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Spotlight on France
William Karel, France, 2009, 104 minutes
“Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” George Santayana’s famous quote would seem to apply to most of Western culture at the moment: a fact that is given exhaustive examination in William Karel’s fiercely intelligent film 1929. Divided into two different sections, the film details both the lead up to and the aftermath of 1929, the year of the fabled Black Thursday, a stock market crash that had suicidal stockbrokers raining from the sky.
The rash of leaping stockbrokers turned out to be an apocryphal story, although many of the events uncovered in Karel’s film are even more staggering because they are, in fact, true. Prior to the collapse of Wall Street, the American economy was booming, the manic energy of the Jazz Age, typified by flappers frantically dancing the Charleston, was matched by a consumerist frenzy with the newly emergent middle class buying goods and playing fast and loose with the stock market. “The crisis of 1929 was like the perfect storm, in which all these improbable things came together in the wrong time in the wrong way,” says one of the film’s interviewees.
The late great Howard Zinn, Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and a wealth of other thinkers and writers weigh in, drawing explicit connections between then and now. Some of the darkest episodes in American history beggar belief. When asked to route the Bonus Army (World War I veterans and their families who had set up camp on the White House lawn demanding the early release of their benefits), General Douglas MacArthur and George S. Patton, along with the 12th Infantry and six battle tanks, attacked the veterans and their wives and children with gas, bullets and fixed bayonets. Many people were killed and wounded including a number of children who were bayoneted by American soldiers. The correlation between political extremes and economic hardship, that arguably gave rise of the Nazi party in Germany, make the rise of right wing demagogues such as Glen Beck in the US, not only disturbing but potentially disastrous.
An important and often riveting film, 1929 uncovers the lessons of the past, applied to the present, while asking hard questions about the future, not only of the US, but of the entire world.
Director’s biography
William Karel was first a photo-journalist from 1977 to 1985. As a filmmaker, he has focused a lot of his work on the United States. His films Empire State Building Murders, The Dark Side of the Moon, CIA, Secret Wars (2003), and The World according to Bush (2004) have all known international success. Karel’s first feature-length film, My Dad is into terrorism (2006), was nominated to the Césars 2007 in the documentary section. His recent work includes the acclaimed Who killed Maggy (2009), the story of the final days in power of Margaret Thatcher. In 2004 William Karel was bestowed the FIPA of Honor.
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