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      ‘Scout’s Honor’ Review: Uncovering a History of Abuse

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      This documentary, subtitled “The Secret Files of the Boy Scouts of America,” unveils the legacy organization’s habit of covering up cases of sexual abuse.Almost three years ago, ahead of a bankruptcy court deadline, more than 82,000 people came forward with sexual abuse claims against the Boy Scouts of America. The mostly male survivors were of all ages and came from every state. Some of them had kept mum for decades.“Scouts Honor: The Secret Files of the Boy Scouts of America,” directed by Brian Knappenberger and streaming on Netflix, is essentially a walk-through of the monumental case. A solid chunk of its running time is spent with Michael Johnson, a former director at the Boy Scouts who has since become an outspoken critic of its youth protection practices. As the film tracks the organization’s history of abuse and cover-ups, Johnson recounts hitting brick walls during his efforts to reform the system.News-based passages remind viewers about the organization’s wholesome image, as well as its links to the Catholic and Mormon Churches. Bland archival footage supports the history lesson, and the film pans across enough headlines to populate a Sunday paper.Knappenberger does, thankfully, make space for survivors to share their own accounts, and their vulnerability lends authority to an otherwise anonymous film. At one point, a middle-aged man laments not having the chance to tell his late mother about the abuse he endured as a child. These are heart-wrenching moments. Unfortunately, the film fails to build on them, leaving the culture of shame and stigma that muzzled these men to hover in the air, unexplored.Scout’s Honor: The Secret Files of the Boy Scouts of AmericaNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Two Documentaries on School Integration Offer New Views of an Old Problem

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      Premiering in September, the films take very different looks at what has and hasn’t changed in the almost 70 years since Brown v. Board of Education.You most likely know that the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education ruled that racial segregation in U.S. public schools was unconstitutional. You may also know that the decision ordered states to desegregate “with all deliberate speed.”Less talked about is the 1969 decision in Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, which, after years of obstruction by many states through the 1950s and 60s, ordered that racially segregated schools must immediately desegregate. In other words: You know what we said back in 1954? We actually meant it.Black and white students rode the bus together as Black students from the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston were bused to mostly white enclaves of South Boston.Associated PressSome of the ramifications and subsequent events are captured in two complementary documentaries from the PBS “American Experience” series. “The Busing Battleground,” directed by Sharon Grimberg and Cyndee Readdean, explores the long buildup to and catastrophic results of busing in Boston, by which students were bused to schools outside their neighborhoods in an effort to desegregate the public school system. Busing saw the city explode in violence and exposed the ferocity with which residents were willing to defends ethnic neighborhood borders. It premieres on Sept. 11.“The Harvest,” produced by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Douglas A. Blackmon and the Oscar-nominated filmmaker Sam Pollard, takes Blackmon back to the small Mississippi town where he grew up, where he was part of the first local class of integrated students to matriculate from first grade to high school. It premieres on Sept. 12.The films arrive at a time when many of the hard-fought gains of desegregation have been reversed and when some schools, according to a report released in May by the U.S. Department of Education, are more segregated than they were before courts intervened. Both underscore what has changed — and what hasn’t — in the almost 70 years since Brown while also questioning tidy presumptions.“These two stories are in conversation with each other,” said Cameo George, the executive producer of “American Experience.” “In some ways they’re almost counterintuitive, because we are all accustomed to thinking that integration in the South was violent, and in the North communities were much more open and progressive. By putting the films together, it just challenges your assumptions in a really interesting way.”Both films also grapple with an unavoidable question: Why has the process been so difficult?Today, when segregation is rife in even some of the country’s most ostensibly liberal enclaves, the reasons aren’t always plain or openly acknowledged. In the decades following Brown, they were often pretty overt. A lot of white parents, in the supposedly enlightened North as well as the historically segregated South, were willing to go to great lengths to keep their children away from their Black peers. And a lot of politicians were happy to help them make it so.When many people think about segregated facilities — schools, water fountains, restrooms — they think about the Jim Crow South. But “The Busing Battleground” shows just how determined many white citizens were to keep Boston schools segregated, particularly in the largely Irish enclaves of South Boston and Charlestown.Many teens and parents hurled bricks, bottles, rocks and racist insults at the buses bringing Black students to South Boston High School in 1974. Donald Preston/The Boston Globe, via Getty ImagesThese were self-enclosed neighborhoods that didn’t cotton to change, or to Black people. “The Busing Battleground” shows how Black Bostonians, led by the tireless Ruth Batson, tried to integrate the city’s schools by way of the ballot box, direct action and the courts. The white people in power, led by Louise Day Hicks, then the head of the Boston School Committee, stonewalled and riled up public support for the status quo.