A Constant Visual Feast

I like a good, standard-issue documentary as much as the next guy*, but what catches my attention and interest most in the form are the movies that read as a cross-breed of performance with documentarian intent; I would put movies like Robert Greene’s Bisbee ’17, Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, and even, to an extent, RaMell Ross’ Hale County This Morning, This Evening into that bucket. They cut away from the traditional structure and design of documentary cinema. They are unique. They are personal.

So I shouldn’t have been surprised that Elizabeth Sankey’s Witches worked on me so well as it did. It’s about horror movies; it’s about witches; it’s about midwifery and the curse of medicine’s male professionalization; it’s about parenthood, specifically motherhood; it’s about the idiotic mistakes we make culturally that lead to awful and very avoidable tragedies like one famous case outlined in Sankey’s self-reflection-cum-pop cultural scholarship. It’s good stuff.

You can read my conversation with her about the film over at The Daily Beast.

*Unless the next guy hates them, and then I reckon I like them a good bit more than the next guy. Pardon me for being thorough and specific.