Waiting for the Barbarians

A documentary about the American war in Vietnam, made while the war was still being fought. Davis intercuts interviews with generals, officials, pilots, veterans, grieving Vietnamese families and ordinary Americans, setting the language of policy against what that policy did on the ground and at home.

Why it’s here: The punk move is the editing: Davis lets the war's architects talk at length, then cuts their words against a funeral, a bombed village or a cheering football crowd, and trusts the audience to feel the gap. The pedagogy is in how the film teaches viewers to hear the language of power, euphemism and abstraction included, while looking at what it covers up. Worth knowing that the juxtaposition is the argument, and General Westmoreland and others objected that their words were framed unfairly, so watch it as a persuasive documentary, not a neutral record.

A documentary on the September 1971 uprising at Attica Correctional Facility in New York, when about 1,300 incarcerated men took over the prison to demand basic rights, and the state's assault that ended it killed 39 men, prisoners and hostages alike. Built from archival footage and testimony from survivors. It was nominated for the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.

Why it’s here: The film puts the people who lived it back in charge of the story, and the story is how a state answers a list of demands. What's punk is the demands themselves: showers, food, medical care, the right to be treated as human. What's pedagogical is the aftermath, the gap between what officials said happened and what survivors and records show. It's a lesson in how to read an official account.