“All the liberal, white, ‘Oh, that stuff happens in the South, we’re so progressive’ stuff just got thrown right out the window,” Readdean said in a video this month. “Nobody was progressive anymore.”Grimberg, on the same video call, added: “Our hope is that people see this as an important Northern civil rights story. We’ve heard lots of Southern stories, but this is a story of a very long, protracted struggle for educational rights for Black kids in the North.”By 1974, when the Federal judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. mandated the integration of Boston schools by busing, the tension had long been building. Images captured from the first days of busing, when Black students from Roxbury came to South Boston High School, remain disorienting in their violence. Many teens and their parents hurled bricks, bottles and rocks at the buses — and hurled the N-word with abandon. As you watch, you have to keep reminding yourself that this is a Northern city in the 1970s.One of the most potent and memorable images of the period, a Pulitzer-winning photo by Stanley Forman, shot during a Bicentennial protest by white high schoolers against busing, shows a Black attorney and civil rights activist, Ted Landsmark, being held by a couple of white protesters while another moves to assault him with an American flag. Landsmark is interviewed in the film, describing how he feared for his life on that day.“The Harvest,” too, features an image from Bicentennial commemorations, this one from Blackmon’s small hometown, Leland, Miss. The home movie shows a festive and peaceful parade through downtown, with Black and white Cub Scouts stepping in unison while a band, which includes a young Blackmon, marches along.As seen in “The Harvest”: Striking sharecroppers camped out in Washington, across from the White House, in 1966 after being kicked off their land near Leland, Miss.Scherman Rowland/UMass AmherstThe integration of Leland public schools wasn’t always so idyllic, as the film makes clear. But compared to what was happening in Boston, which one observer describes as “up South,” the Leland process was indeed a stroll down the street.Blackmon, who is white, was part of Leland’s class of 1982, the first integrated group of students to matriculate through the town’s public schools. (He did his senior year in another town after his father got a new job.) He recalled an upbringing defined by interracial friendships at school that generally didn’t carry over after the final bell rang — when, for instance, he wanted to play G.I. Joe dolls with his Black friends, and parents on both sides of the racial divide discouraged it.What he didn’t realize then was that the new private schools popping up after the 1969 Supreme Court decision were organized largely by White Citizens’ Councils — essentially white-collar versions of the Ku Klux Klan — with secret covenants to exclude Black teachers and students. Beneath the placid surface, Leland’s schools were resegregating.“There really was this overt plan to create a whole new system of schools, and to try to extract, if possible, all white kids from the public schools and then to actively undermine those schools,” Blackmon said from a family lake house in South Carolina. “But Leland was different in that it avoided some of that incredibly rough stuff that did happen in some other places in the South, and that we certainly saw in Boston.”Blackmon and his co-producer, Pollard, who is Black, worked together previously on the 2012 documentary adaptation of Blackmon’s 2009 book “Slavery by Another Name,” an account of the Jim Crow-era convict leasing system, for which he won a Pulitzer. It made sense to have a racially integrated creative team for such a contentious story. The makers of “The Busing Battleground” also found this to be the case.“It was valuable to have the two of us on this project,” Readdean, who is Black, said. “Sometimes, especially because the subject’s so raw for the people that lived through it, some of the whites maybe were more forthcoming talking to Sharon than they would have been with me. We wanted interviews with truthful recollection, not something where they’re trying to be all P.C.The Leland High School basketball team, as seen in the 1979 yearbook. The journalist Douglas A. Blackmon is at the far left in the back row.Leland School District“I felt the same way when we were talking with the Black participants, that they could just reveal what they wanted to reveal talking to me.”Both films come to the same unfortunate if inevitable conclusion: The schools of Boston and Leland have largely resegregated since the ’70s, with many white families fleeing to private or parochial schools, or to the suburbs. But Blackmon found some silver linings in the lives of his Black former classmates, some of whom left and came back to fill key municipal positions.One, Jessie King, is now the school district’s superintendent, at a time when Mississippi’s public schools are on the upswing. Another, Billy Barber, is police chief.They are the better part of the harvest that gives the film its title, residents who seized new opportunities and then gave back to the community where they were raised. They’re a reminder that not all of the purpose and intent that accompanied the integration of Leland schools have faded.“At a very fundamental level, the lesson and the takeaway is that you reap what you sow,” said George, the executive producer. “If you want a better educated population, and you want kids to graduate with not just academic skills, but personal skills, so that they can become productive members of the work force and productive members of society, you have to invest in that. It doesn’t just happen.” More

