As I wrote when I saw the film last month at True/False, Justin Strawhand’s doc The War Against the Weak uses all manner of visual ingenuity to translate Edwin Black’s history of the American eugenics movement “from 600-page doorstop of exhaustive, collaborative research into a smooth-moving filmed horror show that’s shocking, inventive, and seductive in the most disturbing sense imaginable.” The film screens tomorrow at Full Frame in Durham, North Carolina, in the wake of a recent call from that state’s governor to set aside $250,000 to “provide justice and compensate victims” of North Carolina’s eugenics-influenced sterilization program, which was active until the mid-1970s. Via email, Strawhand spoke to the ongoing debate about documentary recreations, the “deep synchrony” between Nazi rhetoric and American eugenics propaganda, and the Full Frame screening’s film’s unexpected timeliness.
How much did you know about eugenics before reading Black’s book? What was it about the book that made you think there was a film there?
I’d come across eugenics during my internet meanderings around ‘01. Much of the information was alongside what I would call generic conspiracy stuff. But eugenics grabbed me right away, because it was verifiable. It was taught in schools, bought and paid for by powerful families and corporations, enshrined by the Supreme Court. I think part of me wanted to rescue the material from the conspiracy theorists. Here was a subject that had all of the best elements of a conspiracy theory, but had played out quite visibly on the world stage. It was “all true.”
I knew right away I wanted to make a film about it. A researcher friend of mine started compiling, and I was thinking of telling most of the story through NY Times articles. Edwin’s book came out in 2003, and I read it soon after. The breadth and depth of his research was astonishing, and he made a point that no one else did: American and German eugenics were not only similar, German eugenics was in fact an offshoot of the American movement.
Edwin’s book is structured in a very cinematic way. It’s a very dense book, but the story of eugenics is remarkable in that it fits kind of neatly into a narrative. It evolves in a very clear and terrifyingly logical way. I call it an elevator ride into hell. I wasn’t sure exactly how I was going to turn it into a movie, but I knew early on that I didn’t want to make a “talking heads” film. I’m a big fan of Chris Marker and his cinema essays, so I went that route.
Pete Demas, the producer, came on board soon after I got the option. I went to rent a desk from him at his studio in Chinatown; an hour later he was 100% committed to making this film happen.
Can you talk about your research process? Did you work with the author? Was it a process of retracing his steps, or did you approach it from a different angle?
The research process was difficult but it’s something I really enjoy. I’d been able to do all the research for my last film, 8 BIT, on-line, which was great, but this one forced me into the field, into the realm of dusty archives and (sometimes) fusty archivists (although most were really nice and helpful.) There were many stages. I’d written the script in such a way that I had all of Edwin’s footnotes locked to the narration. So, when Rich Belfiore (my co-writer) and I finally got my 150 page shooting script to a 50 page narration script, it was easy for me to source all of the documents. I did retrace Edwin’s steps. I read every primary document that he cites. Part of the process was convincing myself that this was all true, so it was important to touch, see, flip these pages. See the ink of the signatures.
I worked with Edwin Black, the author, quite a bit, and he was (and is) very supportive of the project. As I boiled down the material, I needed him to be the “truth filter,” to make sure I didn’t conflate too much. We’d speak at length about single words. He consulted on the film very actively.
Edwin’s research was obviously mostly concerned with text, so I had to use his research as a springboard for visual material. I spent lots of time in various archives, and eventually compiled thousands of pages of material.
The visual material is really interesting, because you find very deep connections. For example, there’s a bit in the film where we explain how the poor in America were compared to this crab parasite. There’s an image of the aftermath of this total body infestation (think The Thing) drawn by Ernst Haekel. Haekel was a prominent German eugenicist and naturalist who drew these incredibly psychedelic (and sometimes scandalous) drawings of flora and fauna, aquatic, microscopic, and sometimes invented! Anyway, his art books were quite popular in America - the very people complaining about the poor being parasites probably had this guys book in their drawing room. I had no idea until I found out who drew the picture. This kind of thing happened a lot. Deep synchrony - especially between German and American eugenics propaganda.
We had some very good luck as well. We stumbled across an attic filled with the remnants of what was a eugenics library. We found the original IQ tests there, 16 mm footage, and thousands of journals, books, and pieces of eugenic propaganda. It was an incredible discovery.
Sometime later I was in Frankfurt, with our German researcher, and we met with a professor there who had just found some never-before seen Mengele material. He said he had found it two weeks before, and he knew somebody would be along shortly to use it. Nobody had looked at this stuff in 70 years.
The film incorporates many different visual modes of storytelling: archival footage, animation, interviews, stagings. Can you talk about your strategy for using different types of imagery? How did you put it all together?
As I boiled down the script (I had close to 1500 note-cards that I constantly re-shuffled and ejected) images just popped out. I also compiled a lot of visual references from the various time periods. I looked at what was popular in art, graphic design, etc. I knew that the film needed to feel “multi-media,” somehow interactive. I wanted to both engage and implicate the audience in the journey, to have a running POV feel.
So there are obviously different strategies for showing the material. I went with my gut most of the time - what I felt I could shoot, went on a shooting list. What I felt needed recreation (the cinematic moments) went on another list. Where the information was abstract, I went toward animation. Where it was concrete, damning, I went with primary documents. I worked with some concept artists to visualize some of the stuff, including Joe the Artist, Johnny Marra, and Dave Jonez, and they were great. I gave them a pdf of all the different reference materials, and they were able to really help me actualize the pictures in my brain.
But I used all of these elements from the research to build a sort of living montage: I wanted images to overlap in discrete, persistent environments, “digital tabletops,” concrete spaces built in digital space.
