Strange Victory

Keith Brinkmann5.0

Why does yesterday wander through today like a ghost? Why is the news still bad?And if we won, why do we look as if we lost?And if Hitler died, why does his voice still pursue us through the spaces of American life?

Robert Daniels5.0

There’s a provocative moment, one of many in Leo Hurwitz’s Strange Victory, a frank, ahead of its time documentary essay, that jolted my breath away. It’s a montage of Americana images — fields of grain, flourishing factories and flat Western plains — accompanied by a speech of Adolf Hitler. It’s one of the many unflinching parallels Hurwitz strikes between a fallen Third Reich and a booming post-war America whose only kept promise is the recurrent prejudice it inflicts on segments of its population.Filming in 1947 and 1948, this anti-racist film is wholly uncensored: Newsreel footage of bodies frozen in the snow, men set ablaze by a Molotov cocktail thrown from stories on high, and soldiers tattered by shells and bullets — fill the frame. With daring editing Hurwitz leaps from scenes of war and the Nazi regime to jubilant sights of celebratory victory crowds: The crowds are white, Black, Asian and so forth. And for a moment, it appears the promise of America feels real as the country nears an industrial, infrastructural and baby boom.My favorite sequence in the film involves Muriel Smith (singer on South Pacific) narrating the promise of newborns entering the world. Hurwitz focuses on a group of Black kids playing baseball in an empty lot. One is brandishing a mitt that’s almost too big for him as the score swells with patriotic strains. You’d almost get the sense that Hurwitz buys into the American mythos as he fashions sequences that feel nostalgic in spite them being contemporary to his time.The second half of Strange Victory moves with heavy intentions as the director reveals the unbroken truths about America: “Hopelessness is next door to hysteria,” the narrator explains. He uses the phrase to explain the antisemitic wave that rushed across Germany, causing Hitler’s rise to power; but, of course, it could equally apply to the US. Hurwitz hammers the point through montages of lynchings in the South, gaggles of teenagers posting antisemitic stickers across New York City, and the stream of KKK members openly inflicting state-sponsored terrorism. Meanwhile, few documentaries, before or since, has so eloquently explained the origins and results of structural racism as the scene where Hurwitz’s camera looks at several babies of different races to explain how from their first breaths, society has already governed their respective futures. [full review via Substack]

Ford H4.0

Strange Victory is probably one of the biggest critiques of America, and it focuses on American life post-WW2, particularly people's prejudice and the plague known as Jim Crow. A return to fascism, even though we just fought a war against it.Strange Victory is a documentary, but you could also call it a mood piece, because it's very hypnotic. It's also a philosophical dive into the value of human life, and it paints a somewhat idyllic portrait of life as children become accustomed to their surroundings. They don't know the horror quite yet, and nothing will prepare them for what lies ahead. Then, we see the ugliness of the world. For instance, we intercut between a smiling Hitler shaking hands with people and images of the hair and teeth collected from the Holocaust. It's disgusting. This documentary boldy captures how brutal and confusing the world can be.