The Dark Side of the 50s (documentary)
Now that the Oscars are over, how about considering a small film, untainted by any glamour whatsoever. Morgan Dews’s documentary Must Read After My Death, which opened this past Friday in New York and Los Angeles, is a real-life version of Hollywood’s “Revolutionary Road.” Both movies hit hard at the myth of the sunny ’50s.
In its reliance on homemade movies, Dews’s film is also reminiscent of Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing the Friedmans (2004). Dews’s film, however, has no single narrator, strictly confining itself to pieced-together audio recordings, home movies and old photographs that Dews’s grandmother Allis left behind when she died in 2001, at the age of 90. They were found with a note that said, “Must Read After My Death.”
The voices of Allis, her husband Charley, and their four children — one of whom was Dews’s mother — provide the narration for the film. Allis clearly took pleasure — perhaps even a weird sort of pride — in the relentless documentation of her family’s life, although it’s anyone’s guess whether she would have wanted her grandson to use these private recordings to make a film for public consumption.
The audio recordings were mostly made during the 60s, when the children were just becoming teenagers. The family members alternately sound angry and full of despair, and affectionate and full of love. One moment a kid is screaming into the phone about how Dad never listens, and he can’t stand to hear his parents fighting all the time, or worse, Allis is wondering aloud why she doesn’t kill all her kids. The next moment someone says simply, “I love you.”...
Read entire article at Chronicle of Higher Ed
In its reliance on homemade movies, Dews’s film is also reminiscent of Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing the Friedmans (2004). Dews’s film, however, has no single narrator, strictly confining itself to pieced-together audio recordings, home movies and old photographs that Dews’s grandmother Allis left behind when she died in 2001, at the age of 90. They were found with a note that said, “Must Read After My Death.”
The voices of Allis, her husband Charley, and their four children — one of whom was Dews’s mother — provide the narration for the film. Allis clearly took pleasure — perhaps even a weird sort of pride — in the relentless documentation of her family’s life, although it’s anyone’s guess whether she would have wanted her grandson to use these private recordings to make a film for public consumption.
The audio recordings were mostly made during the 60s, when the children were just becoming teenagers. The family members alternately sound angry and full of despair, and affectionate and full of love. One moment a kid is screaming into the phone about how Dad never listens, and he can’t stand to hear his parents fighting all the time, or worse, Allis is wondering aloud why she doesn’t kill all her kids. The next moment someone says simply, “I love you.”...