Limit search to available items
Streaming video

Title The brig / filmed by Jonas Mekas & edited by Adolfas Mekas.
Published 1964
Artfilms-Digital (Firm)
Online access available from:
Bloomsbury Video Library    View Resource Record  

Copies

Description 1 online resource (streaming video file) (65 min.) : digital, sound, colour
Summary "The Brig" is a modern Inferno. The men who enter it abandon all hope of mercy. Here, hell is a Marine Corps prison in which humiliation and brutality are dished out according to the book, with guards and inmates performing a mad ritual of degradation...From the moment they awake, the prisoners are at rigid attention. Throughout the men are taunted and beaten by the guards, who often don't even require a pretext for their brutality. What Brown shows so damningly is the insanity that results when a form of government permits men to have other unchecked power over other men. The guards have been turned into sadistic monsters. One is left with the sense of the sheer stupidity of the penal system, for what it accomplishes is not punishment but the destruction of the individual
Notes The Brig is a raw slice of new American cinema filmed in an off-Broadway stage with such brutish authenticity that it won a Venice festival grand prize as best documentary. Part drama, part polemic, with shock-wave sound and a nightmare air that suggests Kafka with a Kodak, the movie does exactly what it sets out to do - seizes an audience by the shirtfront and slams it around from wall to wall for one grueling day in a Marine Corps lockup
Subject Military prisons -- United States. -- Drama
Military discipline -- United States
Genre/Form Experimental films.
Form Streaming video
Author Mekas, Jonas, 1922-2019.
Artfilms-Digital (Firm), distributor