Beauty Is a Wound

A four-part essay-series by the director of I Am Not Your Negro, following the sentence that Conrad's Kurtz wrote on his report in Heart of Darkness. Peck narrates a history of colonialism, genocide and white supremacy from Columbus to the American West to the Congo, mixing archive footage, animation and staged scenes. It is the story the textbooks soften.

Why it’s here: The series connects things the curriculum keeps apart: colonial violence, slavery, the Holocaust, and the ideas that justified each. What's punk is the refusal of the neutral tone, and the fact that it names the thread. What's pedagogical is that it can be paused, discussed and argued with. Pairs with Discourse on Colonialism, Orientalism and King Leopold's Ghost. Note: it is long, essayistic and dense, and some critics call its sweep too broad.

Kirsten Johnson has shot documentaries across Bosnia, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Liberia and the United States, and here she cuts together the footage that never made it into the finished films. There's a birth, a wedding, a dying mother, a sniper's view. It is a memoir in outtakes, and it asks what the person holding the camera owes to the person in front of it.

Why it’s here: The film turns the camera around on the person behind it, and asks what it means to film other people's worst days. What's punk is that it refuses the authority of a neutral observer. What's pedagogical is that it's a direct lesson in media literacy, since it shows how footage becomes a story. It matches the film-craft shelf and pairs with Faces Places and Hale County This Morning, This Evening.