THE KILLING OF AMERICA

“All of the film you are about to see is real. Nothing has been staged.” A threat. A warning. A fact. In 1981 the film makers Sheldon Renan and Leonard Schrader, Paul Schrader’s older brother, compiled and composed a sad, shocking and gruesome compendium of the state of being – or rather the state of dying – of the USA, financed through Japanese funding. The murder of JFK and Bobby Kennedy, the ethnic riots after the death of Martin Luther King, police videos of deadly shootings, all guided by the impetus of educating the nation, not unfamiliar to yesterday’s educational mental health movies. The material unleashed on the spectator in many cases has scarcity value. Recordings of serial killer Ted Bundy’s trial are to be found next to an unnerving conversation with Edmund Kemper, who reveals his sharp intelligent and self-reflectiveness in talking about severed heads in his lap. Charles Manson grins into the camera while Reverend Jim Jones leads hundreds to their deaths. The title of the movie “The Killing of America” is to be taken literally: The filmmakers narrate the demise of their homeland, caused not by the external but by the internal factors. To this day the movie has seldom been shown in cinemas in the USA – a proof of its resounding success. As seen from today a sequel is overdue, which doesn’t mean this unique, brutal document has lost any of its impact.