The American Surveillance State by David H. Price

Author:David H. Price
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pluto Press

When Underground was finally released, it received mixed reviews, many reviewers stressed the undeniable plodding unchallenged narrative, though most lauded the daring will of the filmmakers. Yet, it mostly remained an unseen film, having great difficulty getting distribution, with film festivals fearing getting involved in the controversies surrounding it. A 1981 LA Times article covering Wexler and de Antonio’s suit against the FBI for theft and copyright infringement is the final entry in Wexler’s released FBI file, yet Wexler continued to make provocative political films until his death in 2015.50

Even without a lifelong involvement in radical political causes, the FBI might have monitored such a genius of cinéma vérité. Wexler’s films often feel ethnographically raw, missing an artificial luster that dominated American film, his audiences see more of the poverty, inequality, and injustices of our world. I don’t know which is more remarkable, that he shot such gorgeous scenes while colorblind, or that he was able to portray his radical vision and remain working with mainstream studios. Such unvarnished creations seem bound to attract the attentions of a Bureau maintaining American power relations of injustice. Yet with Wexler it was his activist insistence of this unglossed vision of an unjust world that so anchored him in his cinematic approach, the stories he chose to tell, and decades of FBI surveillance.

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