The tabletop idea is of course borrowed from the language of advertising, and I thought of the film as different movements of advertising, progressing from a certain type of naivete in the beginning, and then “growing up” when we get to Germany. The whole thing was plotted out very carefully, first on paper of course. I did an assembly edit in Final Cut, and then ended up really cutting the film in After Effects.
I worked with some great animators, including Jarratt Moody and Eric Wagner, and a team that works for a friend of mine in Thailand, and I also did quite a bit of the motion graphics myself. (Those guys did all the really good stuff.) I wanted to have what I called a “digital DP” to “photograph” the material in a 3D space. I imposed some rules on the camera (zoom versus dolly, etc) and worked from there.
I spent many years living with these characters, these Eugenicists, and got to know them and their ambitions well. So where I needed to invent imagery (the red pyramid, for instance) I drew from their own writings. I feel like I somehow actualized what they themselves might have made had they had today’s tools.
It’s obviously a controversial subject matter, and I imagine some viewers will be resistant to the film’s thesis. There’s also a camp that’s vehemently against any kind of “construction” in nonfiction filmmaking. Were you ever concerned that employing such a creative, nontraditional manner of storytelling would open the film up to increased criticism over its argument?
Well, I really wanted to make a film that would speak to a wide audience, that would kind of resurrect a story that most people don’t know about and perhaps wouldn’t be interested in at first glance. So my first duty was to the people who were killed, sterilized, ruined by eugenics, and I didn’t think that a traditional talking heads picture was the way to tell this story. I needed a framework that would be perhaps as shocking or challenging as the story itself.
I’m kind of deep-focus in my film philosophy, but I rejected all of that to make this movie. Artifice was important, image was important, design and montage were important, because this whole movement was one of propaganda, image, and myth-making. I don’t call the re-enactments in the film re-enactments at all: I call them invocations. Invocations channelled through the actors - not the people on screen, the eugenicists themselves. It seems ludicrous to use this term here, but this is a bit of a spoiler and if you haven’t seen the film yet please skip ahead.
The entire film builds toward the Auschwitz scene, and the reveal of the constructed siamese twins, Guido and Nino. This is both the nadir and climax of the movie. I drew a little picture of them when I first read the passage in the book - what looks at first glance like a butterfly is actually this abomination, and this unforgettable, shocking, haunting image, and I knew it was the Image of the film, the icon of eugenics. So, we built a temple to put them in. The autopsy table was the altar - the twins, sewn together, are the fetish. How else could I have shown it? The image screamed out to me, and these two poor boys, who were made into human guinea pigs because some arrogant Americans decided to try and breed a better race, screamed out to me as well. I don’t think that there was any artifice in that shot. It was an actual representation of what Mengele saw, as real as if we were looking through his eyes in 1943.
I find it odd that people are still arguing over recreations. I think it’s somewhat silly to demand “authenticity” in the form of rigid adherence to archival or “verite” footage.
On this film, we were constantly two steps ahead of the wrecking ball. We rolled up on a few sites that were already piles of bricks. Many of the events of the Holocaust are only knowable through the testimonies of the survivors, and the Nazis did a rather good job of expunging the photographic evidence, and the Allies did a good job of bombing the rest! So should we abandon critical inquiry into the past because there are gaps in the “celluloid” record?
Unless you are purposefully misrepresenting reality to distort truth, why should we care how a story is told? The most affecting documentary I ever saw was a play-through video of Super Columbine Massacre RPG.
At True/False, you said something in the Q & A about tinkering with the film up until the last minute. Have you changed the film since that screening, and if not, is there anything you wish you could put into the film now?
Well, we’re doing a bit of sound design and a proper mix with the folks at Soundlounge, and I may trim a little bit more for the “theatrical cut.” There are a few scenes that I cut that I would like to put into the DVD (including a fascinating section on immigration policy) but otherwise I’m pretty happy with the movie. For better or for worse, it’s 90% what I set out to do.
The Full Frame screening is surprisingly timely. Can you explain what’s going on in North Carolina with reparations?
Yes - 33 states had eugenic sterilization programs, including North Carolina. Some 65,000 people were sterilized through the 1970s. North Carolina’s Governor has just called for reparations for some of her state’s victims, most of whom were poor black women sterilized in the 1960s.
There is some outrage at this, you know, what with the bad economy and all. I think that this outrage speaks to the fundamental reason we made this movie: to remember, and reconstruct the past, in the hopes of giving some ghosts rest and to achieve some justice for the victims still living. I hope that our film will help awaken people to the facts of American eugenics. We fought a war to end German eugenics, but continued practicing it here until the 1970s. We need to deal with this before it’s too late.
Who do you most hope sees the film, and what would you hope they take away from it?
Well, I made the film for a young audience - for people who wouldn’t necessarily see documentaries, and especially not a historical documentary. I hope it plays theatrically, because it’s important to see the film as a group, to discuss afterward… But also schools, universities, etc. It took Germany a very short time to degrade from industrialized nation to warmachine. We need to know that it can happen again, and to be very aware of the danger of putting science to prejudice.
What’s next for the film after Full Frame, and what’s your next project?Well, we’re hoping for some more festivals, and planning a New York premiere for May.
WATW was pretty overwhelming, and I’m just starting to get some clarity as to new projects. I’m very interested in the concept of “horror,” and have been researching toward a “philosophy of horror” relatable through cinema.
Oh, and my wife D and I are expecting our first baby in June. After 7 years of all this death, doom, and gloom, we decided it was the right time for us to embrace a little life.
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth