GET 50% OFF YOUR FIRST YEAR!

Limited time - use promo code: ANNUAL at checkout

Live stream preview

Watch this video and more on OVID.tv

Watch this video and more on OVID.tv

Start your free trial

Already subscribed? Sign in

South

Crime & Punishment • 1h 10m

Directed by Chantal Akerman • Documentary • 1999 • 70 minutes

Inspired by her love of William Faulkner and James Baldwin, renowned director Chantal Akerman had planned to produce a meditation on the American South. However, just days before she was to begin filming, James Byrd, Jr. was murdered in Jasper, Texas. A black family man, Byrd has been severely beaten by three white men, chained to their truck, and dragged three miles through predominately black parts of the county.

Alternating static shots and dolly shots, Akerman reconstitutes the horrible incident. "We found pieces of his body all along the road," says one witness. But this is not an anatomy of his murder, nor the autopsy of a black man lynched by three white males. Rather, it is an evocation of how this event fits in to a landscape and climate that is as much mental as physical.

"Chantal Akerman is arguably the most important European director of her generation."—J. Hoberman, The Village Voice

Tags
african-american studies, akerman, americas, baldwin, black history, blackhistory2, chantal akerman, civil rights, criminal justice, cultural and ethnic studies, doc, documentary, expository, faulkner, film, history, human rights, human rights1, icarus films, james byrd, jasper, jr, late 20th century (u.s. history), law and legal studies, lynching, ovid, ovid_ca, s_0005, s_0043, s_0058, s_0150, s_0170, s_0263, s_0408, s_0597, slow, social issues, sociology, south, texas, the, the american south, title_nopqrs, title_s, u.s. history, united states, usa, video, white supremacy, womandirector, world regions

Up Next in Crime & Punishment

  • Beltracchi: The Art of Forgery
    1:41:56
    Beltracchi: The Art of Forgery

    Beltracchi: The Art of Forgery

    Directed by Arne Birkenstock • Documentary • With Wolfgang Beltracchi, Henrik Hanstein, Sofia Komarova • 2015 • 93 minutes

    For nearly 40 years, Wolfgang Beltracchi fooled the international art world and was responsible for the biggest art forgery scandal of the postwar era. An expert in art hist...

  • Obscene
    1:37:11
    Obscene

    Obscene

    Directed by Daniel O'Connor, Neil Ortenberg • Documentary • With Barney Rosset, Amiri Baraka, Lawrence Ferlinghetti • 2007 • 97 minutes

    OBSCENE is the definitive film biography of Barney Rosset, the influential publisher of Grove Press and the Evergreen Review. He acquired the then fledgling Gro...

  • Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?
    1:30:18
    Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?

    Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?

    Directed by Travis Wilkerson • Documentary • 2018 • 90 minutes

    “In 1946, my great-grandfather murdered a black man named Bill Spann and got away with it.” So begins Travis Wilkerson’s critically acclaimed documentary, Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?, which takes us on a journey through the Ame...

×