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      Nancy Buirski, Award-Winning Documentary Filmmaker, Dies at 78

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      She won Emmy and Peabody Awards for “The Loving Story,” about a Virginia couple’s successful challenge to a ban on interracial marriage.Nancy Buirski, an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning documentary filmmaker whose eye was honed as a still photographer and picture editor, died on Wednesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 78.The cause had not yet been determined, her sister and only immediate survivor, Judith Cohen, said.After founding the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in 1998 at Duke University in Durham, N.C., and directing it for a decade, Ms. Buirski (pronounced BURR-skee) made her own first documentary, “The Loving Story,” in 2011.The film explored the case of Mildred and Richard Loving, who faced imprisonment because their interracial marriage in 1958 was illegal in Virginia. (She was part-Black and part-Native American, and he was white.)Their challenge to the law resulted in a landmark civil rights ruling by the United States Supreme Court in 1967 that voided state anti-miscegenation laws.The documentary, directed by Ms. Buirski, won an Emmy for outstanding historical programming, long form, and a Peabody Award. It premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York and made its television debut on HBO during Black History Month in 2012.“Drawing from a wealth of stunning archival footage,” Dave Itzkoff wrote in The New York Times. “‘The Loving Story’ recreates a seminal moment in history in uncommon style, anchoring a timely message of marriage equality in a personal, human love story.”Richard and Mildred Loving in “The Loving Story,” Ms. Buirski’s documentary about that Virginia couple’s successful challenge to a ban on interracial marriage during the Civil Rights era.Grey Villet, via Barbara Villet/Icarus FilmsMs. Buirski went on to seek more stories to tell, drawing on a wide range of voices and experiences.“Nancy was a completely original thinker and a visionary,” her frequent collaborator and producer, Susan Margolin, said in an email. “With every film she pushed the limits of the art form with her kaleidoscopic, unique approach to storytelling.”Ms. Buirski directed, co-produced and wrote “Afternoon of a Faun” (2013), about the ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq, who contracted polio while on tour in 1956; and “By Sidney Lumet” (2015), about the acclaimed filmmaker, both of which were broadcast by PBS on “American Masters.”She also directed, co-produced and wrote “The Rape of Recy Taylor” (2017), about the 1944 kidnapping of a Black woman by seven white men. Despite their confessions, they were never charged, although in 2011 the Alabama Legislature apologized for the state’s failure to prosecute her attackers.The critic Roger Ebert called the film “a stiffing, infuriating marvel,” and it was awarded a human rights prize at the 74th Venice International Film Festival.Ms. Buirski went on to direct, co-produce and write “A Crime on the Bayou” (2021) about a 1966 altercation sparked by school integration, and “Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy” (2023), which explores John Schlesinger’s 1969 film starring Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman.She was also a special adviser to “Summer of Soul” (2021), Questlove’s Academy Award-winning concert-film documentary, based on rediscovered footage, about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival.Years earlier, as a picture editor on the international desk at The New York Times, Ms. Buirski was credited with choosing the image that won the newspaper its first Pulitzer Prize for photography, in 1994.After seeking a photograph to accompany an article on war and famine in southern Sudan, she choose one by Kevin Carter, a South African photojournalist, of an emaciated toddler collapsing on the way to a United Nations feeding center as a covetous vulture lurked in the background.Ms. Buirski commended the photo to Nancy Lee, The Times’ picture editor at the time. She then proposed it, strongly, for the front page, because, she recalled telling another editor, “This is going to win the paper’s first-ever Pulitzer Prize for photography.”The photograph ended up appearing on an inside page in the issue of March 26, 1993, but the reaction from readers, concerned about the child’s fate, was so strong that The Times published an unusual editors’ note afterward explaining that the child had continued to the feeding center after Mr. Carter chased away the vulture.The picture won the Pulitzer in the feature photography category. (Mr. Carter died by suicide a few months later at 33.)Ms. Buirski was born Nancy Florence Cohen on June 24, 1945, in Manhattan to Daniel and Helen (Hochstein) Cohen. Her father was a paper manufacturer.After graduating from New Rochelle High School in Westchester County, she earned a bachelor’s degree from Adelphi University in Garden City, N.Y., in 1967.She worked as an editor for the Magnum photo agency before joining The Times.As a photographer she produced a book of 150 images titled “Earth Angels: Migrant Children in America” (1994), which vividly captured the children of migrant farmworkers at work during the day and attending school at night and dramatized the hazards they faced from poor housing, harsh working conditions and exposure to pesticides.Her marriages to Peter Buirski and Kenneth Friedlein ended in divorce. More

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      Overlooked No More: Chick Strand, Pioneering Experimental Filmmaker

