Power, the new documentary centered on the police in the United States, comes from the stable of Netflix, but it is certainly not your regular “true crime” entertainment. The Yance Ford-directed documentary is not based on any particular event. Instead, it takes the route of being introspective about the whole police system. Ford, who’s an Emmy winner, has already proved his mettle in documentary filmmaking with the very personal Strong Island, where he investigated the murder of his own brother. Unlike Strong Island, Ford’s latest work is based on a general topic and an exploration of it. Let’s take a closer look.
What is the documentary about?
The word “police” implies power, and Ford’s documentary goes deep into finding out the origin of it. Ford starts from the very beginning, which was the creation of the first ever police force in America in 1883 in Boston.
What is the documentary about?
The word “police” implies power, and Ford’s documentary goes deep into finding out the origin of it. Ford starts from the very beginning, which was the creation of the first ever police force in America in 1883 in Boston.
- 5/18/2024
- by Rohitavra Majumdar
- Film Fugitives
In a crucial passage from a series of lectures he gave that would be published as Society Must Be Defended, Michel Foucault expounded on the concept of the imperial boomerang. Though the term was used and advanced by many political theorists and philosophers, most notably Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, it was Foucault’s conception of the term that has stuck in the public consciousness. “[W]hile colonization, with its techniques and its political and juridical weapons, obviously transported European models to other continents,” he argued, “it also had a considerable boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West, and on the apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power…the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself.”
Yance Ford’s documentary Power acts as a piece of supporting evidence for what’s become known as Foucault’s boomerang. The film lays out in clear,...
Yance Ford’s documentary Power acts as a piece of supporting evidence for what’s become known as Foucault’s boomerang. The film lays out in clear,...
- 5/5/2024
- by Greg Nussen
- Slant Magazine
A dryly succinct but thoroughly convincing Netflix documentary about the corruptive history of American policing, Yance Ford’s “Power” articulates in the clearest possible terms how 18th century slave patrols and the frontier militias that followed paved the way for a modern police state so violent and unregulated that no democracy would consciously think to invent it.
It begins with a brief voiceover that seems like a targeted overture to the movie’s home audience; the kind of flourish that suggests Ford knew his documentary would bypass a traditional platform rollout in favor of a more geopolitically diverse streaming debut. “This film requires curiosity, or at least suspicion,” the director intones over a black screen. “I’ll leave that choice up to you.”
Tempting as it is to imagine how those words might feel like a trigger warning for any “Blue Lives Matter” types who only started watching “Power” because...
It begins with a brief voiceover that seems like a targeted overture to the movie’s home audience; the kind of flourish that suggests Ford knew his documentary would bypass a traditional platform rollout in favor of a more geopolitically diverse streaming debut. “This film requires curiosity, or at least suspicion,” the director intones over a black screen. “I’ll leave that choice up to you.”
Tempting as it is to imagine how those words might feel like a trigger warning for any “Blue Lives Matter” types who only started watching “Power” because...
- 1/19/2024
- by David Ehrlich
- Indiewire
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