13^th

How is it pos­si­ble that a cen­tu­ry and a half after the abo­li­tion of slav­ery in the Unit­ed States, sta­tis­ti­cal­ly one in every three African-Amer­i­can males will at some point find him­self behind bars? This is the ques­tion posed by direc­tor Ava DuVer­nay in 13^th, her fol­low-up to Sel­ma and first full-length doc­u­men­tary since her 2008 fea­ture debut, This is the Life.

Tak­ing as its point of depar­ture the 13^th Amend­ment to the US Con­sti­tu­tion, which out­laws ​“slav­ery or invol­un­tary servi­tude, except as a pun­ish­ment for crime,” the film demon­strates how that excep­tion has allowed for the sys­tem­at­ic mass incar­cer­a­tion of black bod­ies on ten­u­ous grounds, and for dura­tions of time that far exceed the sever­i­ty of their offences. We see that the Amer­i­can jus­tice sys­tem is plain­ly rigged against the poor. The film’s greater rev­e­la­tion is that in recent his­to­ry, the gov­ern­ment has active­ly pinned crim­i­nal­i­ty onto the disenfranchised.

Rates of impris­on­ment began to soar in the 1970s, when Nixon and his allies declared the so-called War on Drugs. As inter­view sub­jects on the polit­i­cal left and right alike con­cur, this was in real­i­ty a thin­ly veiled attack on pover­ty. Crack was policed with a feroc­i­ty that matched the lax­i­ty on cocaine. News cov­er­age and sub­se­quent upswings in crim­i­nal arrests went a long way towards cement­ing the image of crim­i­nals as black in white America’s col­lec­tive subconscious.

This cat­a­clysmic turn of events came almost imme­di­ate­ly after a peri­od in which African-Amer­i­cans had wil­ful­ly sub­mit­ted to arrest. As Hen­ry Louis Gates Jr, one of sev­er­al promi­nent intel­lec­tu­als to appear in the film puts it, the bril­liance of the civ­il rights move­ment was its ​“trans­for­ma­tion of crim­i­nal­i­ty.” Pro­test­ers com­bat­ting seg­re­ga­tion and oth­er racist laws made being impris­oned into a noble act.

One such rad­i­cal activist, Angela Davis, serves as a key talk­ing head. Work­ing with young cin­e­matog­ra­phers Hans Charles and Kira Kel­ly, DuVer­nay most­ly shoots her bril­liant sub­jects in emp­ty ware­house spaces, the cav­ernous dimen­sions of which make the speak­ers appear like post-apoc­a­lyp­tic sages. Ani­mat­ed graph­ics, expert­ly curat­ed archival footage and hip-hop inter­ludes accen­tu­at­ed by key­words in cap­i­tals and bold add to the film’s no-non­sense energy.

13^th also impres­sive­ly his­tori­cis­es its own tac­tic of shock­ing the mass­es with graph­ic evi­dence of vio­lent oppres­sion. For instance, the film con­sid­ers the effect that auto­bi­ogra­phies of freed slaves such as Olau­dah Equiano or Solomon Northrup (author and sub­ject of ​‘Twelve Years a Slave’) have long exert­ed on the nation­al con­science. This rather macro­scop­ic approach to Amer­i­can his­to­ry moves in and out of focus as the film address­es spe­cif­ic issues. At the same time, it nev­er impedes a resound­ing­ly con­tem­po­rary viewpoint.

Far from sim­ply a mis­sive from the Black Lives Mat­ter move­ment, 13^th offers a spe­cialised intro­duc­tion to the prison-indus­tri­al com­plex. As Pres­i­dent Oba­ma notes in an excerpt­ed speech at the begin­ning of the film, the US has five per cent of the world’s pop­u­la­tion and a stag­ger­ing 25 per­cent of its pris­on­ers. DuVernay’s film lays bare both how this has come to be and why it must change.