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      Often turning her lens on women, she emerged as one of independent cinema’s fiercest proponents on the West Coast.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.In Chick Strand’s 1979 film “Soft Fiction,” five women speak openly to the camera about their sexual histories, including one who describes being molested by her grandfather. As she talks, images of her performing household activities like cooking breakfast appear in splintered frames and enigmatic shapes.“It is a film about women who win,” Strand explained in a 1998 interview with the conceptual artist Kate Haug for the journal Wide Angle. “It is not about women who were victims or who had survived.”“They carry on,” she added, and by doing so they become “more potent, more powerful, more of themselves.”In “Femme Experimentale,” a research paper based on her interviews with several pioneering female filmmakers, Haug wrote that Strand’s “experimental techniques” in that 55-minute film disrupted “the visual codes of documentary film” with its “poetic transitions between narrators.”“Soft Fiction,” which is regularly screened in university film programs, retrospectives and museums around the world, was one of dozens of movies made by Strand, an experimental filmmaker who often trained her lens on women. Among the others were “Anselmo and the Women” and “Fake Fruit Factory,” both from 1986.Strand was a late bloomer by the standards of her day: She didn’t make her first film until she was 34. But she would go on to have momentous impact on the West Coast’s experimental film movement.A still from Strand’s film “Fake Fruit Factory” (1986), about women who work in a factory making wooden fruit.Canyon Cinema Foundation“She rejects the classification of ‘feminist artist,’” the film scholar Gene Youngblood told The Santa Fe New Mexican in 1999, when some of Strand’s films were being shown at the College of Santa Fe. “And yet she has produced some of the most memorable portraits of female characters in the history of cinema.”Though she never achieved the same level of fame as contemporaries like Barbara Hammer and Shirley Clarke, scholars say her work was just as groundbreaking.Chick Strand was born Mildred Totman on Dec. 3, 1931, in Berkeley, Calif., to Russel and Eleanor Totman. Her father was a bank teller, her mother a homemaker. (Chick was a nickname given to her by her father).She first developed an interest in film while studying anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. By then she had already dabbled in photography.In the 1960s, inspired by the growing free speech movement, Strand began hosting makeshift screenings in her backyard with her first husband, Paul Anderson Strand, an artist, and the experimental film impresario Bruce Baillie. These “happenings,” as they called them, were intended to showcase highly personal, often esoteric audiovisual experiments among friends. As word spread, they quickly became carnivalesque productions, with Strand, Baillie and other regulars dressing in costumes and performing live while the films were shown to an increasingly large group of strangers.A still from Strand’s “Soft Fiction” (1979), in which five women speak openly to the camera about their sexual histories.Canyon Cinema FoundationIn 1961, she founded The Canyon Cinemanews, a journal for local filmmakers that Stanford University called “the main organ of the independent filmmaking community” when it purchased the journal’s archives in 2010. The journal offered what it described as “a cornucopia of announcements, letters, classifieds, how-to information, call-outs and more” for local filmmakers who lacked access to Hollywood.In 1966, the same year she began studying ethnography at the University of California, Los Angeles (and the same year her son, Eric, was born), Strand presented a three-minute short, “Angel Blue Sweet Wings,” at the New York Film Festival. The film captured the luminous, psychedelically colored landscape of Strand’s second home, in Mexico, through a roaming, almost dancing camera, with the faces of her friends collaged seamlessly over fuzzy bodies, plants and mountains. It was described as “an experimental film poem in celebration of life and visions” by the Film-Makers’ Cooperative.In 1967, Strand helped start the Canyon Cinema collective with Baillie and the filmmakers Lawrence C. Jordan, Robert Nelson, Lenny Lipton and Ben Van Meter. The organization — part pop-up cinematheque, part artists’ cooperative — distributed experimental films by now-famous directors like Hammer, Clarke and Peggy Ahwesh. Canyon Cinema later became a full-time nonprofit, with many of its members’ works incorporated into the National Film Registry.By then Strand and her second husband, Neon Park, the artist known for his imaginative album covers, were splitting their time between California and Mexico. In Mexico, she began to explore assemblage and ethnography more formally in her art, resulting in several works now considered landmarks of West Coast cinema, including “Fake Fruit Factory,” about women who work in a factory making wooden fruit.