Friday, Sep 5, 2008
Director Andrew Jarecki talks about his explosive documentary "Capturing the Friedmans," in which a family's home videos follow its own destruction in a bizarre child-abuse case.
Jun 4, 2003 | In 2002, filmmaker (and Moviefone founder) Andrew Jarecki began to shoot a documentary about New York birthday clowns. While working with one of the city's most popular bozos, David Friedman, Jarecki noticed several offhand comments Friedman made about his family -- something about his father, something about an injustice. When Jarecki inquired further, Friedman merely said there were some things he would rather not get into.
So, like any budding Errol Morris, Jarecki got into it. Research revealed that David's Long Island family had been destroyed in 1987 when his father, Arnold, and younger brother Jesse were accused of hundreds of appalling crimes. The charges included possession of child pornography and the sodomizing of dozens of young boys enrolled in Arnold's home-school computer class.
Jarecki switched the focus of his film to the Friedman case, whereupon David presented him with 25 hours of home videotapes shot contemporaneously by family members during the crisis -- discomfiting, surreal footage of vicious arguments, shifting loyalties and grossly inappropriate mugging. This first-person depiction of the family's implosion is as close to "snuff" as you will ever want to see, and is the most chilling use of amateur video since "The Blair Witch Project."
By combining these home movies with the Friedman's old 8mm reels and personal video diaries -- plus an overwhelming collection of TV news footage and courtroom video archives -- Jarecki makes an unsettling bio-technological discovery: A camera is a camera; the human brain is also a camera. Both run on electrical impulses. And both are infinitely fallible when employed to recover "the truth."
Both Arnold and Jesse Friedman pleaded guilty to numerous heinous charges of abuse. Arnold died in prison in 1995 and Jesse served 13 years in prison before his release in 2001. But the question of whether they were really guilty of these dreadful and dramatic crimes is, to put it mildly, called into question by Jarecki's exploration of the case.
The result of Jarecki's efforts is the startling film "Capturing the Friedmans," which won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival. It opened last weekend at the Angelika Film Center in New York, where it broke the house box-office record for a documentary (set a year earlier by Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine"). Openings in many more cities will follow. I spoke with Jarecki in Chicago.
America in 1987, when the Friedman case broke, was really at the dawn of home video culture. Our obsession with recording every "significant moment" of our lives is still growing. Why is that?
A big theme in the movie is the transient nature of memory; the ephemeral nature and dynamic nature. People talk about a "memory bank" like it's a place where your memories sit static, but the reality is that as soon as you have an experience and it goes into your memory, it becomes just another electrochemical impulse, and it sits there bubbling like any other chemical reaction. Your memories evolve over time. I think recording is our effort to prevent that in some way. Certainly this [happens] in the film, when David says, "Maybe I shot the videotape so I wouldn't have to remember it myself."
Do you think the Friedman family was conscious that the camera lens was shielding them from the terror and confusion they should be feeling?
Well, David would tell you that they were just recording themselves because their father was going to jail and they wanted to record his last moments with his family, and you can understand that. At the same time, there's also that feeling that so much was going on in their lives at that moment -- it was so confusing, every day there was a new accusation or a new newspaper article -- that you can also imagine they wanted to codify the past, they wanted to have a record they could go back to. They saw members of the family going away and knew [the family] was about to be destroyed. So I think they were clinging to those moments and saying, "Well, let's capture them, and maybe later we can understand them better."
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