[Jewcy asked blogger Katie Halper to attend the New York Jewish Film Festival, which ended today, and write summary reviews of the entries she saw. This is the first in a multi-part series.]
In White Terror, filmmaker Daniel Schweizer returns to the skinhead movement he chronicled in his earlier documentary Skinhead Attitude. His new film is "an investigation of the extreme right,” Schweizer announces in an early voice-over. In Sweden, the U.S., and Russia, Schweizer shows us specimens of the inter-related neo-Nazi movement lurking at the furthest extreme.
The film opens with a beautiful shot of a castle on a lake in the Swedish resort town of Interlaken. Like a fairy tale, looks deceive, and we quickly learn that we are seeing the site of a gruesome crime. Here, after being lured to the castle, 19 year-old Marcel von Allmen was bludgeoned with iron bars, and then, with weights fastened to his feet, thrown into the lake. The victim, a member of “The Order of the Aryan Knights,” divulged secrets of this covert white supremacist fraternity, and was killed for his betrayal.
A documentary film about the nascent global neo-Nazi skinhead movement should be disturbing and alarming. And the beginning sure is, as is the end, which returns to the crime scene. However, what we see in between often engages but doesn’t horrify or revolt in ways we are set up to expect.
Allmen is the film’s only victim, and while the honor code of savages is an interesting subject, it is not Schweizer’s subject. It is curious that a movie that focuses on a movement whose purpose is the murder of blacks, Jews, and foreigners would focus not an actual hate crime but the punishment meted out to turncoats of a fascistic cause: “Aryan on Aryan” murder.
This may have been fortuitous because Schweizer’s poker-faced approach to documentary filmmaking serves him well here. As if he’s asking about the weather, Schweizer queries his neo-Nazi and white supremacist subjects, establishing trust and allowing them to candidly air their hateful feelings. Interviews with journalists and clips from videos further inform the investigation. The hate movement in Sweden is powerful: neo-Nazis recruit through concerts and widely distribute music videos that threaten, “We are armed, we are white, we shoot Reds on site.” Swedish society by and large ignores the problem, we are informed by a journalist. And, indeed, when 20,000 neo-Nazis march through the town of Salem, the media ignores them, focusing instead on a “left-wing” counter rally.
In the U.S. segment, the Schweizer’s quiet interview style motivates frightening candor about the looming race war. Most interesting, perhaps, is the idiom of multiculturalism and identity politics that the white supremacists co-opt to express their racism. One man defends his right to “self-determination.” Another frets, “We are a precious minority; it’s a dark planet.” The coming race war, to their minds, will simply confirm their right to exist.
In Russia, we see the neo-Nazi movement most accepted by organized society. A Russian Orthodox priest genuflects over a neo-Nazi flag incorporating a swastika inside a cross. The neo-Nazis have support not just within the church, but within mainstream Russian cultural organizations. Schweizer is blocked from attending a neo-Nazi meeting at the Slavic Cultural Club meeting to which a young member has invited him. A middle-aged man who works at the club blocks Schweiser and his crew, explaining that is only a folk concert. His almost OCD repetition of “folk” would be funny if not for the sinister nature of the assembly the term conceals.
For the most part, Schweiser's own on-camera appearances help shape the story, showing us genuine exchanges between him and the extremists he interviews, as well as the police and other authorities who try to stifle his project in all three countries. Only occasionally, when he voices righteous platitudes (especially his two minute history of race relations in the United States), does his presence distract.
White Terror’s investigation explores the conversational everyday world of a resurgent and still all-too-deadly ideology. If it doesn’t sustain the horror that it begins and ends with, it nonetheless informs about a growing threat about which we know precious little.
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