“I’d be tripping over the rocks and speaking this terrible Spanish,” Strand told L.A. Weekly in 2006. “But I was so incredibly interested, and people really responded.”Strand with her second husband, the artist Neon Park. They split their time between homes in California and Mexico.Canyon Cinema FoundationStrand then delved into what would become perhaps her best-known work: a 20-year trilogy of ethnographic films on the life of Anselmo Aguascalientes, a poor Mexican Indian tuba player. The first of these, “Anselmo” (1967), about his music, “represents an early example of Chick Strand’s abiding interest in documenting people, objects, animals and events through a heightened and poetic subjectivity, while at the same time using assemblage techniques that allow her to incorporate disparate, sometimes jarring elements,” Maria Pramaggiore, a professor of media studies at Maynooth University in Ireland, wrote in an essay, “Chick Strand’s Experimental Ethnography,” published in the book “Women’s Experimental Cinema” (2007).The techniques used in “Anselmo” — and later in “Cosas de Mi Vida” (1976), about Anselmo’s life, and “Anselmo and the Women,” about his wife and mistress — would, Pramaggiore noted, become hallmarks of Strand’s documentary practice.Another key work, “Kristallnacht” (1979), was more technical, using the whites and blacks of 16-millimeter film negatives to craft a luminous existential tribute to Anne Frank. In that film, reflections play across shots of women swimming in a pool of water, sparking glimmers in the chiaroscuro darkness of each inverted image.Throughout her filmmaking career, Strand taught at the film arts program at Occidental College in Los Angeles, ultimately becoming the program’s director. She retired in 1996 but continued to produce groundbreaking experiments in film in her twilight years. As she told L.A. Weekly a decade into retirement: “I’m very satisfied creating works of art. I can’t seem to keep my mind from doing this, from painting or planning new films. It’s just what I love to do.”Strand died of cancer on July 11, 2009, at 77. But she lived long enough to see 350 of her personal items permanently entered into the Motion Picture Academy’s Film Archive in 2007. More

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      ‘We Kill for Love’ Review: Soft-Core Erotica of the VCR Years

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      This documentary explores a narrow genre of direct-to-VHS soft-core thrillers that found a niche with the advent of video rentals and home viewing.If “Boogie Nights” had a villain, it was videotape. For the characters, the arrival of that technology put an end to a golden age of pornographic movies and spoiled the illusion that they were making art.The documentary “We Kill for Love” counters that the home video market inaugurated a heady era of its own: not a renaissance of hard-core porn, but the boom in direct-to-VHS soft-core that peaked in the 1990s, thanks in part to demand at outlets like Blockbuster, which at least officially shunned anything rated NC-17.These movies had a parallel production system, an alternate universe of stars (Shannon Tweed, Joan Severance) and titles that the documentary likens to a magnetic-poetry kit of recurring adjective-noun combinations: “Dangerous Obsession,” “Criminal Passion,” “Inner Sanctum 2.” As the film notes in a funny sequence, the industry also complicated life for archivists by recycling cover art and altering names.“We Kill for Love,” subtitled “The Lost World of the Erotic Thriller” — and wittily billed not as “a film by” but “a video by” its director, Anthony Penta — makes clear that it’s primarily interested in this semi-forgotten subculture and its product, much of which never reached DVD. Enduring mainstream smashes like “Fatal Attraction” and “Basic Instinct” might have similar subject matter, but they don’t quite count.Both of those films come in for analysis, though, with the “Fatal Attraction” screenwriter James Dearden particularly thoughtful in an interview. Somewhat contradictorily, “We Kill for Love” tries to elevate its catalog of Grade-Z erotica to an ostensibly rightful place beside those hits — and even into the canon, alongside Hitchcock, “Double Indemnity” and “Dressed to Kill.” The documentary deftly mixes interviews with vintage-noir scholars like James Ursini and Alain Silver with observations by veterans of direct-to-video productions. The actress Monique Parent says her output was so prolific in the 1990s that she can’t always remember which movie is which.These films certainly offer fodder for academics. “We Kill for Love” notes that they could only flourish once private viewing became possible, and that distribution through video stores enabled filmmakers to recoup their costs. Nina K. Martin, the author of “Sexy Thrills: Undressing the Erotic Thriller,” argues that these neglected movies pay more attention to women: “If we only had films like ‘Jade,’ ‘Fatal Attraction,’ ‘Basic Instinct,’ ‘Body of Evidence,’ then we would just think that women were these sexual creatures — dangerous, deadly, mysterious — and that men had to somehow be careful of them or tame them.”Despite a game effort to vouch for the aesthetic vision of the director Zalman King (“Red Shoe Diaries”), whose daughter Chloe King appears here as a frequent commentator, the dialogue, acting and mise-en-scène in the clips does not support the notion of a lost universe of classics, or even a cycle rich enough to sustain 163 minutes of close reading — a soft-core companion to Thom Andersen’s great cinematic essay “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” a template that “We Kill for Love” intermittently evokes. Many of the sociological insights — about the tropes used to signify wealth and status, for instance — could apply to Hollywood equivalents.Still, there’s something tough to resist about how “We Kill for Love” rescues works from the shadows.We Kill for LoveNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 43 minutes. Available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      Documentaries to Stream Now: ‘Primary,’ ‘4 Little Girls’ and More

