Nancy Buirski’s documentary film “The Rape of Recy Taylor” reconstructs events from the abduction and sexual assault, in 1944, of a young black woman in rural Alabama
By Richard Brody
With Nancy Buirski’s documentary “The Rape of Recy Taylor,” which is screening at the New York Film Festival on Tuesday night, I’m breaking a self-imposed rule of not writing negatively about festival films. I’m doing so because the subject of the film, and Buirski’s approach to it, reaches beyond the frame into fundamental practices in documentary filmmaking and even further, into the woeful state of American society today. Also, I’m doing so because, regardless of the inadequacy of the film’s artistry, I hope that the film gets a theatrical release and is widely seen, because what’s good about it is more than good, it’s essential, which is what makes its shortcomings all the more conspicuous and frustrating.
Buirski’s film reconstructs events from 1944, when Recy Taylor, a twenty-four-year-old black woman in Abbeville, Alabama, was abducted on her way home from church by six white men who then raped her. Though Taylor knew and identified several of her attackers, a local grand jury—all white, of course—did not indict anyone for the crime. In order to mobilize a national campaign on Taylor’s behalf, the N.A.A.C.P. sent its leading rape investigator to Abbeville—a young woman from Montgomery, Alabama, named Rosa Parks. She and other black activists recognized that, if justice had a chance of being done, it would be the result of news reporting and activism outside the immediate area, and they nationalized the case with protests and petitions, yet the perpetrators remained unindicted, and the case slipped quietly into oblivion—although the campaign that it sparked was directly linked to later successes of the civil-rights movement.
It would have been better if this documentary had been made thirty or forty years ago, when Recy Taylor (who appears and speaks briefly in Buirski’s film) was in better health and able to discuss the events at length and in detail, and when Parks and other people involved in the case were alive. It would have been better for the world if this movie had been made decades ago, because the facts that are brought out in Buirski’s film are—and ought to be known as—a constant and inextricable correlate to African-Americans’ ongoing and frustrated quest for civil rights. But “The Rape of Recy Taylor” has been made now, and it’s essential viewing, yet its reach into current-day experience is largely stifled by Buirski’s aesthetic and journalistic practices—and the film also makes clear that those two elements are crucially connected.
Buirski very briefly interviews Taylor on camera, and includes two still brief, yet longer, voice-over interviews of unstated provenance, but most of the film’s discussions of the case come from Buirski’s filmed interviews with Taylor’s brother Robert Corbitt and his sister Alma Daniels (who died in 2016). They describe, in detail, their experience, as children, of the attack on their sister and its aftermath. Their testimony, like Taylor’s own, is more than precious, it’s sacred; it’s the word of experience that has a physical connection to the events that Buirski wants to make a film about, the closest thing in existence to the world that she’s attempting to film. Yet Buirski doesn’t treat their discussions as sacred. Large portions of the interviews (even those with Taylor) are accompanied by music; it’s often great music, including spirituals sung by Fannie Lou Hamer and “This Bitter Earth,” sung by Dinah Washington, but it’s beside the point. The music guides the emotional response to what Daniels and Corbitt are saying, as if their testimony were somehow emotionally insufficient or ambiguous—as if they were delivering flat and impersonal information that Buirski needed to inflect. (Late in the film, when Buirski interviews the scholars Crystal Feimster and Danielle McGuire about the decisive importance of black women in the civil-rights movement, she includes a brief clip of Martin Luther King, Jr., giving a speech—and his speech is accompanied by oddly generic, bouncy music, as if to emphasize with a ludicrous banality that the pace of activism is picking up.)
Buirski also frequently does with images what she does with music. Though several images in the film depict specific places that are referred to in the interviews—such as a brief shot of the house of one of the attackers, who lived only a few hundred yards from the Corbitt family—much of the visual realm of the film is nonspecific, of tangled tree branches looming overhead, roadside lights moodily out of focus, vague and impressionistic views of streets, signifying the Southern countryside but not linking the discussions to the locations that they evoke. These generic images, of unspecified places that merely provide a general idea of places rather than a clear identification of them, have the same effect as the music on the soundtrack—they dictate over-all emotion and undercut specificity. On the rare occasions when Buirski does pair interviewees’ discussions with specifically related images, even with archival footage—as when Corbitt talks of his father, Benny Corbitt, on his porch, or of the attackers’ habit of hanging out on the steps of the town bank, and Buirski shows archival photos of it—the imaginative effect is mighty.
Another frustration is that Buirski doesn’t allow herself to be heard on the soundtrack interviewing, or, simply, talking with the interview subjects. The illusion of spontaneity, of information that emerges unbidden in the one and only form that it could take for an encyclopedic account, is exactly the opposite of what was being filmed. One of the most noteworthy and significant remarks in the film comes from a local white amateur historian, Larry Smith. After some bewildering, repellent soft-pedalling and contextualizing of the attack (he refers to some relations between white masters and enslaved black women as consensual), he says, “You’re asking me to talk about something that I’m uncomfortable talking about. People are still living; I have to still live here.” What did Buirski ask him? And, above all, why did she not follow up—does Smith fear for his safety, or merely some uncomfortable social situations? “The Rape of Recy Taylor” is full of such journalistic shortcomings. It would be worth knowing whether Buirski faced opposition while attempting to film in Abbeville—whether people refused to speak with her, or if she was confronted while filming on location there. It’s strange that she didn’t seek to interview other black residents of the town, who would be likely to remember the case. Buirski never seeks out, to the fullest extent, her own experience of the subject, the place, the people, the life of Recy Taylor and its historic implications.
Compare this to another film that’s screening in the New York Film Festival, “Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?,” in which the director, Travis Wilkerson, returns to his family’s rural home town of Dothan, Alabama, twenty-five miles from Abbeville, to investigate a racist murder that his great-grandfather committed there in 1946 and that was never prosecuted. In the course of his investigation, Wilkerson visits Abbeville and discusses the Recy Taylor case, and Parks’s involvement in it—and he shows the house in which Parks stayed while working on the case. He also depicts his travel to another nearby town, where he searches for information on his great-grandfather’s victim—and, in the course of that investigation, Wilkerson is threatened by local whites and intimidatingly followed on his drive out of town. The trouble that Wilkerson faces in the course of his research, the obstacles to getting at the truth in a place where residents still have an investment in keeping the truth from being known, comes to life in his images, which, even when relating to historical events, are infused with the force of his own experience, his personal connection not only to past events but to the cinematic identity of his present-tense investigation.
Buirski’s emotionally simplistic approach to her subjects in “The Rape of Recy Taylor” is inseparable from her arm’s-length, impersonal approach to it. She packages information, and she packages the responses to it, instead of conveying a lived, first-person relationship to the subject, to the place, to the people in the film. Above all, this is what’s missing from “The Rape of Recy Taylor”: the sense of present-tense, first-person experience, of Buirski going to Abbeville and seeing what she finds; of speaking with a wide and varied range of people whose knowledge and whose experience bring the case to life; of showing the places now, because the violence and the fear that the rape of Recy Taylor, and the impunity of it, depended on isn’t over.
