubert Sauper’s Darwin’s Nightmare a few times now and I like it (in fact, another public screening of the film I was partly hosting on Wednesday on the campus where I teach fell through because of a graduate student strike — a strike, btw, which I supported).
Darwin’s Nightmare is hardcore filmmaking. That it was nominated for an Oscar does not take away from its impact or importance. (It’s about the brutal politics and economics of globalization on Lake Victoria in East Africa; at the heart of the film is the arms trade and the export of nile perch to Europe.) But I have always had that nagging feeling about it.
Michael Massing (he’s the one writing those long, thoughtful pieces on US stenographer ‘journalism’ in the New York Review of Books), unpacked the film this week as part of a larger rant on what’s wrong with documentary film-making in the US currently.
Full piece in the Columbia Journalism Review here. (Its about a 3rd into the piece).