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      This month’s picks include a look back at a presidential primary, a remembrance of the victims of a hate crime and an intriguing visit to a Northwest Atlantic island.The proliferation of documentaries on streaming services makes it difficult to choose what to watch. Each month, we’ll choose three nonfiction films — classics, overlooked recent docs and more — that will reward your time.‘Primary’ (1960)Stream it on the Criterion Channel and Max. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play and Vudu.The run-up to the presidential primary season is (somehow, already) underway. To see how different the nominating process once was, get a look at Robert Drew’s pioneering documentary.The film has to be watched through the prism of its time. Doubly disorienting, it is a chronicle of the 1960 Democratic presidential primary in Wisconsin at a point when the majority of states did not yet hold primaries; it is also a fly-on-the-wall documentary from a moment when that form — made possible by the increased portability of cameras and sound equipment — was brand-new. While sitting in the room with John F. Kennedy, then the junior senator from Massachusetts, as he receives news of election returns may seem like the sort of sight you could easily catch on TV today, in 1960 it was an innovative, close-range portrait, offering “an intimate view of the candidates themselves,” as the film’s opening narration puts it.Kennedy ran against his fellow senator Hubert H. Humphrey, of Minnesota, who during the events of “Primary” was campaigning only one state away from his home turf. His advantage is said to be with rural voters; Kennedy has strength in cities. The barnstorming seems oddly wholesome and congenial by today’s standards. The film shows Humphrey pitching a room of farmers on how the Senate votes he’s taken aren’t popular in Boston or New York. Elsewhere, cheering crowds greet Kennedy and sing along with his campaign song, a reworked version of Frank Sinatra’s “High Hopes.” And although much of “Primary” consists of speeches and handshaking, it gives the sense of having captured the national conversation in microcosm. Some voters express the fear that Kennedy’s Catholicism would influence his politics. One woman says she favors him precisely because he is Catholic.Drew, who takes a “conceived & produced” credit as opposed to calling himself a director, went on to make other films with Kennedy, such as “Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment,” which followed the Kennedy administration’s actions to support the integration of the University of Alabama in 1963. “Primary” may end with its two candidates on roughly even national standing from where they started, but it inaugurated the direct-cinema movement. People who worked on it — including Albert Maysles and D.A. Pennebaker as cameramen — went on to make groundbreaking documentaries of their own.‘4 Little Girls’ (1997)Stream it on Max. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play and Vudu.A memorial plaque honoring the subjects of Spike Lee’s documentary “4 Little Girls.”David Lee/HBONext month will mark 60 years since the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., an act of terrorism that killed four girls. Their deaths, Walter Cronkite says in an interview in Spike Lee’s moving documentary, became an “awakening” for Americans who had, until that point, failed to understand “the real nature of the hate that was preventing integration.”Lee’s documentary, edited by Sam Pollard (“MLK/FBI”), leads by honoring the victims. The film opens with Joan Baez singing “Birmingham Sunday,” written in response to the bombing, over images of the graves and faces of the four girls, Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Rosamond Robertson and Cynthia Wesley. We then hear recollections from friends and family members who knew them. McNair’s parents, Maxine and Chris, recall how painful it was to explain to Denise, at around age 6 (she died at 11), why she wasn’t allowed to order from a lunch counter. A friend of Wesley’s, Dr. Freeman A. Hrabowski III, remembers Wesley’s sense of humor and kindness, and how they parted with the words “see you Monday,” not knowing what that Sunday would bring.“4 Little Girls” also features interviews with civil rights leaders like the Rev. Andrew Young and the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, who walks viewers through how he barely survived another bombing in 1956. (The commentators, billed as “witnesses” in the credits, include Howell Raines, the executive editor of The New York Times from 2001 to 2003, who wrote extensively about the events.)But almost unavoidably, Lee’s most memorable interview is with the former Alabama governor George Wallace, a proud segregationist who now claims that his “best friend is a Black friend.” He insists on bringing his aide, Eddie Holcey, before the camera. “Ed come over here, just one minute,” he says. “Here’s one of my best friends right here.” Holcey, whom Wallace barely seems to look at directly, and who glances offscreen to make a sort of eyeroll, appears profoundly irritated at how Wallace is using him.‘Geographies of Solitude’ (2023)Rent it on Apple TV, Google Play and Vudu.The naturalist Zoe Lucas first visited Sable Island — a beachy strip that is less than one mile wide, and that lies 100 miles off the coast of mainland Nova Scotia — in 1971. Since then, she has become a tireless and largely solitary cataloger of life on the island: its hundreds of wild horses, its invertebrates and its seabirds, among other animals. She is heard discussing the possibility of finding species that don’t exist anywhere else. The diets of the birds, who have a tendency to eat plastic, are one indicator of levels of pollution in the ocean, another trend that Lucas tracks.In “Geographies of Solitude,” the filmmaker Jacquelyn Mills, while not a naturalist (to be fair, she is credited as director, editor, cinematographer, sound recordist and producer), takes an approach to this documentary that is, in its way, similar to Lucas’s. Both women see boundless possibilities in the island’s treasures. Mills draws on natural elements to make cameraless short films that wouldn’t be out of place in a Stan Brakhage retrospective. With a contact microphone, she and Zoe record the sounds made by the wood of a decaying A-frame on the island. She finds out what happens to film stock when it is buried in horse dung. She hand-processes film in seaweed and electronically renders music out of the crawling of a Sable ant.Mills’s work is interspersed throughout the movie, which becomes a striking combination of environmental documentary and profile. It’s also a landscape film that makes a real effort to attune viewers to sights and sounds, and that gently dips its toe into the avant-garde. Late in the film, Lucas says it appears that her life is Sable Island — “that’s all I have, that’s all I do, all the time,” she notes, adding, with a hint of regret, “I lost track of everything else.” “Geographies of Solitude” isn’t quite immersive enough to make that happen. But it captures a world where cameras seldom go. More

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      Nicholas Hitchon, Who Aged 7 Years at a Time in ‘Up’ Films, Dies at 65

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      He was one of the original children profiled in “Seven Up!,” a 1964 British documentary, and reappeared in subsequent installments for more than a half-century.Nicholas Hitchon, whose life was chronicled in the acclaimed “Up” series of British documentaries, beginning when he was a boy in the English countryside in 1964 and continuing through the decades as he grew to become a researcher and professor at the University of Wisconsin, died on July 23 in Madison, Wis. He was 65.A posting on the university’s website announced his death, from throat cancer. In the most recent installment of the series, “63 Up,” in 2019, he described his struggles with the disease.Professor Hitchon was a student in a one-room primary school in Littondale, north of Manchester, when a researcher working on a Granada Television project came looking for a 7-year-old willing to participate in what was originally viewed as a one-shot TV special. Young Nick was only 6, but he was talkative and unintimidated by cameras, so he was signed up as one of 14 youngsters to be profiled.The idea was to get a cross-section of children from Britain’s economic classes, look at their schooling and other experiences and capture their perspectives on the adult world. Nick represented the rural child. He endeared himself to that original television audience with his response to an interviewer who, clearly fishing for cuteness, asked, “Do you have a girlfriend?”“I don’t want to answer that,” Nick said. “I don’t answer those kind of questions.”The 1964 film, a simple effort titled “Seven Up!,” directed by Paul Almond, began to transform into documentary greatness when one of his researchers, Michael Apted, picked up the thread at the end of the decade and made a follow-up, “7 Plus Seven,” interviewing the same children.Mr. Apted, who died in 2019 at 79, directed that and all the subsequent installments, which were made at seven-year intervals. They became a fascinating portrait of ordinary people growing up, changing and reflecting on their lives.“What I had seen as a significant statement about the English class system was in fact a humanistic document about the real issues of life,” Mr. Apted wrote in 2000.Over the years, Professor Hitchon expressed both admiration for what the series was accomplishing and discomfort with being a part of it and with the way it was edited.“I’ve learnt that the stupider the thing I say, the more likely it is to get in,” he told The Independent of Britain in 2012, when “56 Up” was released. “You’re asked to discuss every intimate part of your life. You feel like you’re just a specimen pinned on the board. It’s totally dehumanizing.”He also thought the filmmakers had a tendency to play up stereotypes of British society, something he said he felt even as a boy in the early installments, when crew members would chase sheep into the camera’s view while filming him.“These people thought that I was all about sheep,” he told The Chronicle of Higher Education in 2005. “I’m quite fond of sheep, but I was more interested in other things.”If the series seemed too intent on demonstrating that economic class was a determining factor throughout life, Professor Hitchon — who went from a one-room rural schoolhouse to a Ph.D. and a life of academic accomplishment — proved to be an exception.“He’s one of the success stories,” Mr. Apted told the education journal in 2005.Professor Hitchon teaching a class in electromagnetism and conductivity at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He said the director Michael Apted would sometimes ask him about his work. “When I try to explain,” he said, “his eyes glaze over.”Michael Forster Rothbart/UW-MadisonWilliam Nicholas Guy Hitchon was born on Oct. 22, 1957, to Guy and Iona (Hall) Hitchon, who had a farm in Littondale. He studied physics at Oxford University, earning a bachelor’s degree there in 1978, a master’s in 1979 and a Ph.D. in engineering science in 1981. Soon after, he left for the United States to teach at the University of Wisconsin, a move that he thought “28 Up” (1984) had wrongly portrayed as abandoning his home country in pursuit of money.“He took us out to West Towne” — a Madison mall — “and had us walk around over and over again,” Professor Hitchon told The Capital Times of Madison in 1987, speaking of Mr. Apted. “Then he did a voice-over where he talked about that I’d come to America for a salary of $30,000.”Professor Hitchon pursued research on nuclear fusion, then switched to computational plasma physics. Once in a while, Mr. Apted would ask him about his work.“When I try to explain,” Professor Hitchon told Physics Today in 2000, “his eyes glaze over.”He published more than 100 journal articles and three books, the university’s posting said. He retired in 2022.His first marriage, to Jacqueline Bush, ended in divorce. He married C. Cryss Brunner in 2001. She survives him, along with a son from his first marriage, Adam; and two brothers, Andrew and Chris.If Professor Hitchon was sometimes uncomfortable with the “Up” project, he stuck with it, while a few of the other original participants dropped out. In “42 Up” (1998), he even joked about its role in his life.“My ambition as a scientist is to be more famous for doing science than for being in this film,” he told Mr. Apted on camera. “Unfortunately, Michael, it’s not going to happen.” More

