Street Fight

This stirring and provocative documentary follows the 2002 mayoral election in Newark, NJ. No film is a one-man-job, but Marshall Curry deserves all credit for this, and deserved his Oscar nomination for best documentary feature last year. Basically just him and his little DV camera following the story for more than a year, then spending another year in a closet with his editing computer, cutting 200 hours of shooting to less than two. The DVD arrives with a timely update on results from the subsequent 2006 election, and one of the producers of the film turns out to be Netflix. This little package portends big changes in the business of film production and distribution. And the film is a pleasure to watch. We mainly follow insurgent Cory Booker, sort of a younger and paler Barack Obama -- went to Stanford on a football scholarship, Rhodes Scholar and Yale Law grad -- as he mounts a campaign against the entrenched mayor, Sharp James, who became a political force after the Newark riots in ’67, then spent 16 years on the City Council and 16 more as mayor, the firebrand become machine boss. I first heard about this film on a Wire discussion website, and it offers instructive comparison with the Carcetti vs. Royce campaign for mayor of Baltimore in that superlative HBO series. Street Fight is a heartening parable of democracy at work, both in its subject and the means of its making, even when the reality depicted is quite disheartening. (2005, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-88.)

In the same vein, the PBS “Independent Lens” doc Two Square Miles depicts a grassroots civic campaign to keep an immense cement plant from being built by a Swiss conglomerate in nearby Hudson, NY, on the banks of the river that spawned a whole school of art. Again, both the movement and the movie are about democratic empowerment. It’s a messy process, but it works for us. But you can see how hard it would be to export the mechanics to a place where democracy has not been long enshrined as a cultural ideal.