NYFF 2017: "The Rape of Recy Taylor," "Before We Vanish"

On the night of September 3, 1944, Recy Taylor, a black woman, was walking in Alabama when seven white men rode up in a car, accused her of violence against a man she hadn't committed, and then forced her in the car at gunpoint. They drove her a few miles into darkness, taunted and terrorized her, threatened to kill her, and then six of the seven men raped and maimed her. No one was punished. Recy Taylor is now in her 90s and the country that denied her justice appears to be in freefall back toward the frightening political climate that allowed her attackers to go free. Her brother Robert Corbitt talked about the issue as much as he could afterwards because there was so much buried in this single incident. Every horrific stereotype foisted on the black community by white people was proven a cowardly projection of their own sexual violence and hideous prejudice, abusing their powers in order to never find themselves in so precarious a social position as to be taken advantage of by another race. The rape of Recy Taylor, it becomes clear in Nancy Buirski's astounding documentary of the same name, was one of a handful of symbolic acts of punishment handed out randomly by white men to let blacks know that they would never find comfort or safety in their own country. 

"The Rape of Recy Taylor" is the strongest documentary in the NYFF line-up, a stirring, infuriating marvel. As Godfrey pointed out in his curtain raiser a few days ago, the line-up has become somewhat predictable under Kent Jones and his selection committee. The only thing about this I see as troubling is that the documentaries allowed in tend to follow too strict a guideline. There are the issue/human interest docs, like "Recy Taylor" or "Voyeur," that center on one person; there are the sunny biographies (which too frequently border on hagiography) represented this year by "Spielberg" and "Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold," which offer fond looks at a life's work; and there are the formally assaultive biographies like "Caniba" or last year's Jonas Mekas marvel "I Had Nowhere To Go." I've been covering the festival almost as long as Jones has been in charge and you can sort of set your watch by the few documentaries they let in. There are HBO and Netflix distribution deals behind most of them and the high-profile subject matter means lots of coverage ahead of awards season. Considering how strong the fiction main slate is, it's a bit of a letdown knowing that the documentaries aren't a little more diverse. 

Having said that, there is no downside to "The Rape of Recy Taylor" being given this attention. If anything, the relatively lightweight (tonally speaking, if nothing else) "Spielberg" and "Voyeur" make "Recy Taylor" seem all the more vital and striking. Buirsky has many virtues as a filmmaker, her ability to conjure atmosphere the most cunning and impressive of all. In her documentary "Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq," the sensuality of dance is communicated through still images and the interplay between music and silence. Buirski's intense rhythm and knack for filling in vital missing pieces through respectful and electrifying invention make her work as interesting as her subjects. She has precious little footage of Taylor and knows that her talking heads can only be so dynamic (though the shallow focus photography does relieve some of the unavoidable monotony of the practice—she is plainly trying to do something different, which is admirable). And to help us visualize what Taylor went through, what her world looked like, she uses clips from race films by directors like Oscar Micheaux and Spencer Williams. 

Her most frequently recurring soundtrack motif is Dinah Washington singing "This Bitter Earth" over Max Richter's plaintive strings. This composition may be familiar to fans of either "Shutter Island" or "Arrival," but this is the first time its been used essentially as part of a film's fabric. The film gives Washington's voice back to black women by letting it speak for Taylor's pain, in as much as film can change our conception of music by pairing it with images. By coupling the composition with ominous, double exposed footage of dark woods (the site of Taylor's violation) and images of black women from movies directed by black men, Buirski is attempting to let the voices and experiences of black people be seen and heard as loudly as possible. Those trees, filmed at dusk and laid over top of each other, are among the scariest images I can recall in any film this year. They speak of collusion and secret violence, of pain easily erased from every conscious except that of the recipient.