Shut Up, Movie; or, What A Documentary on Child Killers Could Learn From an Australian-German Movie on War Criminals

I often end up thinking about movies in relationship to whatever movies I happened to watch immediately before or after it, so stick with me on this one. I'm about to compare two movies that have almost nothing in common.

But I think I have a good point here.

Earlier this week I came across the 2012 movie Lore, a striking, deeply mournful drama about a group of five siblings living in the Black Forest in the last days of WWII. When their Nazi parents are arrested by Allied forces, fourteen-year-old Lore (Saskia Rosendahl -- keep your eye on this girl) must lead her siblings on a nine-hundred-kilometer journey to their grandmother's house across their decimated fatherland. Along the way, they encounter reports of, and witnesses to, the Nazi regime's brutality, and a survivor of Auschwitz named Thomas (Kai Malina) becomes their unlikely companion and protector.

I have no reservations about calling this movie a must-see. It is an extraordinarily shot, extraordinarily acted piece of cinema that ought to be required viewing for anyone with even a passing interest in WWII. Primary credit here goes to the direction and cinematography, plus the extraordinary performance of Rosendahl as the title character. At its core, Lore is a character study of one girl bearing the weight of two terrible burdens. The first is the lives of her four siblings, whom she must protect and provide for as they travel without money and food through a war zone. The second is the growing awareness that the ideas and values she's cherished her whole life -- Nazi ideology, really -- are actually horrifying. In order to get food for her siblings at refugee camps, Lore must look at photographs of Auschwitz's emaciated prisoners and read the first-hand accounts of the camps' survivors. We hear the other German refugees around her responding to these pictures - "It's exaggerated." "It's a lie." "Those men are actors." And so forth. We don't hear Lore respond. We just see her watch, and look, and listen.


It's that silence surrounding the lead character that makes Lore work. Lore is a quiet, understated movie that rarely lets us get intimate with its lead character. Lore doesn't talk to her siblings about her feelings or experiences, so we never experience the story in her words. We are just unbearably close to her as she makes her way through the trials before her. Rather than telegraphing Lore's anxieties to us through the script, director Cate Shortland lets the camera linger on details that allow us to think Lore's thoughts along with her. Shots of the deep mud Lore pushes a baby carriage through (the youngest sibling is an infant) show us the exhaustion and frustration that accompanies caring for four children. A vat of clothes boiling in black dye show the deep national grief that accompanies Lore's growing antipathy towards her parents' values. The bloodied legs of a murdered woman convey the ever-present threat of violence and rape against a young woman left without any protection.

In other words, this is a movie that uses images and intimations to convey the experience of its characters. It is very, very quiet.

The 2009 American documentary Cropsey is not.

If Cropsey were a person, he would be the guy who sits next to you while you're trying to watch his favorite TV show and explains the plot to you even if you already understood it. The movie is about two Staten Island filmmakers who, recalling an urban legend about a child murderer named Cropsey that frighten them as children, discover that the story may have come to life when a drifter named Andre Rand is accused of kidnapping and killing developmentally-disabled children in their neighborhood.  After Rand is charged and convicted with two of the five disappearances originally linked to him, documentarians Barbara Brancaccio and Joshua Zemens explore the evidence linking Rand to the crimes of which he was ultimately convicted. These stories include the disturbing story of a now-defunct mental hospital where Rand was a custodian, Rand's own history of violence, mental illness, and vagrancy, plus hysterical rumors of an underground cult of Staten Island satanists who perform human sacrifices in abandoned buildings.

Cropsey, deeply reminiscent of other better documentaries like West of Memphis and Paradise Lost, gives the audience convincing evidence that the prosecution proved beyond reasonable doubt that Rand killed 13-year-old Jennifer Schweiger and 7-year-old Holly Ann Hughes. There was, for example, no physical evidence linking Rand to either crime. Hughes' body was never even found. What apparently convinces Staten Island of Rand's monstrousness is a combination of local folklore, moral panic, and Rand's own less-than-winsome public image. A front-page newspaper photo shows Rand literally drooling as police officers take him into custody, and his correspondence with the directors demonstrates that Rand is clearly unhinged. He is an outsider in the Staten Island community, homeless, and a drifter.

Rand could be, in fact, a real-life Cropsey. Or he could only be the victim of the strange set of forces that hold sway over this troubled community -- the instinct to protect children, the fear of unspeakable evil, the dynamics between insiders and outsiders, the need for a scapegoat, and above all, the overwhelming power of images, legends, and stories. In the face of such powers, is it possible to know the truth, or is the truth-seeker left only with the intersection between reality and story? Can we know anything about Rand, or can we only discover Cropsey?

"LOOK HOW SCARY THIS IS."

The problem with this movie is that basically everything I've just written is pedantically spelled out for us in tiresome voiceovers for the benefit of the idiots in the audience who just don't get it. Though the interviews with families, lawyers, and prosecutors more than speak for themselves, Zemens and Brancaccio insist on ending every sequence with a pan of old buildings and spooky forests while solemnly explaining the movie's message to you. They just can't trust you to look at the raw material and figure out what they're trying to tell you. Even as they explore the abandoned mental hospital Willowbrook and the forests where the homeless Rand made his home for years, Zemens and Brancaccio betray a strange concern that their topic and setting might not be disconcerting enough on its own. They insist, for example, on investigating Willowbrook in the middle of the night, Blair-Witch style. Why film in the middle of the night when the audience can't get a clear look at the facility that haunts Staten Island's history? Because it's so much creepier in the middle of the night, that's why. And then Zemens helpfully chimes in with a voiceover to remind us that This Facility Haunts Staten Island's History, and you might not have gotten it if he hadn't been here to tell you about it.

By the time Cropsey is over, you just want Zemens and Brancaccio to leave you alone. Everything is souped up, dressed up, talked through, walked through, explained, evaluated, and summarized. It's like being shown a delicious meal, then having Zemens and Brancaccio chew it up and spit it directly into your mouth. While all you want is to explore the facts, images, and stories in their raw and undoctored form, the filmmakers just can't stand to let you figure it out on your own. And this is where Lore's psychic distance and silence could teach Zemens and Brancaccio a thing or two about filmmaking. When Lore watches Thomas bathe and play with her young siblings in a creek bed, she doesn't turn to her little sister and say, "I don't know how to reconcile the closeness I feel like Thomas with the fact that he is Jewish."We don't need her to, and if she did it would be ridiculous. The director and actress trust us to have the awareness and humanity to see Lore interact with her environment, and to understand the turmoil and pain and changes she's going through. The director, in other words, does not think you are an idiot.

And Cropsey could have done the same thing. A description of the suspect evidence, plus an account of the crazed satanic-cult rumors, plus an interview with someone who remembers the Cropsey legends, all express the same theme that Zemens explains to you in his voiceovers. Lore's style of communication leaves the viewer feeling haunted and sobered. Cropsey's style of communication leaves the viewer feeling belittled and manipulated. Lore's style is better.

So shut up, movies. Let the viewer figure it out for once.

For more Beth and Louise, follow us on Twitter at @BandLHateMovies or subscribe to the podcast. Give us a rating and leave a comment on iTunes!