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      The Best True Crime Podcasts and Documentaries to Stream Now

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      Four picks across television, film and podcast that will take American viewers and listeners to places with vastly different systems and understandings of justice.The true crime genre can often feel very America-centric: Crimes that take place in the United States, with American perpetrators, victims and investigators. So the systems at play — political, legal, cultural, press — are all anchored to a similar playbook, and the failures and successes of these systems can feel repetitive.But lately, more documentaries and podcasts take audiences far from American shores and immerse them in societies with very different customs and expectations — and little in common with how crimes are approached, understood, pursued and solved in the United States. Here are four picks that will transport American viewers and listeners.Documentary Mini-Series“Wanted: The Escape of Carlos Ghosn”This four-part docuseries on Apple TV+ takes viewers on a well-paced ride between Japan, France and Lebanon that involves an escape almost too fantastical for Hollywood. At its center is Carlos Ghosn, a Lebanese chief executive, born in Brazil and raised in Lebanon and France, with a Midas touch when it came to automakers. Among other feats, he brought Nissan back from the brink of failure about 25 years ago. By doing so, he became a glitzy and beloved figure in Japan, until he was arrested there for alleged financial wrongdoings.Along the way — through interviews with journalists, Ghosn’s wife, his associates (business and otherwise) and Ghosn himself — the stark differences in how executive compensation, justice, surveillance and criminal investigations are thought of and handled in these various countries are on display.Documentary Film“Missing: The Lucie Blackman Case”Lucie Blackman, as seen in an undated handout photo released by the British Embassy in Tokyo.British Embassy, via Associated PressThe police processes of Japan are explored from another angle in this Netflix documentary, which tells the story of Lucie Blackman, a 21-year-old British woman who was living and working in Tokyo when she went missing in 2000. Immediately after, her distraught family, led by her unyielding father, traveled there and — after proving that they would not be dismissed or diminished — spurred a massive search for her.Cultural clashes frustrate the family and complicate the effort, and you may finish this documentary with as many questions as when you started (though they will be very different questions). Unlike many true-crime stories, there is closure to the case, and the outcome is shocking.Podcast“Notes on a Scandal”In this podcast, one of Pakistan’s first in the true crime realm, we travel to Karachi in the late 1960s and early ’70s, when the city’s lust-fueled nightlife and high-society scandals would rival the most sensational eras of Hollywood or New York.This story has it all: the mysterious death of a tortured poet, Mustafa Zaidi, whose body was found next to his unconscious muse and lover, the socialite Shahnaz Gul, renown for her beauty; a rumored suicide pact; an exhumation; a murder trial; breathless media coverage; and even revenge porn, which was not digital as we understand it today, but printed on thousands of fliers.The show’s hosts, Tooba Masood and Saba Imtiaz, Pakistan-based journalists, have been researching the circumstances surrounding Zaidi’s death for years. Over two seasons, they share their findings in great detail, attempt to apply logic to the gossip of that time and debate the legitimacy of the possible scenarios. This is an independent podcast, and some might find the format — a conversation between the hosts, with a couple of notable guests in Season 2 — simplistic, but there is nothing simple or boring about the tale they’ve resurfaced.“Rough Translation: Love Commandos”In India, arranged marriage, as its known in the West, is simply known as marriage — but marrying for love, which still accounts for only a small fraction of marriage there, is an anomaly called “love marriage.” As we learn in “Love Commandos,” the final season of NPR’s “Rough Translation” podcast, love marriage can be a dangerous, even deadly, proposition for the young couples who follow their hearts instead of their parents’ wishes.In this five-episode podcast — hosted by Gregory Warner, guest-hosted by Mansi Choksi and drawing on years of reporting by the NPR correspondent Lauren Frayer — listeners are taken to modern-day India, where a mysterious Delhi-based group called Love Commandos has for about a decade offered shelter and safety to those who marry for love. Now, its leader, Sanjoy Sachdev, is facing allegations of extortion. As Warner puts it, “Escape is far from the same thing as freedom.”Over five episodes, we hear from couples who’ve lived at the Love Commandos compound and from Sachdev himself. But the possible crimes perpetrated by Sachdev in many ways take a back seat to some of the painful details that illustrate the prevalence and normalization of fear, harassment, abuse and human rights violations seemingly inherent to love marriages — details that abound in nearly every story told. More