Quantcast
Channel: Film3Sixty Magazine » Citizenfour (2014)
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 4

Nick Broomfield Talks ‘Tales of the Grim Sleeper’ and the Current Documentary Landscape

0
0

Having started his filmmaking career in the early seventies after being educated in law and political science, Nick Broomfield gradually went on to become one of Britain’s foremost documentarians, propagating a ‘Direct Cinema’ style that’s become the industry norm ever since.

Pioneering a highly adaptable self-reflexive style, where his projects are as much about the creation as they are about the subject, Broomfield is responsible for a string of renowned but controversial documentaries that are as playfully critical as they are thoughtfully incisive. His subjects have so far spanned from such noteworthy figures as Margaret Thatcher, Aileen Wournous, Heidi Fleiss and Sarah Palin, who’ve each been given ample investigation into their respective impact on British and American culture, and vice versa.

Broomfield’s latest, Tales of the Grim Sleeper (2014), continues this inquisition into the dark underside of American society, unpacking issues regarding social and racial inequality in a downtrodden American neighbourhood. It tells the story of Lonnie Franklin Jr., a resident of South Central Los Angeles whose ostensible affability masked his sinister profession as a clandestine serial killer potentially responsible for the murder of over 100 victims (usually black women) since 1985.

Arrested in 2010, Franklin was dubbed the “Grim Sleeper” due to his apparent fourteen-year break from killing, and for the fact his crimes went puzzlingly undetected and publicly unannounced by the police for over thirty years. Franklin is still yet to stand trial.

We spoke to Broomfield about how he came across the case, how it inspired an investigation into this neglected community, and what interests him about these notable public figures.

 

F3S: How did you come to know about the case of the Grim Sleeper and what then inspired you to explore it through documentary?

NB: I’ve lived in Los Angeles on and off for a while, and what I’ve noticed is that it’s really a city of two cities; there’s the Santa Monica and Beverly Hills areas that everyone has heard of, and then there’s South Central and the greater parts of Los Angeles that has a whole different life expectancy. They have completely different unemployment levels – in the area of eighty-five per cent – terrible obesity levels, that kind of thing. These murders could never have happened in the wealthier parts of the city, but when I read about the case I saw the amount of people who had disappeared or been murdered over the course of twenty-five years, which was almost like a genocide. It makes you think that all of this could only have happened in an area where people didn’t care, and where people were looked at as disposable.

F3S: You’ve recently been quoted as saying that “Los Angeles is in the grip of an apartheid system.” Being a resident of LA, how aware were you of this neighbourhood and the disregard of these police towards these black citizens?

NB: There’s definitely an apartheid system in the United States, and that dates right back to slavery. It’s never recovered from it. You have to remember that Los Angeles has always been a very racially divided city. The reason that areas like Compton exist is that they are black areas where black people could only live, and in many ways that hasn’t changed very much. Yes, there’s been a Civil Rights Movement and supposedly they do now have a vote, but there’s been a real conscious effort to disenfranchise the black vote by incarcerating a vast number of these citizens. A high percentage of the three billion currently in prison are black. If they have a family conviction or a prison record then they can’t vote. I think there’s been enough support of this from both Republican and Democratic parties, where the black influence hasn’t really made a mark. To answer your apartheid question, it really dates back to the constitution where slaves were three-fifths of the whole map. There’s always been this notion within the whole American founding fathers constitution that there are people who are worth less than other people, and there’s always been this real fear that if the black vote becomes a parcel force then it will really threaten the white dominance of American politics. You can see it all the way back to Hoover. It’s a well-chartered thing.

F3S: You are seen actively going out filming on the streets of this very close-knit but precarious neighbourhood where you are heckled and at times in the vicinity of gunfire. How safe did you and your crew feel?

NB: It actually really is a safe area. One of the advantages of being white is that nobody is going to shoot and kill a white man, because they will then face serious imprisonment and probably never get out. I mean, that wasn’t an enormous reassurance for our cameraman, who left after four days, but it is a fact that you’re very protected because the last thing the police are going to tolerate is a white person being shot. It’s fine for a black gang member to be shot or for a prostitute to disappear, but if you’re white then you have all the force of the justice system on your side.

F3S: Yours is a very participatory approach to documentary filmmaking, where you are on-screen and engaging with these people and events, whereas other documentarians choose to remain silent and off-camera. What do you feel your presence adds to your films?

NB: I don’t think I’m that present in this film as opposed to others. It’s really a device more than anything to hold the film together, because it’s not like you’re filming in an institution or something where there’s an inherent boundary. A lot of the connections that are made in the film are basically fairly arbitrary and they have to be connected by some means or another. In a way the filmmakers are just the narrators or the detectives, all those things are storytelling devices that hold and weave the story together.

 

F3S: Like your previous films about Aileen Wournos, you’re here launching an investigation into crime and punishment in America, though this time the figure of Lonnie Franklin Jr. is more of an incidental figure looming large in the background. Was this a conscious decision you made or were you simply denied access to him?

NB: We were denied access, yeah. The sheriff’s department was very protective of him, which I guess meant that they just wanted it all to go away. They don’t want any more publicity than there has to be, and they were just very obstructive in terms of us conducting any interviews, even though I was supported by his attorney. We made a formal application to talk to him, and I even tried to use some connections I had to get to the sheriff. I knew somebody who worked for him, and made a special point of trying to get him to put a good word in for me, but they were just really not interested in helping.

F3S: Did that inspire you to then look further afield to Lonnie’s friends, victims, etc.?

NB: None of the authorities wanted to talk, and in many ways I’m actually very grateful for that because I think the film is much stronger as a portrait of a community. If I had gone and done a whole load of interviews with the police and forensic experts, etc., which is kind of what I intended to do at the beginning, it would’ve made the film weaker.

 

Continued on Page 2


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 4

Latest Images

Trending Articles





Latest Images